By: Jim Taylor

The trial of Tom Ellison in Vancouver raises troubling questions for me. Troubling because of what he apparently did. But troubling also because of what we're doing now -- putting him on trial, some 30 years later.
           The facts seem fairly clear. Ellison was a teacher at Prince of Wales Secondary School. He was, by all accounts, ruggedly handsome. Reports suggest that teenaged girls swooned over him.
           As a teacher, Ellison organized elite wilderness adventures. He took impressionable youth to remote locations on the Queen Charlotte Islands or kayaking among the islands of the Gulf of Georgia. He entertained them on his boat moored in Vancouver's fashionable False Creek.
           And there, his accusers say, he had sex with them.
           Ellison doesn't deny the encounters. But he contends he did nothing illegal. Any sex, he claims, was consensual. The age of consent in Canada was, and still is, 14. As high school students, all the girls were over that age.
           The current law, prohibiting teachers from having sex with students under 18, even with consent, was not enacted until 1988. It did not exist at the time of Ellison's alleged offences.

WHO'S RESPONSIBLE NOW?
           What Ellison did was certainly unethical. But perhaps not illegal.
           Mining companies, tobacco producers, and manufacturing industries use the same defence. There were no regulations at the time requiring today's levels of environmental protection, or preventing them from marketing harmful products.
           But they too are now being held to account. And they should be.
           The B.C. government, for example, has a lawsuit against the big international tobacco companies. It hopes to recover up to $10 billion in health-care costs for smoking-related cancer and heart disease.
California has launched a similar suit against the big car makers for environmental damages.
           All through the Kootenays, toxic trickles drain from long-forgotten mine shafts and leach out of abandoned ore dumps.
           Here in Kelowna, a former sawmill site caught fire. The piles of sawdust and wood debris were up to 30 feet deep. The property has changed ownership several times.
           Who's responsible for cleaning up the mess left by the original owners?
           Time does not mitigate wrongdoing. Not for Tom Ellison. Not for the offending corporations.

NO STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS
           Many people are surprised to learn that Canada has no official Statute of Limitations.
           Eddie Greenspan, probably Canada's pre-eminent defence lawyer, argues in a published paper that "The United States and continental Europe have recognized that . it becomes simply too late to lay a criminal charge because the exercise of state power to prosecute is no longer proportionate to its goals.
           "The principle of proportionality is applied through a graduated system of limitation periods.. Murder is an exception -- there is no time limitation for it anywhere in the world."
           Greenspan cited some underlying principles:
1) With the passage of time, objective evidence is lost.
2) It is wrong to force people to defend themselves against disproportionate prosecutions of ancient allegations.
3) It is unjust to prosecute and punish people based on social and moral values that may not have applied at the time of the alleged offence.
4) The process can be politicized to prosecute only certain "hot button" offences, such as sexual assault. This leaves the door open to prosecuting conduct that would not have been viewed as criminal at the time it occurred.
           We do have some unofficial limits, for minor offences. An RCMP officer escaped charges of misconduct because his commanding officer failed to press those charges within a year.
           Most of us keep our income tax records no longer than seven years.
           Interestingly, noted Greenspan, Canada treats treason as a minor offence -- charges must laid within six months.

CHANGING MORAL STANDARDS
           Greenspan's primary argument, however, dealt with changing moral standards. Which brings us back to Tom Ellison.
           "One of the purposes of statutes of limitations," Greenspan wrote, "is to prevent people from being judged today based on yesterday's standards. Social and moral values change over time. Is it fair to prosecute someone based on today's beliefs, even if he or she had no guilt [under] the standards at the time of the alleged offence?"
           With his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, Greenspan wondered if hockey legend Gordie Howe, renowned for using his elbows as vicious weapons, should worry that he could be charged retroactively with assault.
           Despite his levity, he identifies the problem -- what standards do we apply?
           Consider an extreme example. The Bible treats King David as the ideal ruler. He probably was, by the standards of his time. By today's standards, though, David was an adulterer, perhaps a rapist, certainly a murderer, a bigamist, a thief, a traitor, and a terrorist who waged a revolution against the reigning king. The Bible itself provides irrefutable evidence.
           If we make excuses for David -- based on the standards of his time -- should we not do the same for Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun, whose names have become synonymous with ruthless brutality?

DRAGGING OUR PASTS ALONG
Changing standards sometimes work to the offender's benefit. Nelson Mandela went into prison as a terrorist under South Africa's laws at the time of his trial. But 27 years later, he came out a hero.
           Personally, I'm less concerned that occasional individuals may get away with ancient offences than that corporations will. Those who inflict long-lasting damage on society and the planet need to be held accountable, whether they acted deliberately or just carelessly.
           The tobacco companies, for example, must have known they were causing harm. Given the mountain of evidence, they cannot claim that they acted in blissful ignorance.
           Everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes can be mitigated by subsequent behaviour, but as Tom Ellison is discovering, they cannot be expunged.
           The past is never closed. We all drag our pasts into the present with us. Like it or not, we need to accept responsibility for what we were, as well as what we are.
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Copyright © 2006 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.