Despite my pressing need for lunch and a trip to the staff washroom, I stayed because Carl had been a mentor of sorts since my arrival at John A. Macdonald. Many of my private sector friends had tried to convince me of the relative ease of the profession I had newly entered. When we compared the perils of our jobs, it always came to one comparison. I would ask my friends: for example, as a financial advisor, are you able to go to the bathroom whenever you want? The answer being “yes,” I was always able to claim undue hardship in the teaching profession. When you have a room full of teenagers, especially some of the winners I worked with, you just couldn’t leave them unattended long enough to go to the staff washroom two floors down and half a block away. Nonetheless, I figured I could hold my coffee byproduct for a couple of minutes more to talk to Carl.
“Sure,” I told him. “What’s up?” Carl stood in the doorway of my classroom. He looked the least sure of himself I’d seen him. “Carl. You can come in.”
“Yeah. Okay.” The student desks in my classroom were organized in a loose horseshoe shape. It wasn’t always the most productive for students, but it was easier to catch the sleepers like Justin. Carl slid his six-foot-frame into the end of the horseshoe and looked away from me like a student caught cheating. “These desks really aren’t very comfortable, are they?”
“Nope.” A long, palpable silence filled the dusty classroom. I could feel my bladder expanding while I waited for Carl to speak.
“Listen, can I talk to you off the record?” he finally asked.
“I wasn’t aware we were supposed to keep notes of conversations between colleagues.”
“I just mean . . . I just need this conversation to be confidential. Okay?”
“Sure.” Another pause followed.
“I’ve got a problem, and I’d like your advice.”
“I’ll do what I can. Is this a teaching problem?”
“Well, yes and no.”
“If it is, you know how new I am to this business. You might be better off talking to another teacher, or maybe the principal if you’re . . .”
“No!” he suddenly blurted. “We can’t talk to the principal or anyone else. Please. You’re the only one I can trust with this right now.”
“Okay, it’s all right,” I tried to reassure him. “I’m here. You can talk to me.” There was another, agonizing wait while he gathered the nerve to continue the conversation.
“I need to speak to you not as a teacher, but . . . I need your advice in your . . . your other capacity.”
“Oh.” It was the worst guarded secret at Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary that the reason I had come to teaching at the relatively late age of thirty-five was that I had given up the practice of law to pursue what I had always assumed would be a less demanding, much less conflict-oriented profession. Of course, the first class I was assigned to was “Law 12”, a Social Studies elective course for budding teenage lawyers. Fortunately, there weren’t enough of them to make up my entire teaching load; unfortunately, what was left over for me to teach included my Communications class. “Carl, are you in some kind of trouble?”
“I think so.”
“Okay. Look. Before we go any further, you should know that while I’m still a member of the bar, I really don’t practice law any more. And ‘educational law,’ if there even is such a thing, is certainly not my area of expertise. I was defence counsel for legal aid.”
“Criminal law might be what I’m looking for advice about.”
“I see.” I didn’t, of course. Two months into my new career, I didn’t want to get involved in a teacher’s legal problems. But Carl had become a friend.
“There’s a student in my biology class. Her name is . . .”
“Better that you don’t tell me her name right now,” I interrupted.
“Okay. This girl. She threatened me this morning.”
“She threatened you how? Like she was going to hurt you?”
“Not physically. I don’t think she’s gonna pull a Columbine on us or anything. It’s me she’s after. She threatened to . . . she threatened to go to the principal, to Dan, to tell him that . . .”
“Hold it, Carl. Stop.” Under British Columbia law, as a teacher, I was obligated to report any sexual misconduct between a student and a teacher. As a lawyer, anything he told me was confidential, but that wasn’t the way I was paying my rent any more. “You know I can’t really hear this without putting you in jeopardy.”
“Shit, Winston, hear me out. I don’t know what else to do.”
He truly looked pathetic. I had only known Carl for two months, but I had a hard time believing he could actually be guilty of anything that would harm his students. He was the consummate professional. If anything, students would have held him up as someone unapproachable because of his high standards.
“Carl. Give me a dollar.”
“What?”
“A dollar. A loonie. Have you got one?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. Reaching out, he placed one in my outstretched hand.
“Okay. You’ve just retained me. What is this student going to tell the principal about you?”
Carl took a deep breath. “She threatened to tell the principal we’ve been sleeping together.”
Two
I’d had cases not unlike this before. When I first took the L-SATs and entered law school—as an honour student, I might add—I really hadn’t envisioned myself defending criminals—err, pardon me—”alleged” criminals. Still, by the time I had graduated, corporate, tax and real estate law gave me hives, divorce law (or “family law” as our legal system euphemistically calls it) reminded me too much of my own childhood, there didn’t seem to be enough work in intellectual property law, and I refused to wear sandals, which ruled out environmental litigation.
That pretty much left me with criminal law. On the face of it, criminal law seems to be the most exciting: murder, mayhem, chaos, shady characters cutting deals in underlit offices, all of which is how this particular legal genre is played out on television and film. I chuckled watching Sam Waterston give a ninety-second closing to a murder case on Law and Order. The truth is criminal law can be more tedious, with a mind-numbingly precise attention to detail, than any other profession. But at least I knew there would always be work to do: despite politicians’ promises to the contrary, there is no real hope that the criminal element will straighten itself up and turn to the good life.
There was no way I was going to be Crown Counsel. Two of the friends I had graduated with had chosen that noble calling. “You’ll be serving society, Win,” they tried to tell me when it came time to seek work. “Ridding the streets of unwanted low-lifes, protecting the innocent from the ravages of criminal activity.” Both of them still toil away proudly in the courtrooms on behalf of Her Majesty, working seventy-hour weeks on a civil servant’s salary. I chose the other side.
The real money for a lawyer is in criminal defence. It does take a considerable amount of time to build a reputation and really learn the ins and outs of the Criminal Code. But once a good defence counsel’s name is known, he or she can almost print their own money. When you travel down to