Bad Medicine appears to be good for book sales.
The book by Canmore Judge John Reilly has been selling well, reaching sales of over 5,000, which has placed it on the non-fiction bestseller list in Calgary and Edmonton.
Rocky Mountain Books publisher Don Gorman said the sales numbers are “almost unheard of.”
“We are thrilled it has happened,” Gorman said. “It shows there is huge support for the judge and the topic.”
Bad Medicine has been on the best seller list in the two major cities in Alberta for the past 12 weeks and occupied the number one spot on the Calgary list for the past three weeks.
Reilly was on hand for a packed house audience at the most recent Friends of the Canmore Library speaker’s series.
The long-time judge recounted how he came to write the book and provided some details on what could be the next two offerings in a trilogy.
He joked, however, that any further publications would not be as a sitting judge on the provincial court circuit.
“I promised I wouldn’t publish until I wasn’t a sitting judge,” he said.
The premise for a further two books, Bad Judgment and Bad Law, he said, would be based on a court battle he went through as a result of his efforts on the Stoney-Nakoda reserve and his views on the justice system in general.
In fact, Reilly said he has stopped sitting as the regular judge in the Cochrane court, in which are heard the majority of cases from the reserve.
He said the purpose of the book was to share how the efforts to learn about the Stoney peoples changed his life.
“My original thought was I was going to learn about them so I could explain to them in terms they could understand how wonderful my justice system is,” he said. “I tried to learn about them, but I learned more from them… it has changed my life, my world view and my view about Aboriginal people in Canada and the justice system.”
Instead, Reilly said he began to agree with the perspective of the justice system as oppressive.
He said the idea of figuring out why people do bad things and stopping them is contrary to Aboriginal justice, which looks at why people do good things and tries to encourage that.
Having been appointed to the bench in 1977, the youngest provincial court judge in Alberta at that time, Reilly sat in the Calgary courts and later circuit courts, including Cochrane.
“I dealt with a lot of Stoneys in those years and I knew nothing about them and that was the wisdom of the day,” Reilly said.
By 1993, Reilly had become the sitting judge in Canmore and Banff and volunteered to sit in Cochrane again.
As he began driving to Cochrane from the Bow Valley, he crossed through the reserve lands, something that changed his outlook and pushed him to learn more about the Stoney culture.
At the same time, the ‘90s became an age of awareness of Aboriginal people in Canada, including a federal royal commission and a task force on the criminal justice system and its impacts.
There were also changes to the criminal code surrounding what to consider, as a judge, when sentencing people.
Reilly said he took the change to the code seriously, especially when it spoke to considering all sanctions other than imprisonment when reasonable in the circumstances, with particular consideration for Aboriginal offenders.
After beginning to learn about the Stoney people, Reilly said the prevalence of poverty on the reserve shocked him and he began working towards addressing it.
“We have a community of 4,000 people, most of whom are living in poverty, dysfunction and disease,” he said, adding suicide rates, incarceration and substance abuse are 10 times the average on the reserve. “We do have a responsibility to our neighbours and we should be doing something.”
He said the answer is not sending people to jail, but addressing the underlying issues that result in the disproportionate number of Aboriginal offenders in the justice system – poverty.
That’s when he encountered resistance.
He said in his opinion, the two people who should have been on board to help change the situation on the reserve and keeping people out of jail turned out to be the greatest obstacles.
That included the chief judge of the provincial court system and Chief John Snow, a United Church minister and holder of two doctorates from the University of Calgary.
Snow, at the time, was one of three chiefs for Morley, which consists of three bands – the Wesley, Chiniki and Bearspaw.
“The two people I thought should want to help me, the chief judge and the chief of Morley, turned out to be my biggest enemies,” he said. “(Snow) had hundreds of millions to make his reserve one of the most progressive in the country, to make it a shining example, and I’m told it is one of the worst.”
Reilly said Snow was not interested in discussing the problems or possible solutions to systemic poverty in the first nation.
After everything he has been through, including writing Bad Medicine, Reilly said he believes keeping their people oppressed through poverty serves the interests of the powerful on the reserve.
“I am convinced many chiefs and councils across Canada meant to keep their people poor, uneducated and weak so they can exploit them,” he said.
While he didn’t claim to have all the answers, Reilly pointed to education as the starting point.
With the pervasiveness of the education issue, it is not an easy fix or an inexpensive one, but the cost of doing nothing is greater.
“In order to fix the problem in Aboriginal society, which has been created in over 120 years, we are looking at a 50-year program and billions more than they are spending now,” Reilly said.
