NO PLACE FOR VIGILANTISM IN CANADIAN JUSTICE

Carter Foster, Matthew Lambert, Michael Small and Lloyd Bainbridge,
four men from the tiny island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, got a
salutary lesson from a jury last week in the difference between
thuggery and good citizenship.

It's sad that the lesson was needed in the first place, of course,
and sadder still that many of the men's fellow islanders appear to
have learned nothing from their neighbours' fate, but the rest of us
can be reassured the 12 ordinary men and women on the jury in St.
Andrew, N.B., were not so easily hoodwinked.

This sordid affair began one night last July when between 20 and 40
Grand Manan residents gathered at Carter Foster's home, right across
the street from the house belonging to one Ronald Ross, a newcomer
widely suspected of being a drug dealer who sold crack cocaine out of
his living room. Rumours were rife that Ross and his buddies planned
to burn down several island homes.

At some point, the Grand Mananers and Ross's friends clashed in the
dark; both sides fired shots, someone beat Ross up and someone else
burned down his house. Now Ross, who has admitted to using crack
himself and has a long criminal record for assault and theft, might
very well have been the neighbour from hell. And the islanders might
well have been frustrated in their efforts to get the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police to take their complaints about Ross seriously. People
in remote communities often sense they're ignored by the forces of
law and order and feel compelled to take matters into their own hands.

But even if the Mounties should have done more to reassure the
islanders, nothing excuses what those men did. The law in Canada
quite rightly takes a dim view of people who go out at night armed
with rifles, beat up a neighbour and burn down his house. It's sad
that the line between order and chaos became so blurred on Grand
Manan that Foster, Lambert et al. appeared to have thought they could
get away with doing just that. In fact, judging from the way they
talked before and at their trial, they seemed to think that their
squalid actions were meritorious.

Fortunately, the jury saw through their absurd claims that they were
acting to defend themselves and their community and convicted them of
an array of charges ranging from the inappropriate storing of a
firearm to arson. With their verdicts, the jury upheld such sacred
precepts of Canadian criminal law as the presumption of innocence and
due process.

The convicted men's friends and neighbours have worried publicly that
the verdict will send a message to drug-dealers that it's open house
on Grand Manan. We seriously doubt that; enterprising narcotics
merchants can surely find more lucrative places to do business than a
thinly populated island in the Bay of Fundy. Even Ross has abandoned
the place for the greener pastures of Nova Scotia. But even if it
were true, the verdict sent a far more important message to Canadians
everywhere: Vigilantism and mob violence are not tolerated anywhere
in Canada. Period. And that's a good thing.