I moved again this week. It’s getting difficult to find affordable apartments in the old heart of Kyiv. More foreigners are here this year than last, and far more than in 2022; many of them come with comparatively cushy salaries from organizations in the EU. That, and many Kharkiv residents are heading west again, fleeing the city that, in the last couple of months, has been under near-constant assault. In the last 10 days alone, Russia bombed Ukraine’s largest book printer and a Kharkiv Epicentr, a big-box store that’s sort of a hybrid of a Home Depot and a Target. Imagine being at a Wal-Mart on a busy Saturday; that’s when and where Russia chose to attack.
My first night in my new place, the power went out. It’s been cutting out a lot in Kyiv recently, a consequence of this year’s renewed attacks on Ukraine’s power generation systems. My first two apartments never lost power, though the “why” was never clear; my building would still have power, while the one immediately in front of it, sharing a courtyard and even a wall, did not. For whatever reason, one of them was connected to a power line that was never turned off, likely shared with some critical infrastructure. I’ve heard folks in Kyiv call it a “lucky circuit.”
It’s interesting, how you learn to deal with this too. I was thinking lately that Ukraine has, overall, taught me how to live with less. It’s not ideal, and in this circumstance, it is especially not just. It’s an injustice that millions of people are forced to live without sufficient power, in a country that, in peacetime, was capable of providing it; but you do learn how to adapt. I keep my headlamp by my bed. I keep my power bank charged. You manage in the dark by the light of your phone, and the knowledge that the roof is still over your head and even if power doesn’t return, the sun will once again come.
I have little to report from the last couple of weeks; I’ve just been moving and writing, with a couple stories due soon. I’m hoping to get to Kharkiv in the coming weeks and do some work out there. (If anyone reading has interesting contacts there, please pass them on.) In the meantime, two thoughts from news back home.
On Friday, a court ordered that Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, the truck driver who caused the devastating 2018 Humboldt Broncos bus crash that killed 16 people, must be deported back to India. His lawyers are appealing the decision, which may take years to resolve. Yet this legal juncture is worth a moment of reflection, because this order — even if it was expected — should challenge us to think about what we expect from justice.
First, a quick recap of the facts of the crash, as agreed by all parties. At the time of the crash, Sidhu was not wantonly reckless: he was not drunk or speeding, or even looking at his phone. He was simply an inexperienced driver, the fault for which falls heaviest on the company that put him on the road; he became briefly distracted by the sight, in his mirror, of the tarp over the truck’s load, which had become loose and was flapping in the wind. In that moment, he blew through a stop sign.
This type of accident may fall under the legal definition of a crime — in this case, 29 counts of dangerous driving — but, at least in my opinion, it can’t morally be treated as one. Brains are fallible. All of us, even the most experienced drivers, can be briefly distracted by objects in the environment. Had Sidhu or the Broncos bus been a split-second earlier or later, the tragedy wouldn’t have happened; it would’ve been a close call, the type we’ve all experienced. I can’t judge anyone harshly, when the truth of it is that there but for the grace of God go I.
In the wake of the crash, Sidhu conducted himself as a model of what we would hope to see from any offender, even at real cost to himself. He directed his lawyers to plead guilty so as to spare grieving families the trauma of a trial, and didn’t even contest his unusually strict sentence, though it may well have led to less time in jail. He met with any grieving relative who wished to meet with him, and by all accounts showed deep, genuine remorse. He sat with their pain, accepted it, and took total responsibility for the crash; one victim’s father called the meeting one of the most powerful experiences of his life. We often forget that Sidhu himself could easily have perished in the crash; he is a survivor of a horrible accident, as well as the one responsible.
Last year, Sidhu — a permanent resident of Canada — was released on parole. He was reunited with his wife, a Canadian citizen, who he’d married shortly before the crash. They have an infant son who has health problems, and likely can’t follow his father to India. If the deportation proceeds, it means a young family would be split apart.
One relative, who has chosen to forgive Sidhu, expressed her grief over the decision.
“My boy would want forgiveness and so do I,” Laurie Thomas, whose son Evan died in the crash, wrote on Twitter.
Not all families feel the same, and they, of course, have every right to their feelings; it is an unimaginable pain. But we as a society also have a stake in how we proceed with justice, and I would like us all to question where we find it now, in this case.
