It's not an easy job putting the bad guys away.
Long hours, significant stress, and dedicated work goes into gathering the evidence and convincing a judge or a jury of your case beyond a reasonable doubt.
For more than three decades, Dennis Cann has worked as a provincial Crown prosecutor in North Battleford dealing with all kinds of cases ranging from murders to sexual assaults, to drunk driving, coroner's inquests and many others.
That career wrapped up in March with his retirement as regional Crown prosecutor in North Battleford.
"I've been very fortunate to work with some really fine people over the years," said Cann. A retirement event was held for him at the Dekker Centre in April.
That frees up time for Cann to spend more time around his family including his grandkids, and brings to a close a long and storied legal career, one capped in 2010 when Cann was designated Queen's Counsel.
He was born in Assiniboia and moved to Coronach when he was five years old, and then the following years moved to Outlook and lived there right through high school.
It was in Outlook he met his "high school sweetheart," Terry Lynn, whom he later married.
Terry Lynn Cann went on to a long career in nursing as well as two terms on North Battleford city council. Their 42-year anniversary will be in August.
But his career in law almost didn't happen, according to Cann.
Moving to Saskatoon after high school, he studied at the University of Saskatchewan where he took an honours BA. But originally he was interested in a business career and was accepted to pursue an MBA. It had "never crossed my mind being a lawyer," said Cann.
That's when circumstances changed. He was working at a music store at the time and they ended up embroiled in a lawsuit over an accident with a school bus.
"I didn't know any lawyers," said Cann. The owner of the store sent him down to see a lawyer named David Beaubier, who later became a federal judge.
"He solved my problem in five minutes," said Cann. Beaubier called SGI right there and the issue went away, and then they began talking about Cann's own plans to go for an MBA.
"He espoused how I should go into law instead of the MBA," said Cann. "I never ever actually thought about it."
On Beaubier's advice Cann went down to the College of Law to see the dean, and met a couple of professors - "nice guys," he said - and "decided to give that a shot in the fall."
Cann got through the three years of law school and was able to get some summer experience working for a law firm in Saskatoon. He had approached Bob Stromberg at his firm in Saskatoon and said, "I want to learn the business of law, of how you run a law office."
"He did teach me a lot, such as how to think like a lawyer and how to run a business. It is a business."
After he got his law degree, he needed a place to do his articling term before he passed the bar.
It was Cann's idea to go to North Battleford. He noticed Saskatoon was saturated with applicants.
"Back then, there were guys waiting eight to ten years to become a partner in Saskatoon."
"I said, nah, it makes more sense to move somewhere else."
He had about three different cities in mind as places to apply, but after knocking on some doors in North Battleford he landed an articling job with Dennis Maher and Eldon Lindgren.
He then stayed on after he passed the bar in 1978 and eventually became a partner with the firm.
Cann arrived at a time when the local bar was changing. There hadn't been many young lawyers in that area in some time and "then all of a sudden a whole bunch of young lawyers moved in here."
It was during his time in private practice that Cann got his first experience trying cases in court, including some prosecution work.
The way prosecutions were done was changing in Saskatchewan. Before the mid-1970s, Cann said, the prosecution work in North Battleford was entirely farmed out to the private lawyers.
That changed once the province established an office in the city. As Cann describes it, Harvey Walker became the first full-time prosecutor and then Dave Arnot, Randy Kirkham and Jim Taylor joined that office.
Back then, "they did all the prosecutions in North Battleford," said Cann.
"But the whole district outside, they only did the serious matters, the murders, the sexual assaults and things like that. All the outside points were farmed out for the standard stuff, the assaults, the drinking and driving, all that stuff, to private firms. Just about every firm in town would have some centres where they would send guys out to do prosecution."
When he was with Maher and Lindgren, the firm would prosecute in Unity and Wilkie. Cann recalls others at other firms would do prosecutions in Cut Knife, Spiritwood, Turtleford or Glaslyn.
"All the firms did some. I think it went pretty good back then because it was a good way for young lawyers to get into court. It's always very hard for young lawyers to get trial experience and I think it's even harder now than it was back then. So a lot of us got into court right away and away we went."
There was also a congeniality among everyone in the Bar, by necessity. One day a lawyer might be prosecuting a case, but the next day he might be on the defence side.
"It made everybody co-operate and be civil with each other."
Cann joined the Crown office in 1982 when David Arnot was appointed a provincial court judge.
After all congratulations on that appointment were out of the way, Arnot raised the idea of joining the Crown with Cann. After discussing it with Terry Lynn, Cann made the move.
For years, the North Battleford office ran as four prosecutors, right through to the mid-1990s.
What changed was "the volume increased substantially over the years." Also, the decision was made to take over the prosecutions for the outside smaller towns from the private bar.
"That was one of the reasons for the volume. Plus, the crime rate actually went up substantially."
The office moved from four to six, to eight, to the current tally of 10 prosecutors. The office covers the Northwest from Lloydminster to Onion Lake, to St. Walburg, Pelican Lake, Spiritwood, Glaslyn, Turtleford, Biggar, Unity and points in between.
Cann did his share of travel, but in the beginning it was only for the major files. He travelled to St. Walburg, for example, for a murder case there. That changed over time as the workload increased.
He acknowledged that a big challenge for the Crown prosecutors was keeping up with the volume of work they had to do.
"That's the biggest difficulty of the prosecutions, the volume of work," said Cann. Legal Aid was "in the same boat," he said.
Around 2005, he recalled, the Crown Prosecutors Association did a study of the workload of prosecutors. The average prosecutor did about 530 matters per year in Canada, the study noted.
