A Cruel Arithmetic: Inside the Case Against Polygamy, Craig Jones

• Author: Anne Cochrane
• Pages: 407-413

407

(2015) 1 CJCCL

Book Review

A Cruel Arithmetic: Inside the Case Against

Polygamy, Craig Jones

Introduction

In August 2014, two of Canada’s most notorious polygamists, Winston

Blackmore and James Oler, were charged with practicing polygamy

under the Criminal Code. Blackmore and Oler were two of the leaders of

the Mormon Fundamentalist community in Bountiful, BC.

For many Canadians, the arrest of these two men raises the question:

why now?  e polygamy prohibition under section 293 of the Code

was originally enacted in 1890, and complaints about the Bountiful

sect go back to its founding in the 1940s. But, in the decades since,

through the coming and going of governments and political parties,

Canada’s response to polygamy has been paralyzed by concerns over

the constitutionality of the criminal prohibition in light of the Charter

protection of religious liberty.  is issue was  nally addressed in the 2011

landmark BC Supreme Court decision of Chief Justice Robert J. Bauman

in what is now commonly referred to as the Polygamy Reference. Arising

out of this historic Reference is Craig Jones’ A Cruel Arithmetic: Inside the

Case Against Polygamy,1 a work that creates its own genre and is as unique

as the case it recounts.

 e Polygamy Reference

Procedurally unprecedented and legally unusual, the Polygamy Reference

proceeded pursuant to British Columbia’s Constitutional Questions Act,

1. Craig Jones, A Cruel Arithmetic: Inside the Case Against Polygamy (Toronto:

Irwin Law, 2012).