A La Ronge resident is making a drastic career change after years of seeing the vicious cycle alcohol has created in his community.
Harold Johnson ran a private practice before becoming a Crown prosecutor eight years ago. He says alcohol plays a role in 95 per cent of the cases he took on in court. According to Johnson, crimes of violence, drunk driving, even murders are almost entirely fueled by alcohol.
From the story of a man who drove drunk and woke up to realize he’d hit and killed his cousin, to a pastor telling Johnson that alcohol was involved in 60 deaths in Montreal Lake this past year, a bottle is never far in the tragedies Johnson’s heard.
“Every offence that we see has alcohol in its core. Every day, at least once, sometimes several times a day, I hear someone say, ‘when he’s sober he’s a good guy,'” he said.
For years, Johnson would join judges and defense lawyers on flights to northern communities where they would see the same thing day in, and day out.
“We do the same thing over and over and over again, and we wonder why things don’t change,” he said. “The problem was alcohol and the justice system was not going to solve it with the system we have in place.”
He says there was one final incident that made him leave his work in the justice system behind.
Johnson frequently prosecuted a La Ronge man who kept breaching his conditions not to drink, or drinking and doing even worse, so Johnson would send him to jail for 30 days to sober up.
“And he had no animosity towards me, he’d come and he’d meet me on the street, come and talk to me and shake my hand,” Johnson recalled.
At one point, the man told Johnson he went through detox and was waiting to go in to rehab.
“I patted him on the back, ‘good for you,’” he said. “And I saw him a while later in front of the post office. He’d obviously been drinking and he came up to me and he said, ‘do you think you can send me to jail?’ ‘What for?’ ‘He says ‘I went to rehab, I sobered up, I was doing really good but then I got back to La Ronge and all my friends were drinking and I joined them.’”
So now Johnson’s changing paths to deal with a root issue of crime. Johnson is working with Lac la Ronge, Montreal Lake, and the Ministry of Justice to change the story. His message focuses on sobriety and changing the community from within.
Over the course of six months, he will make presentations about sobriety, and Johnson says we need to open up the conversation about alcohol.
“The very first contact that we had with white people they started telling that story about us, after they gave us alcohol, about how we couldn’t hold our liquor. And that ‘lazy, dirty, drunken Indian’ story is out there. And we internalized it. I had a kid on a reserve up here just last year tell me that to be a real Indian meant you had to drink,” he said.
He wants to see more people celebrating sober living, and speaking up about it.
Johnson said removing alcohol from people’s lives won’t just reduce the traffic through courtrooms in the north, it’ll reduce the cost of policing, prison guards, health care, educational supports for children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, and social services.
“There’s an excitement building, it is time. It’s time to change it,” he said.