chris selley: ottawa's abortion fixation collides with reality, with ugly results
the status of women committee sent two invited witnesses, experts on intimate-partner violence, out the door in tears. welcome to a brand new low
4 minute read
witnesses megan walker and cait alexander were treated badly by the the house of commons status of women committee last wednesday.
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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.
cait alexander and megan walker had given scorching testimony about how many female victims of domestic assault and murder were set upon by men who were out on bail, or on parole, or on some other conditions to which they obviously were not adhering.
“i’m supposed to be dead,” alexander told committee members. “exactly three years ago today i sent a two word whatsapp message — “please help” — to a friend who thankfully believed me: my ex was beating me, all 6’3”, approximately 250 pounds of him, because he couldn’t find his car keys.
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“(he beat me) for four hours with his fists, his feet, a wooden rolling pin. … he split my head open in three places, gouged my eyes with his thumbs, kicked my ribs, and tortured me in ways i can feel but can’t fully describe.
“and after all that, guess what? your criminal justice system gave me a peace bond. all eight charges … were stayed against my ex, and i can’t say his name because it will forever be known as ‘alleged abuse’.”
alexander rattled off case after case after case of women who knew they were in terrible peril, but whom the justice system simply couldn’t or wouldn’t protect. “the government doesn’t care,” she alleged.
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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but surely an avowedly feminist government should be keenly aware of the well-founded accusation that it’s putting the rights of accused and even proven violent offenders ahead of the rights of their past and potential future victims. surely, in this age of $40 airtags, there must be a better way to balance the necessity of letting people who’ve served their sentences get on with their lives and mitigating the risk that they’ll instead do something even worse than they did before.
“last week we arrested 18 men for carjackings and home invasions in peel,” milinovich testified. “of those 18 people, we held 15 of them for bail hearings. … by the time we made the press conference announcement, nine of them had already been released.”
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.
but it’s not normal. no one should accept it as normal. i double-checked: carjackings and home invasions were not a thing when i was growing up in toronto. intimate partner violence most certainly was, but it shouldn’t be treated as normal either.
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to be honest i couldn’t even really follow the scatterbrained, partisan half-logic that led committee members to making the meeting somehow about abortion. i guess fish have to swim, and birds have to fly, and liberal and new democrat mps just don’t know any other way. but it has never looked so wretched as it did at that meeting.
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.
i think it’s mostly just decadent culture warfare in a country whose many severe problems have until fairly recently been easy for the wealthy urban progressives who dominate the national conversation to ignore.
but there are real people involved too. and the status of women committee, having invited them to ottawa to say their piece, sent them out the door in tears of rage. i don’t know how these mps sleep at night.
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national post
cselley@postmedia.com
cselley@postmedia.com
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