Acknowledgments

• Author: Craig Jones
• Pages: 15-16

xv

Acknowledgments

British Columbia Attorney General Wally Oppal should get fu ll credit

for putting momentum behind the province’s polygamy le after decades

of uncertainty and inac tion. His successors — Mik e de Jong, Barry Penner,

and Shirley Bond — each took a particular interest in the subsequent Poly-

gamy Reference proceeding, and would have shouldered the blame had

the whole enterprise collapsed in failure, so it is fai r that they should claim

a large measure of credit also for its success. Each had a personal hand in

aspects of the case’s progress. Successive Deputy Attorney s General Allan

Seckel and David Louk idelis, and my immediate superior, Assistant Deputy

Richard Fyfe, threw their support behind this untried and ambitious idea

of a trial of the constitutional issues t hrough a reference proceeding. Each

showed enough faith in me and my team to trust us with virtually every

aspect of the conduct of the litigation.

is book is partly memoir, and any such work, as Ben Frank lin rec-

ognized, is in some measure an exercise of the ego. After all, we write

these things in the conceit that something we have done is worth reading

about at some length. at Franklin oered his disclaimer in the intro-

duction to the autobiography of, to my mind, one of Western history’s

greatest gures and then went on to write the balance with such o hand

humility and genia l charm is remarkable. I am no Franklin. I’m sure that,

whatever eorts I take to conceal it, my recollections of the polygamy cas e

and its conduct will reveal a n element of pride. I can only hope that it does

so without obviously intruding on the story t hat follows.

With that disclaimer behind me, I should say right from the beg inning

that had the litigation, which is at the heart of this book, been left in my

hands alone, it would have been a mess, or at the very least, a ver y dierent

case from the one I describe here. I worked with some exceptionally dedi-

cated and talented lawyers in the Legal Serv ices branch of the Ministr y

of Attorney General, and it will be my privilege to introduce you to many