By Taylor MacPherson

Retired La Ronge prosecutor plans to continue advocacy work

Jan 4, 2018 | 4:00 PM

Harold Johnson may have retired as a Crown Prosecutor, but he’s not planning to sit back and relax any time soon.

Johnson, who served as a prosecutor in La Ronge for nine years before retiring last month, said he plans to stay in his home community and continue both his writing and widely-praised work with the Northern Alcohol Strategy. As a prosecutor in the North who was also born in the region, Johnson said he was able to establish trust with victims and witnesses, meaning he had a much easier time than other lawyers.

“The biggest problem with prosecutions is getting people to come to court and tell the court what happened. People are very reluctant to testify,” he said. “I didn’t have that problem.”

Johnson said that as a prosecutor, he quickly began to notice the huge number of criminal cases involving alcohol or alcohol abuse. As many as 95 per cent of all the offenders were drunk when they committed their crimes, Johnson said, which meant the issue was larger than just the justice system. Johnson was instrumental in the creation of the Northern Alcohol Strategy, a provincial initiative meant to help tackle the pervasive issue.

His popular book, Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing my People (And Yours), was published in 2016 by the University of Regina Press, and was nominated for a Governor General’s Award. Johnson said his battle against alcohol abuse in the North has been the highlight of his career, because he sees the hope it has given the community.

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Johnson said people stop him regularly on the streets of La Ronge and thank him for his work. La Ronge has more dry events now than ever before, Johnson added, and he plans to continue working to reduce alcohol consumption in the North.

“I’m not retiring from the Northern Alcohol Strategy,” he said. “I’m going to be working nine days a month.”

Johnson said he has too much invested in the strategy to simply walk away from it after his retirement. Many community members have invested their hopes in the alcohol strategy, and said he needs to stay on in order to ensure that hope is maintained.

“You cannot come into northern Saskatchewan and get people’s hopes up, and start something, and walk away,” he said. “After too many of those, the people are reluctant to hope anymore. I can’t walk away.”

In addition to his advocacy work, Johnson said he has several literary projects underway. Johnson said his upcoming book, which is set to be published August or September, will be about his older brother, who was killed by an impaired driver in 1985. Johnson said the book is a “biography/science fiction,” which blends biographical details about their childhood together with a fictional sci-fi account of his brother’s life.

“It’s a way of honouring my older brother, who wanted to be a scientist,” Johnson said. “Bookstores are going to wonder what shelf to put it on.”

Despite his recent retirement, Johnson said he is as busy as ever. When asked if he has any plans to slow down in the future, Johnson laughed.

“I don’t know what that means,” he said.

Taylor.macpherson@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @TMacPhersonNews