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My loss of faith was incremental, and came over years, so there’s no one case that turned the tide, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

If I search my memory now, the best I can do is pinpoint a few instances where a particular penny or two may have dropped.

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For instance, in 1993, when I was working for the Toronto Sun, I got a taste of how ferociously judges and lawyers can turn on one another, and over which subjects, and what astonishing creatures of convention many of them are and what prisoners — despite all the high-minded protestations to the contrary — of the dominant political orthodoxy.

Walter (Wally) Hryciuk was an Ontario Court judge, a very good one apparently but a bit of an old-school guy, even then. He was the kind of man whose wife gave him a joke light switch plate such that when you flicked the light on or off, you were flicking a little penis, and he was the sort who thought it would be a laugh to hang the thing in his chambers at the Old City Hall courts.