just when you think parliament has degraded itself to the utmost, something brand new and horrible comes along: on wednesday, the house of commons status of women committee chased two invited witnesses out of the wellington building in tears , after a meeting about intimate partner violence and how the criminal justice system treats it suddenly veered off into a pathetic tangent about abortion.
it’s a hideous thing to watch, but i highly recommend it. it couldn’t really be any more revealing of the sickness of political partisanship. it’s like these witnesses weren’t even real people to the liberal and new democrat mps who decided to derail the proceedings. even if the meeting was some kind of conservative stunt, as those mps allege, the two witnesses — undisputed experts in the subject matter at hand — were owed basic human decency. and they didn’t get it.
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it’s a reasonable accusation, especially in light of a stark figure that i had not encountered before: nick milinovich, deputy chief of the peel police, testified that 29 per cent of homicides in canada in 2022 were committed by people who were free on some sort of statutory release . the figure comes from the government, in a written response to a question from conservative mp melissa lantsman.
it is of course true that the vast majority of people on statutory release do not murder people. and you can’t lock people up for stuff they haven’t done: should not, must not, cannot.
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residents of the gta, peel in particular, have increasingly been asked implicitly to accept such crimes as normal. just give up your keys, don’t make a fuss. a toronto police officer famously told a community meeting earlier this year that best practice is to leave your car keys near the front door, so when thugs break into your house wanting to steal your car, they can just grab them and go without going all clockwork orange on your family.
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canada’s kabuki abortion politics is usually pretty harmless, at least if you don’t count all the actually important things we could be talking about instead. i think everyone knows, deep down, that those “it could happen here too” takes are just stupid: no, the most permissive abortion regime in the developed world is not going to suddenly turn mississippian because a guy who says he’s pro-choice and vows never to legislate on abortion is set to become prime minister.
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cselley@postmedia.com