Last night, CBC aired an interview with Conrad Black in which Peter Mansbridge and the former media mogul discussed his legal troubles, his recent return to Canada, and just how tricky phones are these days.
It was, all in all, a pretty embarrassing example of journalism from an otherwise decent chap. Mansbridge had one of the most interesting and eloquent Canadians of the last half century before him and he decided to spend a lot of his time on absolute trivialities. What kind if car did you leave the prison in? What kind of private jet do you have? What’s your Twitter handle?
Ugh, really Peter?
In recent years, after spending considerable time in the American justice system, Black has written and spoken eloquently on the indignities of prison. He also frequently writes about national and international affairs in the National Post, the paper he founded in 1998. No matter what you think of him, there’s no doubt that Black is an interesting fellow. Here are Black’s best quotes from the interview (despite Mansbridge’s often inane questions).
On prison:
“By the way it’s absurd. I mean the idea of prison for non-violent people is nonsense. It’s done because it’s always been done but it is nonsense. It is not the way to treat them. It’s horribly expensive. It’s tokenistic, fetishistic and a matrix for the magnification of abuse, and the exacerbation of sociopathic problems. It’s an absolutely catastrophic misjudgement on how to deal with non-violent crime. I’m not talking about people who are a physical menace to society. That’s a different matter.”
On Thomas Mulcair:
“I mean Mulcair might have considered the fact that only a few weeks before, the Supreme Court of this country had decided unanimously that I had a right to sue for libel to preserve my reputation. If I was, as he said, a “British criminal,” what reputation was I preserving?
[...]
If he, if he wants to allege that I engaged in improper attempts to influence public figures or civil servants in order to whitewash criminal behaviour, if he wants to divest himself of his parliamentary immunity and say that, it would certainly be my pleasure to sue him for defamation.”
How people should refer to him (if not as a “British criminal”):
“What about just calling me by my name, you know? I mean, what is wrong with that? Am I to understand that [...] I am stigmatized for life and must always be, like a medieval leper, with bells on my head to warn the unsuspecting of the approach of moral taint and turpitude?
Either you can take the view which happens to be true that I was shafted and who was in fact innocent and gave it my best try to fight that evil system there which convicts 90, over 90 per cent of people and over 90 per cent of those at trial, such a bogus juggernaut!
I gave a good account of myself and the convictions are very dubious. Or you can say, perhaps something was done but whatever it was there was a sentence. He served the sentence. Let’s drive on. It’s not the only story with this guy. He’s nice to his wife and dogs and occasionally is a good guy to have a drink with or something, and describe him otherwise.
But a constant sadistic reference to my alleged status according to the trumped up system of the palace of corruption and hypocrisy of a courthouse in Chicago is, if I may take the unusual — for me — step of quoting the Globe and Mail: un-Canadian.”
On technological changes:
“Well the complexity of phones has surprised me. You know, I had a cell phone before but it was just a phone. You couldn’t do anything else with it. Now I have of course one that does all kinds of things. Unfortunately I don’t know how to do them but I hope to learn.”
The full interview is embedded below and available on CBC.ca:
CBC News