May I introduce Robert Latimer’s parole board to the concept of “the undeveloped heart.”

Its decision to refuse day parole to Latimer after seven years in prison for killing his suffering, disabled daughter is an extraordinary thing, and it reveals a fault common to bureaucrats worldwide. In their struggle to interpret rules — badly in this case — the board missed the larger point.

E.M. Forster, writing in 1936 about the great blank that is the emotional life of the English, called it “the undeveloped heart.” He hastened to note that it is not a cold heart. There is plenty of emotion there but it’s concealed under a layer of propriety and disapproval.

We are “self-complacent, unsympathetic and reserved,” he wrote in the essay Notes on the English Character.

Forster was referring to the yearly tide of extremely well-educated public school boys entering “into a world of whose richness and subtlety they have no conception. There is plenty of brain power, but it is more often used to confirm prejudices than to dispel them.”

Nowhere has this observation been better displayed than in the Latimer case. I am not suggesting that the parole board is packed with intensely clever people. Clearly it is not.

The board is unsteady with both language and intent, having failed to grasp that its priority is to decide whether a prisoner will re-offend. Since Latimer has no other daughters with steel rods jammed in their spine, and he is unlikely to steal yours from your home on a whim, he is never again going to take the life of a child.

Board rules

So what was the board seeking?

“We were left with a feeling that you have not developed the kind of sufficient insight and understanding of your actions,” said Kelly-Ann Speck, ungrammatically and illogically. No one had greater insight into the intense pain of the little girl, and from the response of Canadians on this website, people with developed hearts clearly understand that.

One lawyer told reporters that the board was probably using “insight” to mean “remorse,” which Latimer says he does not feel.

But if he said he was sorry, he’d be saying he wished his daughter’s pain had gone on endlessly. Apologizing would mean betraying the dead. When you have reached the level of loss that Latimer has suffered, you almost can’t suffer more.

Why not stay true to yourself and your family?

One wonders what the parole board would have done with a killer unlikely to re-offend who cheerfully lied and said he was profoundly sorry for his crime. They’d release him.

Latimer is unwilling to lie. So he stays in jail. I normally disapprove of comparing sentences, as each case is different, but how odd that Karla Homolka is free despite never budging on her claim of total victimhood.

Canadian Calvinism

If the Latimer mess isn’t the result of a primitive heart and a massive failure to understand what motivates a man who loves his daughter more than himself, then I’m a block of heartless stone, a slab on Easter Island.

If Tracy Latimer had been my daughter, I would have ended her life, too. But then I’m not smug about the pain of others, especially when they are little girls who can’t understand these slashing body storms when they hit.

Tracy Latimer had a mental age of four months; for her, there were no whispered words of comfort for the future. She didn’t understand the concept of future, she only knew the lacerations of now.

Even in a country too heartless to make space for a law on mercy killing, Latimer should not have been charged with murder, but rather with manslaughter. It was this and the terrible wrong of mandatory sentencing that turned Canadian justice into a monster.

The Supreme Court was right: Constitutional exemptions shouldn’t be made to coddle bad laws. It’s time for Parliament to be brave, but they’re not big on that, those fellows.

Tracy Latimer could not walk, talk, swallow food or breathe properly. The story of her degenerating disease, the scoliosis that compressed her organs just as a tumor does, is all on record. She could not take painkillers beyond acetaminophen because they would have combined with her anti-seizure and anti-convulsive drugs to suppress her breathing and send her into a vegetable state. The child could not sleep.

Any Canadian who has been seriously ill knows that the medical system as a whole does not value pain management. With the biotechnology available, why should anyone suffer pain? Yet we frequently do. It’s Canadian Calvinism.

Experience and expression

Groups fighting for the rights of the disabled have rejoiced over this decision. But the key here is not that Tracy was disabled. She was in pain and getting worse, which is different.

Parents of disabled children who have vociferously attacked Latimer over the years should declare their personal bias. If they can figure it out, that is, because I admit that it’s a complicated one.

The birth of a disabled child is a landmine. All of life is changed. Marriages break up when one parent can cope and one can’t.

Although it gives you a perspective others don’t have, being the parent of a disabled child does not automatically make you an expert or even a nice person.

Robert Latimer’s website has a number of comments from sympathetic parents of disabled children. Here is one extraordinary essay. It makes clear that the circumstance does not define the parent. Everyone reacts differently.

Think of the 10-year-old, orphaned Vietnamese boy who came to Canada for surgery on a facial tumour. His disfigurement was so ghastly that it was hard not to shudder at his picture.

Canadian doctors decided they could not operate. But they added that the tumour was “not life-threatening,” which struck me as cavalier.

Luckily, some Americans, with their unaccountable energy and optimism, took an interest in the boy. The surgery will be done in Boston.

Without disparaging the Canadian doctors, I think we all have different ideas about quality of life. The Toronto doctors were wrong; the Boston doctors were right.

Latimer watched his daughter writhe in agony for years. I’d count on him to be a better judge of quality of life than the prosecutors and politicians who chose to jail a man who forced himself to do the unthinkable.

Latimer had a developed heart. If only the learned minds of the Canadian justice system had one too.

This Week

Just as I sent my last Christmas book order to Britain — sigh, lovely presents under the tree, done and dusted — Guardian TV critic Charlie Brooker casually mentions that he has a new book out. Hugely annoyed, I order two copies of Dawn of the Dumb: Dispatches from the Idiotic Frontline and they flutter across the ocean at great expense because Brooker, well, he makes me laugh.

The Globe‘s John Doyle is the best critic in Canada but he doesn’t have Brooker’s material to work with. And Brooker’s off to the races.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall — please stop throwing up. Yes, it’s a hard life being ugly. People stop and stare, then wish they hadn’t. You ruin photographs just by being there. Witness the poor bastards scattered through BBC3’s Body Image season, and the lost souls showcased in reality shows Too Ugly for Love and My Small Breasts and I.”

These are genuine programs. I blame Rupert Murdoch.