Supposed Trudeau Liberal mantra: Believe the victims.
Actual Trudeau Liberal motto: Humiliate the victims.
That truth was revealed, yet again, this week on Parliament Hill. A House of Commons committee was conducting a rare summertime hearing. The subject: Violence against women.
It’s an important issue. Canadian women are five times more likely to be targeted with sexual assault. In their lifetimes, four in ten Canadian women have experienced some form of violence from a partner. In 2022, almost 200 Canadian women were murdered, mostly by men — that’s one every two days.
So, the Status of Women committee scheduled a meeting this week to hear from police officers and victims themselves.
The Liberals on the committee, it appears, were in a bad mood. They didn’t want their summer vacations interrupted. MPs adjourned early, back in June, and won’t be back until the middle of September: That’s three months on the golf course and away from legislative business.
So, the Grits were grouchy.
Cait Alexander, a young woman who heads an advocacy group called End Violence Everywhere, was there to give evidence. Her family sat behind her as she spoke. “I’m supposed to be dead,” Alexander said. She showed the assembled MPs harrowing photographs of three years ago, when her then-boyfriend beat her and left her for dead. “If you haven’t met a survivor and a victim’s family, well, now you have.”
After Alexander finished her opening statement, Liberal MP Anita Vandenbeld spoke. You could be forgiven for thinking that Vandenbeld is a nobody who couldn’t get picked out of a one-person police lineup. She’s worked for the United Nations (naturally), and she’s been investigated by the ethics commissioner (practically a Trudeau Liberals job requirement). That’s about it.
Vandenbeld spoke. She made a few vanilla comments about the issue before the committee, and then she went after Conservative MPs for “politicizing” the issue. Which she, herself, did. She wanted to talk about abortion.
The witnesses who had been invited to speak were dumbfounded. So were the Tory and NDP MPs present. Cait Alexander couldn’t believe what was happening. She held up the photos of her battered body again. She was crying. An advocate of battered women, Megan Walker, spoke: ”This is the problem. Did (Vandenbeld) listen to anything that was said this morning?”
The meeting descended into chaos, while the female victims of violence looked on, appalled. MPs started raising points of order. Winnipeg Centre NDP MP Leah Gazan said: “I’m disgusted because I wasn’t given a chance to put forward witnesses when I’m representing ground zero for murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls.”
At that point, Cait Alexander got up and left, in tears. Walker got up and followed her.
Some of the MPs apologized to Cait Alexander’s mom, who was still in the committee room. Her mother was unmoved. “Sorry isn’t good enough,” she said. “We’ve heard ‘sorry.’”
And that, really, was the best and only response to a disgusting, appalling display by Anita Vandenbeld her ilk: Saying “sorry” isn’t enough. It doesn’t cut it.
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But Vandenbeld is a Trudeau Liberal, isn’t she? She’s a card-carrying member of the cult that professes to be feminist. They’re the ones who regularly chastise Conservatives (and others) for being insufficiently on the side of women — and then look the other way when their boss kicks two impressive women, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, out of cabinet. For talking back to him.
They’re the ones who insist that they want to ensure women have the right to choose — when they could have passed a law enshrining abortion rights at any time in the past decade. But didn’t.
By their words and their deeds, we know who the Trudeau Liberals are. Non-entities like Anita Vandenbeld show us, all the time.
They’re liars and hypocrites.
And, this week, they again reminded us that they don’t give a sweet damn about female victims of violence.