Sound The Trumpet : Christie Blatchford: Three Year Sentence Brings Sad, Sickening End to Onetime Education Superstar

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“Christie Blatchford: Three Year Sentence Brings Sad, Sickening End to Onetime Education Superstar”
by National Post
June 29th, 2015

It is a common enough scene in the criminal courts, and not without its own special heartbreak.

An accused person, the long judicial process over at last and no more stalling possible, is formally sentenced, and as he is led off to jail, hands cuffed behind his back, he scans the seats for final glimpses of familiar faces and the world as he once knew it.

But Friday, at a suburban Toronto courthouse located in a strip mall, the handcuffed man was one of Canadian education’s highest flyers and biggest stars and the exit from courtroom 304 was the denouement to an unprecedented fall from grace.

Ben Levin, a former deputy education minister in two provinces, former member of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s transition team and a global expert in childhood learning, was sentenced to three years in prison Friday by Ontario Court Judge Heather McArthur.

The 63-year-old Levin earlier this spring pleaded guilty to one count each of possessing child pornography (for his small, but with violent and sadistic elements, collection of child porn), making child pornography (this in relation to a story he wrote for an undercover police officer from New Zealand posing as a single woman with an interest in incest, in which he detailed the violent sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl) and counselling the indictable offence of sexual assault (in which he acted, as the judge said, as “a deviant mentor” to a Toronto undercover officer posing online as a mother purportedly fighting her attraction to her own eight-year-old daughter).

As well, the judge noted that though Levin didn’t plead guilty to this offence, he unquestionably “also distributed child pornography,’’ sending the New Zealand officer, among others, “an image of a bound girl, with a gag in her mouth and an adult woman standing over her” which he described in a comment this way: “Mmm, so hot to imagine a mother doing that to her girl to please her lover.”

And, despite Levin’s purported suspicions that the “mother” with the eight-year-old, whom he was grooming, wasn’t “real,” McArthur said he “knew he might be wrong; the woman he was chatting with could, in fact, be a mother who was sexually interested” in her own child – and egged her on anyway.

Indeed, McArthur wrote in a smart and thoughtful 23-page decision, while Levin did much good in his life and had an illustrious career, it was precisely that background “as a leading expert in childhood education” which “renders his moral blameworthiness particularly high.

“It is an understatement to say that Mr. Levin would know that the young victims in the images he possessed were not getting the best start in school, let alone life,” the judge said.

This was a reference to Levin’s role as one of the major architects of Manitoba’s “K-S4 Agenda for Student Success,” which focused on improving student learning outcomes.

Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13