Not all the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls report recommendations stand up to scrutiny
The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIW) report declares that violence against Indigenous women is genocide. But do the recommendations stand up to scrutiny? Already, a Senate committee is at work dealing with some the report’s 200-plus recommendations, as part of the Senate’s study of an omnibus criminal justice act, Bill C-75. One…
True power doesn’t rest with the violent, it lies with those of integrity and courage
Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire stated, “At its heart, the Rwandan story is the failure of humanity to heed a call for help from an endangered people.” It would be nice to believe that the world learned its lesson in Rwanda, where nearly one million people were slaughtered in roughly 90 days as the world stood…
It’s hard to fault people when simply signing up can net a big lump of money. But the taxpayer is always on the hook
A staggering amount of money is being gobbled up by the victim industry in Canada. The Globe and Mail reported on Aug, 17, 2018, that different factions of lawyers involved in what’s termed the ’60s Scoop class action suit are squabbling over $75 million in fees up for grabs for the work they claim to have…
Terri-Lynne McClintic shouldn't have been sent to a healing lodge. In fact, the very nature of such institutions defies fair practise
Terri-Lynne McClintic, convicted of the 2009 abduction, rape and murder of eight-year-old Tory Stanford, was recently moved from federal prison to a healing lodge. Canadians were surprised – to say the least – that the transfer of a convicted child murderer to a healing lodge was not something new but had being going on since…
If we can be ‘enlightened witnesses’ and listen without judgment, we can help the healing process
Much of the study of genocide has focused on how it happens and what it looks like. This is important but perhaps we need to go further. What do people go through after these crimes have been committed? What happens to children? There are many amazing books written by survivors of genocide: Viktor Frankl’s Man’s…
If we’re to rid the world of this horrendous theft of innocence, we need to approach it the same way we approached the Holocaust
In the song Sympathy for the Devil, the Rolling Stones repeat several times, “Pleased to meet you. Hope you guessed my name. But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.” In essence, the Stones are talking about the nature of evil and our relation to it. We see it but we often don’t…
Caryl Chessman won eight stays of execution until the gas chamber finally caught up with him on May, 2, 1960
He’s a forgotten figure now but there was a time when anyone following the news cycle would have known who Caryl Chessman was. Sentenced to death in California on June 25, 1948, Chessman won eight stays of execution until the gas chamber finally caught up with him on May, 2, 1960. In the process, he…
The focus on consent has made men all over the world stop and think. Am I one of those men?
Strangely, this weird moment in history is a good time to be alive. I've been a feminist most of my adult life, at least since I realized power imbalances were rampant in present and past societies. After dedicating most of the 1990s and 2000s to fighting the good fight in the trenches, I burned out and left…
Something is deeply wrong with our legal and political systems in which the accuser and not the accused is on trial
Tens of thousands of people marched in Spain in April, protesting for three days over a court’s failure to convict five men of the gang rape of an 18-year-old woman during the Pamplona bull-running festival in 2016. The men had offered to walk the teenager to her car but instead they took her to the…
Alberta’s Bill 24 ignores the fact that predators thrive in an environment where secrets are kept from parents
It would seem like obvious common sense that secrets should not be kept from parents about what their children are doing. Especially when it comes to other adults talking to children about sex. Child abuse, sexual or otherwise, occurs most often when parents are absent and unaware. Countless Canadian criminal cases demonstrate that predators, abusers…
The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIW) report declares that violence against Indigenous women is genocide. But do the recommendations stand up to scrutiny? Already, a Senate committee is at work dealing with some the report’s 200-plus recommendations, as part of the Senate’s study of an omnibus criminal justice act, Bill C-75. One…
