Odd for PM to host the Boyles

Trudeau had reason to be wary of meeting

As Joshua Boyle, thank God, must be presumed innocent, so may Justin Trudeau be presumed to be merely stupid.

Continuing the Liberal tradition of looking kindly upon the highly sketchy, Trudeau met Boyle and family in his office on Dec. 18.

Officials in the PMO only confirmed the meeting after Boyle tweeted pictures of his young children frolicking in Trudeau’s office and the PM sitting with the youngest, baby Ma’idah Grace, on his lap.

Now, of course, the 34-year-old Boyle is facing a raft of serious criminal charges — he made a brief court appearance by video in Ottawa Wednesday — and Trudeau appears by the kindest light as an aging naïf sorely lacking in judgment.

At the time, when reporters who saw the Boyle tweets inquired at the PMO, they were told, “It was a private meeting and we will not say more due to privacy considerations and out of respect for the family.”

Now, no one in the PMO is commenting further because, that wonderfully handy and well-used excuse, the investigation is ongoing.

But even before the shocking news of Boyle’s arrest Tuesday on 15 charges including sexual assault, Trudeau had reason to be wary of meeting him.

While his lawyers correctly point out that Boyle “has no criminal record and has never been in trouble with the police,” those are not the usual bona fides sufficient to land you a sitdown with the PM.

As my Postmedia colleague, Toronto Sun columnist Mark Bonokoski, wrote with lovely snarkiness in a Dec. 21 piece, well before Boyle’s arrest, “millions of Canadians would love a private audience with Justin Trudeau — after all, as his Disabilities Minister Kent Hehr put it, ‘Everyone has a sob story’…”

What’s more, at least according to Boyle, the meeting wasn’t without substance.

As he tweeted, “we were able to discuss #MartyrBoyle (the name the couple gave to the baby they say was killed in a forced abortion during their captivity) and the #HaqqaniNetwork (the Taliban-linked group that abducted the couple in 2012 and held them hostage for five years) in further detail.”

That conversation would have no bearing upon the progress of the investigation or prosecution of Boyle’s charges. Whatever he said about his or his family’s treatment at the hands of his captors, it could have no prejudicial effect upon his fair trial rights.

In fact, it has almost nothing to do with Boyle and everything to do with Trudeau.

Boyle did not arrive at the PM’s office as just another released hostage.

First, he was once briefly married to Zaynab Khadr, the jihad-loving big sister to Omar Khadr, the former Guantanamo Bay prisoner, two of the children of the late Ahmed Said Khadr.

He was a suspected bomber being held in Pakistan when then Prime Minister Jean Chretien went to bat for him with then Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto.

Ahmed Khadr was released shortly after Chretien’s intervention, and in thanks for that favour, he subsequently returned first to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan, enrolling his sons, including Omar, then just a boy, in terrorist training camps.

Khadr senior died in a gun battle with Pakistan forces in 2003.

Then there are the curious circumstances of Boyle and second wife Caitlin Coleman’s capture in Afghanistan.

Boyle, who describes himself as a “pilgrim,” has always said they just wanted to help villagers living in remote Taliban-controlled Afghanistan where no aid workers dared venture; there are U.S. intelligence officials who don’t entirely buy that.

In any case, Boyle seems to have an overblown sense of his abilities or importance. Even his Twitter handle speaks to that. It’s @BoylesVsWorld, and the accompanying description calls him and Coleman “freelance do-gooders, hostages extraordinaire, lovers of fine cheese.”

And from the moment of the couple’s unexpected release on Oct. 12 last year, there were signs of Boyle’s bizarre need to control: It was almost always him, and just him, who spoke to the press.

Consider the weird interview Coleman’s hometown newspaper, the York Daily Record in York County, Penn., where her parents live in the little town of Stewartstown, population about 2,000, conducted with her on Oct. 21.

It was polite, of course, but the writers pointed out their email correspondence was with Boyle, and was initiated by him. He said his wife wasn’t ready to speak about their captivity, or to provide details of her recent hospitalization (she was rushed to a hospital in Smith Falls, Ont., where his parents live, on Oct. 17).

But, Boyle said, his wife might enjoy speaking about her memories of her childhood home, and so she did, writing to the paper about the joys of being home-schooled, visits to local carnivals with her dad Jim, and sledding on a neighbour’s ravine. How it appeared, to the reader, was that Boyle was firmly in charge of who could speak and about what.

While in captivity, the couple had three children because, as Boyle once put it, “Hey, let’s make the best of this and at least go home with a larger start on our dream family…We always wanted as many as possible, and we didn’t want to waste time. Cait’s in her 30s, the clock is ticking.”

In other words, long before he was criminally charged, Boyle was demonstrably an odd duck, not, one would imagine, the sort of fellow to be granted a private audience with a prime minister.

He is charged with 15 offences, including two counts of sexual assault, several of assault, one of “misleading police to believe (someone) was suicidal and missing,” one of using “a noxious thing, namely Trazodone,” an anti-depressant, and one of unlawful confinement. They date between Oct. 14, days after their release from captivity, and Dec. 30.

The names of his alleged victims are protected by a standard publication ban. Boyle next appears in court Monday.

BOYLE SEEMS TO HAVE AN OVERBLOWN SENSE OF HIS OWN ABILITIES.