Moore is a troubling conscience
Juana Ines de la Cruz was a 17th century Mexican nun, women’s activist, poet and scholar.
She wasn’t describing New Democratic Party MP Christine Moore when she wrote, “Has anyone seen a stranger moral fervor? You who dirty the mirror cry that it isn’t clean.”
But it’s a magnificent fit nonetheless.
Until Tuesday, Moore might have appeared the feminist conscience on Parliament Hill, a job to which she appointed herself.
Just recently, it was she who in the modern parlance “called out” fellow MP Erin Weir when he sent out an email in January asking for support in his quest to become the NDP caucus chair.
In reply, and Moore appears to have hit “reply all”, she accused him of being “the last person in caucus I would like to see get that position. “There is too many women (mostly employee) complaint to me that you are harassing to them and as a woman I would not feel comfortable to meet with you alone,” was her exact reply.
With these vague complaints, Moore set in motion Weir’s temporary suspension from caucus, the usual se- cret lawyer’s “investigation” of the allegations, and last week, Weir’s expulsion from caucus by leader Jagmeet Singh.
In the final analysis, Weir stood convicted of being what was once called on the late, great Seinfeld series “a close talker”.
(In the episode, Elaine briefly had a weird boyfriend named Aaron who was oblivious to the norms about personal space and who hovered inches from the face of whomever he was chatting up.)
Ditto Weir.
Never was there a hint of a breath of anything substantial, and despite the party beating the bushes for victims (Singh’s chief of staff emailed 250 federal NDP staff, inviting them to contact the investigator), turns out he’d done nothing but what any single 36-year-old on the Hill might do: At a dreary function, he sought out female company to talk to and sometimes, apparently, he talked too long or too close.
Oh yes, and at the 2016 Saskatchewan NDP convention, he’d had cross words with a staffer from then-leader Tom Mulcair’s office, who intercepted him on the way to the microphone, where Weir planned to depart from the party orthodoxy on carbon pricing.
He didn’t like being shut down; the staffer didn’t like that he was not in proper lockstep: They had a bit of a verbal set-to.
She made a recent complaint that he’d been aggressive and intimidating.
But she had authority over him (the dread power imbalance was in her favour) and she won the skirmish — Weir deferred to her and didn’t speak against the resolution.
So, a close talker then, with a smidgen of independence to boot: What a bastard.
What most Canadians outside the Hill don’t know is that it was also Moore who was behind the 2014 ruination of two Liberal MPs, Scott Andrews and Massimo Pacetti.
The reason most don’t know her from that sorry incident is that though Moore went on a bit of a press tour to discuss it, it was as an alleged victim. Thus, she was guaranteed anonymity by most mainstream news media, was never named in legacy print and only ever appeared in the shadows on the tube.
I named her in my 2016 book on the criminal justice system (Life Sentence), in a section on the casualties of what was then called #ibelieve and later the #MeToo movement.
In a brief email correspondence that March, she didn’t ask for confidentiality and I didn’t offer it.
How it happened was that at the funeral that fall for Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders reservist who was shot while standing guard over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Ottawa, Moore spotted then-Liberal leader Justin Trudeau on the bus taking Parliamentarians to and from the service.
She presented him — what better time than a funeral for a slain soldier? — with what’s called a third-party complaint.
She said that one of his MPs, Scott Andrews, had allegedly behaved inappropriately with one of her colleagues.
Trudeau told his whip to tell the NDP whip about the allegation, and within days the two whips met Moore and the alleged victim.
It was there Moore first brought forth her own serious accusation about Massimo Pacetti. On Nov. 5, Trudeau temporarily suspended both men and appointed a lawyer for the requisite secret review.
Moore told me that it was only when the news leaked out and journalists began calling that she knew she had to go public.
According to her account given to various media, she and Pacetti played in the same sports league, went for drinks, and then for a nightcap at his hotel.
There, he made his desire clear, and after a trip to the loo, she said, she “froze”, memories of an alleged sexual assault as a teenager overwhelming her, and “then we had sex with no explicit consent from me.”
She did, however, provide the condom Pacetti used.
Both men were permanently expelled from the Liberal caucus in March of 2015. Both were finished in politics. Moore told me she regretted how Trudeau had managed things, that it was his decision which shredded the men’s lives and that she would have been happy if Andrews had taken “behavioural therapy” and apologized.
Then Tuesday came a story by CBC’s Neil Macdonald, about how, after former Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry soldier Glen Kirkland testified at a 2013 House of Commons defence committee (Moore was a member), she invited him to her office.
There, he said, she poured him a couple of gins, even though he told her he was on antidepressants and painkillers. As Pacetti allegedly had done, Moore also allegedly made her intentions clear. The two spent the night at Kirkland’s Ottawa hotel.
Then she allegedly stalked Kirkland a bit, once showing up at a golf course where he was playing with friends, another time at the doorstep of his Brandon, Man., house.
Kirkland didn’t claim he was sexually assaulted, or that he’s any kind of victim. But he was a lowly private — a wounded and vulnerable one too, at the time, who had seen his friends killed around him — and Moore was a wheel, a big-time MP.
But he found it a little rich, he told Macdonald, to watch from afar on TV the destructive chain of events Moore set in motion with Weir (and of course, less well-known, before him, with Pacetti and Moore).
Neil Macdonald contacted Singh’s office for comment for his story. Mid-day Tuesday, the NDP leader issued a statement saying Moore was suspended pending the usual secret lawyer’s investigation. Moore issued a brief statement, saying she was pleased to cooperate with the investigation. She didn’t reply to my email.
If you dirty the mirror, you don’t get to cry that it’s not clean.