WHAT THEY DIED FOR

Like many other Albertans, I followed the news of Thursday's shootout near
Mayerthorpe with increasing horror and disbelief. That day, RCMP
Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli was among the first to advance the now
widely accepted view that the four Mounties killed in Alberta gave their
lives as part of the toll of the war on drugs -- though most didn't go
quite as far as he did.

"Today," he said, "the RCMP continued its vigilant effort to detect and
dismantle illegal drug manufacturing and to respond to the calls for a
drug-free Canada. We know that these are most serious issues and
challenges, made complicated by the involvement of organized crime, the
availability of weapons and risks posed by individuals who choose the path
of violence and destruction over peace and good. And today we recognize
with gratitude and respect that four of our own paid the highest price to
fight this fight, to make Canada a safer place for all of us."

I reread this paragraph several times over as details of the murders
emerged over the weekend. Every time I reviewed it, Commissioner
Zaccardelli grew a little more fatuous in retrospect.

It was obvious, even on Thursday, that the young policemen hadn't been
killed by anything resembling an "organized criminal." Then we learned that
the discovery of the marijuana in the fatal quonset was purely accidental,
and had little to do with anyone's "vigilant effort" to suppress illegal
substances.

But there was still one thing saving the commissioner from the appearance
of total dissociation from the truth: Whatever events had brought the
martyred policemen to the Roszko farm, they did find a "grow-op" there, and
they did, by their deaths, inadvertently bring Canada a little closer to
being "drug-free."

And on Saturday we learned exactly how much closer they brought us: 20
plants. That's how many were found on the killer's property -- 20 marijuana
plants. Enough to generate about a half-ounce per day, given a three-month
harvest and the RCMP's own standard yield figures. Some grow-op.

I doubt we have enough Mounties to make Moose Jaw drug-free, let alone the
whole country. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there
was something more fundamentally disturbing about Commissioner
Zaccardelli's message than its mere factual status. He seemed to be saying,
after all, that the sacrifice of four young men's lives on these terms was
regrettable, but justifiable and noble. With respect to the demands that
that moment placed upon him, I think the whole idea is offensive.

The truth is that those cops were at the Roszko farm to carry out the most
mundane police duty imaginable: to help a bailiff repossess a truck. The
texture of every police officer's life is woven from crummy little tasks
like this -- which, attended to day by day, painful increment by painful
increment, sustain the decrees of justice and preserve us all in our
property, our personal liberty, and the network of capitalist linkages that
keep us fed and clothed and fat and happy.

That debts will be honoured is the sort of reciprocal expectation we rely
on, unthinkingly, every minute of our lives. On mercifully rare occasions,
we resort to the law to make it work. And in enforcing the notion of
honouring freely assumed obligations, policemen do something truly
honourable. How crass is Mr. Zaccardelli's dream of a "drug-free Canada"
compared with the simple vision of a civil society where people pay what
they owe. Those four constables deserved better from their commander.

Still, the commissioner, the Liberal Party of Canada and dozens of
individuals in authority are paying tribute by advocating harsher measures
against "grow-ops" run by "organized crime." Funny sort of tribute. We now
know it has nothing to do with the circumstances of those officers' deaths,
and we already knew it wouldn't have saved their lives anyway.

The northern Alberta airwaves were filled on Thursday night with the voices
of ordinary people from Mayerthorpe who knew James Roszko. The community is
unanimous in its lack of surprise at what he did. Roszko was hostile,
creepy and violent. He had a long history of confrontations with cops and
other officials, had been convicted of threatening behaviour and property
crimes, and had wounded a teenager with a rifle in 1999. His various
criminal acts, from the age of 18 to the day he died, almost defy
enumeration. Yet for all his legal trouble, the courts were mostly
powerless to imprison him for any significant length of time. He was, it
seems, a fanatical amateur student of the law who retained excellent
counsel. He was able to wriggle out of at least 17 criminal charges at one
time or another.

The magistrates' best chance to protect Mayerthorpe and its cops came in
April, 2000, when Roszko was convicted of having repeatedly molested a
child over a seven-year period in the 1980s. From the ages of 10 to 17, the
victim was forced into sodomy and degradation by a grown man under the
constant threat of a fatal beating. For this, Roszko served about 21 months
in prison. If Canadian justice had penalized him according to popular
notions of right and wrong, he would still have been in jail on Thursday --
and would have stayed until he was much too old to engage in a firefight.

The law failed the public here, not to speak of the four constables. And
the politicians who have been hyperventilating about a rapist's
horticultural pastimes -- Ralph Klein, Anne McLellan, Randy White, and the
like -- are failing the public now. They are engaging in a calculated
distraction that presents them as part of a thin line standing between us
and an enormous, inchoate, "organized" evil. And they've been trampling the
graves of the real heroes to do it.