For Cann, though, "that year I did 1,400. And that was pretty standard for everybody at my office. We were always running two or three times the national average, which wears on people over time."
He's had several memorable cases over the years. He says he's done some 30 murder cases on his own, and there were probably another 40 that he worked on initially but ended up handing over to someone else in the office to finish.
He recalls the arson case involving Hunter's Trailer and Marine, which was "the longest running trial ever in the Court of Queen's Bench here," Cann said. It lasted seven-and-a-half months, he recalled.
Another memorable case was the Norma Jean Mooswa trial. She was convicted of six counts of impaired driving causing death and four counts of impaired driving causing bodily harm in connection to a horrible car crash on July 1, 2004 in which six individuals were killed in Cochin.
Mooswa was sentenced to 10 years in jail, which at that time was the longest sentence ever imposed for drunk driving, though she did end up being released early.
Cann was the prosecutor in that case and notes the danger posed to the public from those who drink and drive.
"The most dangerous person to the average citizen is not the person with a gun or a knife," said Cann. "We rarely run into people like that most of our lives."
However, the "drunk driver can pick off any one of us," he said. "It's very hard to protect yourself."
Given the caseload Cann had to deal with, one of his biggest challenges in his career was finding any time for himself away from the practice of law.
He describes being a member of what he calls the "Breakfast Club" - a group of people from all walks of life who gather periodically for breakfast.
"If it was all lawyers it would get pretty boring," he said.
Cann said the idea started with Dennis Maher and David Conroy in the 1960s. The group would get together and just talk about the topics of the day or the happenings in the news, at the city or in business. It's something Cann plans to keep up with in his retirement.
Another thing that kept Cann occupied over the years is his involvement in music and in various bands.
That started in high school in Outlook and continued in Saskatoon.
He started out playing in a number of rock and roll bands in his early years. He got out of it when in law school, but returned to playing once he started practising.
He played with the Hildebrandts in North Battleford and others, and eventually got into country music playing with the John Lindsey Band and several other groups.
"There's a saying. Old rockers never die, they just turn country."
The keyboard is his main instrument, although he did play the drums when he first started.
That sideline proved to be a successful one, with the bands getting radio time across Canada and onto the Tommy Hunter Show at one point.
He played for Ian Eaton and Battle River at one point and that was the "first band in Saskatchewan to have a video on CMT Nashville. Two of our records got into the top 20."
Cann also took up songwriting, with several getting radio play and one making it onto a CBC TV movie that played in Europe. That meant he would get cheques in the mail from "Germany or Belgium or Holland for that song," whenever that was shown there.
Cann has seen sweeping changes in the legal profession over the years. One of them was in the way trials were conducted.
When Cann started out, there were many jury trials. "They're not very common now," said Cann.
Some cases, like first-degree murder, must go to a jury. But "a lot of the public think the Crown decides which goes to jury or not."
Not so, he notes. While the Crown decides whether it's indictable or summary, the accused gets to choose where he wants his trial. "They can choose provincial court, or Queen's Bench judge alone or Queen's Bench judge and jury."
Few of those accused choose to go to jury these days, Cann said. That makes it harder for young lawyers to get experience in jury trials.
Another change has been technological. When he started out, getting a memory typewriter was a "big deal. We could put forms in it and do that, that was the main thing." As well, all the firms had law libraries.
Now, "it's all online and everything's computer(ized), and computer skills are pretty much a must in our profession now."
Now, one by one, the generation that came to North Battleford along with Cann is retiring, and a new generation of lawyers is coming in. Cann says he's seeing the bar changing again with "lot of young lawyers coming back in here now, and it's good to see."
Another change is the number of women who've joined the once male-dominated legal profession. Half of the prosecutors with the Crown are female now, Cann said.
He's also seen changes in terms of the sentences handed out. When he started, manslaughter sentences of two-and-a-half to three years were common. Now, it's up to 13 years. "That wasn't that way when I started practising," said Cann.
One thing that hasn't changed is there are still criminals who end up in the system. But not all of them are bad people, Cann notes.
"I've always thought a large number of people I've met - 80 per cent - are not that bad a person, they've done a bad thing and need to be sentenced for that," said Cann.
"Twenty per cent are bad people. And there's a very, very small percentage of that. There is such a thing as evil."
The difficulty every judge has is figuring out where each one fits, he said. Many of those in the "eighty per cent" include a large number with alcohol and addictions problems.
"If we could solve that we could solve a heck of a lot of the crime. But the court can't change that. What we deal with is after the fact. If society wants to get that, they have to start putting some mechanisms in."
For the most dangerous ones, the Crown has at its disposal the dangerous offender provisions. A handful of lawyers in the department of Justice do most of that work.
"Those are the ones with the serious record or the ones who are going to cause a lot of serious problems somewhere down the road."
Perhaps the biggest, and most troubling change Cann has seen in the past decade - one in which he won't be around to address now that he has retired as a Crown prosecutor - is the rise in gang activity.
"That's a major concern, I think, unfolding for society as a whole," said Cann, who sees that activity going on not only in the city of North Battleford but also the surrounding area.
He describes gang criminals as a different type of criminal.
"The gang thing is a totally different mindset and that's the scary part," said Cann. "There, you're getting a professional or, if you want to call it, anti-society criminal. And your normal processes don't work with them. You need a totally different approach."
That different approach that is needed, he suggests, is to "get tough on them, call it tough love, call it scared straight" and "show them that that is a nowhere road."
"That's something the whole system is going to have to address seriously."
