Media Interviews and Reviews A review by Bob Orrick – a contributing writer to Canadian Senior Years website Short Pants to Striped Trousers Thoughts, that breathe, and words, that burn.                (The Progress of Posey – 1757) The quote from the Progress of Posey, seems appropriate to introduce Wallace Craig’s riveting account – Short Pants to Striped Trousers – of his life and times as a youngster growing up in Vancouver during the ghastly years of the Great Depression, through the tumult of World War Two, along the corridors of academia at UBC, and on through the offices of private practice to emerge on the criminal court bench to exercise his true calling – the dispensation of justice in a land that daily is under attack by those who would prefer to bring down rather than to uphold the law. In his forward to me, Judge Craig wrote these words, “I hope that my Vancouver ‘life and times’ serves up some pleasurable reading for you. And it may be that we are of a like mind on the tattered scarecrow that was long ago a functional criminal justice system.” We must not make a scarecrow of the law, Setting it up to fear the birds of prey, And let it keep one shape, till custom make it Their perch and not their terror. Measure for Measure, Act 2, S1, William Shakespeare . . .Certain traits of court were anathema to Judge Craig. He wrote, at page 134, “During my years as a judge I witnessed or was part of the blurring of the fundamental purpose of sentencing brought about by (a) judicial participation in plea bargaining; (b) soft jail sentences; (c) the Parole Act. Specifically, “In the first expedient, a trial of a charge appropriate to the facts of a criminal act is avoided when the Crown accepts a guilty plea to a lesser offence and undertakes to join with defense counsel in asking the sentencing judge to impose a specific lenient sentence. A common instance is the acceptance of a plea of guilty of manslaughter even though the Crown had earlier concluded that there was a substantial likelihood of obtaining a conviction for first-or-second degree murder.” His words seem to be at odds with much of what Canadians read about when criminal court judges hand out lenient sentences that fly in the face of what the public demands be considered appropriate to the offence. Perhaps that is why reporter Ian Mulgrew, writing in the Vancouver Sun last year, commented, “Craig thinks Vancouver’s future is in jeopardy because too many judges have gone soft on crime and too many politicians have gone soft in the head.” Short pants to Striped Trousers is an easy read that takes the reader along a path that for some might not be too far removed from their own childhood and school years and early days of earning a living. Throughout the book, real people are seen doing real things; this is not some Hollywood version of an interesting time/place/event that attempts to glamorize or compress or distort reality. To paraphrase an oft-repeated claim from a long-ago television sitcom, “ What you read is what you get.”  Bob Orrick is a private tutor of English grammar, literature, poetry and Canadian history to offshore youngsters. His pupils hail from such places as Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Venezuela. He was previously in international marketing, was a ministerial assistant to a provincial cabinet minister, spent a few years as a reporter then editor of a community newspaper and enjoyed a career in the Royal Canadian Navy.