This was an open letter to the contenders for the leadership of the Conservative Reform <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Alliance party, first published in May 2000 in Toronto's The Globe and Mail.

I write to you not simply as a Canadian, but as an Iranian-Canadian.  This is the first time in the thirteen years I have had the privilege of being a citizen of this magnificent country of ours that I hyphenate my citizenship.  It is the first time in the sixteen years I have lived in Canada and under Canada’s benevolent protection that I find my cultural background of some importance in respect of the message I wish to impart.

You see, I write on the subject of capital punishment.  I write to ask you not to open this debate again.  

Twice in one generation Parliament has spoken.  Each time, the debate on capital punishment wounded and scarred the social psyche and pitted brother against sister, friend against friend.  Each time, it focussed our attention on all that was ugly and wrong in us and our souls, to the detriment of peace, forgiveness and charity.  Each time, it forced us to pit moral choice against principles of accountancy (does it cost more or less to keep a convict in prison rather than to put him to death).  Though the outcome was edifying, the debate was not.

I ask you not to open this debate again not only because a society can ill afford such repeated assaults upon its moral tranquillity.  The country is at peace, the crime rate is falling, fewer monsters lurk in the shadows of our society and even in the US, for heaven’s sake, they are re-examining their attachments to Old Sparky and its more humane progeny.

I ask this of you because I know something of state-sanctioned violence.  I know the violence it inflicts not just on the murderer to be hanged, but on the body politic, on justice, on equity, on humanity. 

This is why I write to you as an Iranian-Canadian.

When I left Iran in 1983, that country and its people were wracked by revolutionary fervour, a vicious invasion from without and civil unrest bordering on war within.  It was a society bent on exacting revenge – or retribution, the terms are in large part substitutable – for ills historical and recent.  It was a society whose only voice was of anger, whose only instrument was the bayonet.  It was a society where the spilling of blood – one’s own in martyrdom, or that of others in vengeance – had become a sacrament.  It was a society for which death imposed by the state was literally an Article of Faith.

That was the society I left behind.  From that environment, where violence had dominion, I came to Canada, where violence had no place.  And by that I mean official violence; state-sanctioned violence; state-sanctioned death.

No matter how much you limit the application of the death penalty, no matter if you insist on restricting it to a worst case scenario – a Paul Bernardo or a Clifford Olson – no matter if you put in place safeguards against the murder of innocents – and executing an innocent man is no different from murder – the moral principle at the root of punishment of death is the same.  For either a state accepts death as an instrument of policy or it does not.  The moral choice is as stark as that. 

I lived most of my childhood in a society in which that moral choice was in favour of death.  State-sanctioned death.  The thing is, once the moral choice is made, once the floodgates of official violence are opened, drawing a line in the sand will be as useless against the torrents of vengeance, of more violence, of more death as, well, a line in the sand.  Once it becomes acceptable for the state to kill, once society becomes inured to the daily reports of hangings, gassings, electrocutions and lethal injections (stoning and beheading considered outré these days), the inevitable question of “why Bernardo and not Homolka” will begin to haunt the executioners. 

For, why stop at pre-meditated murder?  Why stop at cop-killers?  Why stop at kidnappers and rapists and drug-dealers?  Why stop at those above 18?  Why stop at those with full mental faculties?  Why give murderers on death row the benefit of endless appeals, of constitutional protections, of “getting off” on technicalities?

Blood will beget blood.  The charity and forgiveness of this vast, pacific land of ours will give way to hardened hatred and base moral ugliness.

As it did, in the country of my birth. 

And I know something of state-sanctioned violence, the damage it does to the conscience of a people.  The damage it does to the conscience of each citizen.

Now, in Canada that moral choice was made twice in the last generation.  Twice the representatives of the people in Parliament assembled turned down death as an instrument of national policy.  Twice the Body Politic was convulsed and then relieved to find itself purged of state-sanctioned death.  Twice the country stared into that moral abyss of putting one of its children to death and thought itself better than the men whom it judged.  Twice in one generation Canada paid heed to the wise words of Churchill, uttered eighty years ago, that the moral strength of a people is to be found in how it treats its worst.

I ask you to respect that choice.  I ask you not to open that debate.  Leave the country at peace, as you would find it if you were to become Leader of the Opposition.  And if you become Prime Minister, bequeath a country to your children – to our children – that proudly checked the punishment of death at the door before entering the great community of civilised nations and refused to leave the room to retrieve it.

I ask you not to open that debate so that I can give my children the gift for which I left my birthplace: a society governed by laws and inspired by hope.  For in a society that chooses death over life, hope is the first casualty.