The crash cannot be undone. The lives lost cannot be brought back. It did spur much-needed changes mandating better driver training in some provinces, so at least some good came from a horror; but deporting Sidhu does not make Canada any safer. The decision may follow the letter of the law, following a procedure laid out for any non-citizen convicted of crimes with a longer sentence; but only at the cost of its spirit.
Canadian society does not need to be protected from Jaskirat Singh Sidhu. Indeed, I’d say it’s almost the opposite. In the midst of a nightmare, he embodied the qualities we desire most in our communities and our neighbours: he showed humility, selflessness, and compassion for those harmed as the entirely unintentional result of his actions.
The justice system may be tuned to address crime, and that is what it has done here; it isn’t purpose-fit to navigate tragedy. The moral nuances of the latter ask us for gentler considerations. Sidhu wishes to build a life in Canada; it seems unlikely that he will be allowed to. But I hope he does; I hope his appeal is successful. Canada will be better if he is able to remain, take care of his family, and give back in the ways he is able.
If you’re a curling fan — and also if you’re not — you have to check out Broomgate: A Curling Scandal, a new CBC podcast hosted by the delightful John Cullen, which has been topping the Canadian podcast charts since it was released.
John actually interviewed me for the series last year — sounds like I’ll make a cameo in the sixth and final episode next week. When he first reached out, I told him it was the best podcast idea I’d ever heard, in part because the whole story had never been told — but also, because telling it would be a boon for curling.
When the scandal about wildly effective new brooms exploded in the 2015-16 season, elite curlers were reticent to talk, fearing inflaming the tensions. I remember rushing out to a bonspiel in Portage la Prairie to corner Reid Carruthers on his way off the ice and ask him, in a conspiratorial whisper, to “tell me about the brooms.”
“Ohhhh boy,” he replied, and sighed, and agreed to explain it mostly off-record.
After that, players were pretty tight-lipped in public, even as some chaos raged behind the scenes. At the time, I thought it was a shame we journalists couldn’t get a little bit more out of them. There were interesting layers to Broomgate, ripe to be explored: it’s a story about a folksy sport at a crossroads, wrestling with how to hold onto its soul as it navigated from where it had been, to where it was going.
It was also a colourful enough story, I thought, to interest a general audience, which curling needs. As I’ve written before, I think televised sports occupy the place in our culture once taken by myth: shared narratives of victory and defeat that highlight the values we wish to transmit. Athletes become characters and their careers a story arc, whose crises and denouements keep us gripped. So sports draw new fans when they manage to sell these stories; for instance, I thought curling was boring until the 2010 Olympics, when Kevin Martin’s late-career quest for gold captured my imagination.
So a brouhaha such as Broomgate, rich with back-room intrigue, big personalities and high emotion, always seemed to me the perfect bait to get new fans on the hook; and I knew that John Cullen, who has a close rapport with most elite curlers, a pure love for the sport, and a gleeful sense of humour, was the right guide to reel them in.
Curling dramas are my favourite sports dramas, because — I say this with immense respect — they’re reliably entertaining and, in the big picture, relatively harmless. I don’t say that to minimize the stress they cause the athletes: team shake-ups can be bruising, and Broomgate in particular ripped open a social fracture in the sport that was quite painful for many of its stars.
But at the end of the day, it was still a fracture about broom fabric. This is unavoidably funny. No crimes were committed, no bigotry was inflicted, and nobody got hurt — at least, not in a way that time and a few reconciliatory beers can’t heal. So that makes it an ideal subject for this sort of podcast: you get all the intrigue and fraught emotional drama of a scandal, and can enjoy it guilt-free. It’s just not that serious.
Look, curling is quirky. It’s what makes it so fun to follow, and what keeps it humble as it makes its long journey towards professionalization. The athletic skills it requires are ludicrously finicky and difficult to master, but they’re also hilariously niche: we’re talking about people who’ve dedicated their lives to getting really, really, really good at sliding a big chunk of rock down bumpy ice. So even as we admire their feats, it’s hard to discuss the sport without keeping at least the tip of one’s tongue lingering in cheek.
That’s not a knock against curling — quite the opposite. That bemusing eccentricity is its most distinctive quality, its most charming texture, and its greatest strength. It’s why I adore the uniquely beautiful game, and what I hope curious listeners will fall in love with through this Broomgate podcast. There’s no sport like curling, in either its mechanics or its tempestuous teapot dramas; what makes John’s podcast great is that even as he uncovers the fault lines of its most difficult schism, he never loses contact with what makes it all so darn fun.
By the way, John also has a fantastic curling newsletter that’s a must-read for any fan.