On a frosty mid-winter Friday night in Battleford, Sask., Gerald Stanley got away with murder.

Yes, that is an interpretation. But how else could one interpret the fact that an all-white jury acquitted a white man who shot a young Indigenous man, Colten Boushie, in the head?

I cannot possibly suggest the jurors in this case were racist. I don’t know any of them and I wasn’t in the courtroom.

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But I do know they live in a white world, as do I, and we would all be incapable of knowledge of an Indigenous upbringing in this country, something that carries with it fears, despair, lack of opportunities and outright racism.

This happened because Canada’s justice system is broken.

That also appears to be the opinion of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, and other Canadian ministers including Jane Philpott and Carolyn Bennett, both of whom have Indigenous portfolios.

The reaction of Wilson-Raybould, an Indigenous justice minister, to a jury verdict was extraordinary and possibly without precedent.

Those who thought she was questioning a verdict pushed back hard.

“My thoughts are with the family of Colton (sic) Boushie tonight,’’ she said via Twitter. “I truly feel your pain and I hear all of your voices. As a country we can and must do better — I am committed to working everyday to ensure justice for all Canadians.’’

She spoke out on social media after receiving a call from Trudeau, who was in California and the prime minister said Saturday that Canadians, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, know “we need to do better.’’

There is a simple way to do better, and a quick way to do better — eliminate the system of peremptory challenges, something that invites racism in the system and can be eliminated by a Criminal Code amendment introduced by Wilson-Raybould tomorrow.

And so, maybe this intervention by the justice minister wasn’t so extraordinary. She appears to have foreshadowed change when she released a statement after the jury was selected.

Peremptory challenges allow the Crown or defence to reject potential jurors without giving reasons. In this case, the Boushie family says the Stanley defence team used its 14 peremptory challenges to reject any potential jurors who appeared Indigenous. It is often cited as a reason for Indigenous underrepresentation on juries.

“The under-representation of Indigenous jurors is an issue in several provinces and it is a reality I find concerning,’’ Wilson-Raybould said in a statement.

But she promised only “careful study’’ of ending peremptory challenges, something the United Kingdom did three decades ago.

The first call to end that system came in Manitoba in 1991 in a study on aboriginal justice in that province co-chaired by Sen. Murray Sinclair, the head of the groundbreaking Truth and Reconciliation commission.

In Ontario, we are headed toward the fifth anniversary of a report on the under representation of Indigenous people on juries by former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci.

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He also said the province should urge the federal government to end peremptory challenges.

The status quo, Iacobucci said in 2013, will mean “any hope of true reconciliation between First Nations and Ontarians generally will vanish.’’ Any provincial progress on this issue has been negligible at best.

But as Kent Roach, an expert in criminal law at the University of Toronto, told me, eliminating peremptory challenges is not a magic solution because the problem of Indigenous representation on juries remains.

In fact, he said, in the Boushie case the Indigenous pool of prospective jurors was likely so small that it was relatively easy to seat an all-white jury.

Under representation is a product of many factors — the often prohibitive travel involved for Indigenous jurors getting to a courthouse, distrust of the system and the use of documentation to build a jury roll that favours non-Indigenous jurors.

This problem has existed for years. Wilson-Raybould should move on this with the provinces.

It’s clear the system failed Boushie and his family from the starting point, when his mother said RCMP officers searched her home without permission and asked her if she had been drinking (allegations denied by the RCMP after they investigated their own), to what the family saw as the stacking of the jury.

We have witnessed an injustice in 2018, but the Trudeau government can quickly rid our system of an archaic, racist jury selection practice.

It’s merely a step, but it doesn’t have to study it.

It just has to do it.

It must act in the memory of Colten Boushie. Everything else is just words.

Tim Harper writes on national affairs. Tjharper77@gmail.com Twitter: @nutgraf1

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