Keegstra: The Trial, the Issues, the Consequences

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

It is a truism that one of the best ways of understanding people is to understand their religious convictions, since a mind set by religion is a mind that approaches all other matters in a similar fashion.

Jim Keegstra, the ex-teacher from Eckville, Alberta, is a fundamentalist Christian who supports purest Social Credit theory and who, not surprisingly, also holds simple-minded attitudes about a Jewish conspiracy in world history. As a penalty for forcing students, through his grading system, to accept these theories about Jews in his high school social studies classes in Eckville between 1968 and 1982, Keegstra lost his job as a teacher, and the next year his position as town mayor. In 1985 Keegstra also lost a case before the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench in which the issue for him was freedom of speech and, for the prosecution, the provision of the criminal code that prohibits anyone from willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group — to wit, the Jewish people.

The case raised many other issues, not the least of which were the quality of the Alberta social studies curriculum and of its inspection system. Also at issue were the desirability of prosecuting Keegstra (was not his job loss punishment enough?), the role of the press once the decision to prosecute was undertaken (how to report objectively without giving Keegstra a platform on which to spread his twisted views?), and finally, the impact of the man on his students (how many really hated Jews as a result of his classes?).

As “instant books” go, the one under review is reasonably comprehensive, although by publication day, Keegstra had an appeal before the Alberta Court of Appeal so the story may not yet be over. Mertl covered the case from its inception, and both authors enjoyed, if that is the word, the active co-operation of Keegstra himself.

As a read, one can quibble about the journalistic style, complete with short paragraphs, and chapters of weirdly varying lengths (4 pages v. 53). Moreover, the constant repetition of Keegstra’s mindless views about Jews is at best tedious — Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.”

Nonetheless, the book is an important one that ends on a beguiling note — if there really were a Jewish conspiracy, not above assassination and massacre in its history, why did it allow Keegstra to rail against its machinations in public for many years when all it had to do was bump him off quietly in a car accident?