Editor's notebook (considers fairness of courts and governmental institutions).

• Author: Mildon, Marsha

The title of this issue of LawNow "Life's Not Fair" comes from our collective memories of childhood, those poignant cries of "it's not fair" when some rules of a game were differently applied, when one child feels somehow excluded by decisions of others, when some authority figure's rules differed from our child's eye view of what was fair. It seemed to us that Canadians' concern for matters of rights and equality reflects that primal human sense of what is or is not fair, and so we have used that theme to examine the ways in which our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, our legislation, and our courts attempt to provide equality and fairness in our society.

We are particularly grateful to the Sheldon M. Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership for its generous sponsorship of this theme. The Foundation encourages dialogue on the importance and means of fostering principled, community-minded values and behaviour and the significance to society of fairness to all members of the community.

Fairness is a crucial community value on which both our Canadian justice and moral traditions are built. The word fair, descended from the Old English word faeger, means free from bias, fraud, or injustice, and was used with that meaning before the turn of the first millennium. However, the difficulty comes -- as the articles exploring fairness for refugees, homosexuals, males and females in employment, as well as accused and complainants in the criminal justice system indicate -- in determining through our laws and courts where the fairness line falls when there are competing interests or rights.

Certainly, it is easy to point to instances where life has not been fair. As I write this column, yet another dreadful tragedy in British Columbia has raised that cry throughout media and common conversation. Another child, nine-year-old Jessica Russell, was murdered -- the ultimate unfairness to the child, her family, and to all of us who value human life, and children's lives in particular. As the Premier of BC said, the system failed that little girl.

But there are other aspects of unfairness in this story. The man arrested and charged with this crime had been put on probation and released from jail two days before he allegedly murdered the child. He had been in jail for months waiting for a psychiatric report to be done before sentence -- but there were no psychiatric beds. He and his lawyer had both asked that he receive psychiatric help -- but the waiting list...