Making the Penalty Fit The Crime

"I am satisfied any farmer or other person operating heavy equipment in the course of a farm operation is more likely to be deterred from risking a child's safety by the prospect that the child could die, than by the prospect of going to jail."
"[Bauman] has always accepted full moral responsibility for his son's death. The issue is whether Mr. Bauman is criminally responsible for his son's death."
"Children have ridden with their fathers on their tractors for generations. Objectively assessed those tractor rides -- children standing beside their father or riding on the fenders have always been dangerous."
"What is different in this case is that four-year-old Steven was standing in a bucket, untethered, when his father's attention was, inevitably, going to be drawn to his work and away from Steven."
"[It was] completely foreseeable [that Steven could fall out and that] serious life-threatening bodily harm would occur."
"[Bauman lost his son and] there is no more ultimate price than that."
Ontario Court Justice Julia Morneau

Ontario farmer Emanuel Bauman walks from the Owen Sound Courthouse Thursday afternoon after being given a suspended sentence with three years probation for criminal negligence in the accidental death of his four-year-old son. (Robert Krbavac/CBC)

"Can you imagine [the extent of the toll taken on the family]."
"He's serving a life sentence of grief and remorse. It will never leave his family."
"As his other children grow up, he'll have that explaining to do."
Doug Grace, defence lawyer

In Canada, eight to ten children under age 16 die every year in mishaps taking place on a farm. Yet, according to Marcel Hacault, executive director of the Canadian Agricultural Safety Association, police appear reluctant -- in such tragic circumstances where a father's lack of attention and care results in his own child's death -- to lay adequate charges reflecting the situation and the gravity of its outcome.

Emanuel Bauman who owns a family farm in Grey Highlands located roughly 150 kilometres northwest of Toronto, last August had two of his five children in his care while he was involved in farm work. Mr. Bauman, 32, allowed his son Steven, four years old, to stand in the bucket of the skid steer alongside his seven year-old brother Luke. Their father was pulling a trailer of woodchips intending to build a laneway.

Looking back at the trailer as its load was dropped, he failed to see that his younger son had fallen out of the bucket. The child died of a fatal head injury. On May 14 his father was found guilty of criminal negligence. And on this past Thursday his sentence was delivered. He would avoid prison. The Crown had called for a two year jail sentence to deter farmers from placing vulnerable children in similarly dangerous situations.

Justice Morneau pointed out that this was a dire life lesson that would never be repeated by the farmer, that safety improvements had since his son's death been instituted on the farm, so that the child's four other siblings would never be placed in a dangerous life-threatening situation. Originally Mr. Bauman pleaded not guilty, but conceded all that the Crown disclosed including photographs, autopsy report and statements he made himself to police, all incriminating evidence.

According to Mr. Hacault, Mr. Bauman's conviction of criminal negligence causing death represented a "major escalation" in punishment historically brought down in such cases, leaving him with the hope that it would be noted, and thoroughly discussed within farm families that children die needlessly in farming accidents.

The Ontario home of Emanuel Bauman, where his son Steven was killed last year in a farming accident. Bauman was charged and convicted of criminal negligence in what is believed to be a landmark decision. (Robert Krbavac/CBC)

The Black/White Checkerboard

"The problem now is that we have the land, but they have the experience. We need to help each other."
"He kept saying, 'You stole our land'. And I told him, 'No, I'm indigenous. This land belongs to us."
Tracy Mutinhiri, black Zimbabwean landowner

"We can't have another war to liberate a country we have already liberated."
"If white settlers just took the land from us without paying for it, we can, in a similar way, just take it from them without paying for it."
Robert Mugabe, President, Zimbabwe

"There's no one who disagrees with social justice, but instead we watched as land reform was used as a tool of political patronage"
Peter Steyl, head, Zimbabwe commercial farmers' union 

As one black landowner puts it: ‘We have the land, but they have the experience. We need to help each other.’

Zimbabwe, when it was still Rhodesia and under white colonial rule, was an African breadbasket. It was white farmers who 'owned' the farms in the country, employing black farm workers and producing a cornucopia of food sufficient to feed the populace, with enough excess to sell abroad, constituting a huge income for the nation. Rhodesia was one of the last colonized countries of Africa to become independent, and it did so after a war against white rule.

In the 1960s and 70s, indigenous black Rhodesians fought against their oppressed and colonized condition, and Robert Mugabe was one of the heroes of the Rhodesian civil war that ended when black rule began. There were great hopes for Rhodesia, and there seemed to be a conciliatory effort on the part of both the colonizing Rhodesians and the indigenous Africans whose country it truly was at independence in 1980 when the country was renamed Zimbabwe.

Up until 1997, the country's economy was strong. Between 2000 and 2009, agricultural revenue fell by $12-billion, resulting from the agricultural revolution in devolving white farming into black farming. Which was when white farmers received notice that their productive farms were being appropriated by the government and handed over to the people who had earned their right to own the farms as black Africans. There was no compensation and there was abundant violence.

Some white farmers who resisted the forced takeovers lost their lives, just as they were losing their livelihoods, working farms that had been in their families for generations. As white farmers were kicked off the land they considered their own, the black farm workers employed by them became unemployed as well. In some instances farms were handed over to cronies of Robert Mugabe. It can be safely stated that none of the blacks taking over white farms had any farming experience.

In many instances the land, once vibrant with rich growing crops went fallow and was returned to nature. In others, the farm owners proved incapable of properly and profitably farming the land. But it was a revolution and as such a triumph. Even while the Zimbabwean economy fell into ruin, inflation soared, and so did unemployment. Not much has changed since then.

"The whites had their turn. It's time for our people to have a chance", said Savior Kasukuwere, minister of local government. So the former white farmers were landless and unemployed. Now, as farms are struggling to produce under black ownership, the country is heavily reliant on international aid to feed a quarter of its population, according to the World Food Program.

The Mugabe administration thinks it has a solution; force the farm owners to produce more crops more efficiently by pressuring them with threats to exact a quarterly 'rent' to the state. If they don't succeed they in their turn will be evicted. So black farmers who are facing difficulties have turned for advice and aid to the white farmers who had once operated the farms, offering to employ them as managers and advisers.

The dictatorial Robert Mugabe is none too pleased with this turn of events. But the economy is in dire straits, and black farmers see the need to have assistance from the very individuals whose misfortune led directly to their fortune. "Every week they're asked, 'Wouldn't you like to come back to the farms?", noted John Robertson, an economist in Harare.

And therein lies a dilemma. Some believe that taking that proffered employment would serve to legitimize a land-reform system they feel is unjust and politically driven. But with few other job prospects in the offing and the reality of widespread unemployment, many are indeed hiring themselves out as consultants and farm managers.

And, in fact, the new reality may just be of tremendous use to both solitudes, and in the end, help pull Zimbabwe out of its current misery status. Now ... if only Robert Mugabe would fade into history....

Robert Mugabe has warned that forging ties with white farmers is a step backward (AFP/Getty)