Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t have to adopt the most extreme positions within the world of social justice and completely cede the cultural mainstream to his opposition. But he did, which is how we got a statement like this from Pierre Poilievre on Sunday:
“I can’t believe I have to say this: but when I’m PM, there will be no male prisoners in female jails. Period.”
He was responding to a recent horror story out of Quebec. One Mohamad Al Ballouz brutally killed his wife and two sons in 2022, and last week was sentenced to life in prison with no shot at parole for 25 years. Because he now identifies as “Levana,” Al Ballouz has asked to serve that sentence in a women’s prison, the Joliette Institution for Women.
If the wish is granted, female inmates there will have to share space with a male counterpart who stabbed his wife 23 times. It would be an absurd and inhumane scenario — and it’s only possible because of a 2017 policy change championed by Trudeau that requires prisoners to be sorted according to gender identity and not genitalia.
Today, a fully intact criminal — rapists included — can be housed in the same facility as vulnerable women, balls and all. The first transfer, gang-related killer Fallon Aubee, formerly Jean-Paul, was moved into a women’s facility in 2017 in a move that warmed hearts at CBC. It only continued from there. Trans-identifying bank robber Sam “Steven” Mehlenbacher was kept in a female prison and, according to another inmate, caused three women to require the morning-after pill; Mehlenbacher went on to receive a sexual assault charge, but it was eventually dismissed.
Most vile is perhaps the incarceration of baby rapist Tara Desousa (Adam Laboucan) and serial pedophile Madilyn Harks (Matthew Harks) in a female facility. In 2021, a women’s advocate reported to the House of Commons that both individuals had been antagonizing a fellow inmate and her child in the facility’s mother-child program.
People like this have no place whatsoever in a women’s prison. Unfortunately, the prime minister doesn’t agree.
Before 2017, all pre-op trans prisoners were kept in a prison dedicated to their sex; only post-op males had a pathway to female prisons. A key factor limiting transfers was the fact that pre-op transgender-identifying males weren’t eligible for surgery unless they’d lived for a year as a woman prior to prison. It kept the barrier to entry for female prisons high, even though it wasn’t perfect.
But in 2016, riding the hype train of Netflix’s trans-plotline-featuring Orange is the New Black, then-minister Ralph Goodale signalled that a more accommodating prison policy was on the way.
In January 2017, he unveiled the new change: prisoners would now be eligible for cross-sex surgery if they lived as the opposite sex for one year, in prison or out. It wasn’t enough, however: a few days later, Trudeau was confronted at a town hall by a transgender activist who accused the federal prison system of committing “torture” and decried the fact that women of “any other type” aren’t put in men’s prisons.
Trudeau promised to look into the matter before uttering the magic words, “trans rights are human rights.” A week later, federal prisons were ordered to evaluate transgender transfer requests on a case-by-case basis, eliminating the old standard that restricted transfers to post-op individuals.
The prime minister accelerated, exposing female prisoners to violent male offenders all because of one self-interested activist at a town hall.
The rest of the country, for the most part, isn’t on board with any of this. Just under 80 per cent of Canadians believe that it’s “somewhat important” or “very important” to segregate prisons by sex, according to 2023 polling by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. A little more than 70 per cent believed that trans prisoners should be kept away from female inmates.
And because he agrees with them, Poilievre is smack-dab in the middle of normal culture: regardless of their partisan leanings, the overwhelming support for sex-segregated prisons shows that most people are Team Conservative on this one. For the sake of women in jail, thank goodness.
It’s a matter of common sense, really: men are bigger and stronger than women, therefore, they present the greatest threat. Plenty of Canadians want adults to be free to live as the opposite sex — but that does not include the freedom to leer at women in a federal institution.
Trudeau, on the other hand, made his party into one that will ceaselessly defend Al Ballouz’s right to be housed in a female prison after stabbing his poor wife to death. Talk about cold, cruel and small.
National Post