Invoking dead husband in online criticism crosses line: senator

OTTAWA • Sen. Denise Batters was minutes from boarding a flight home when she noticed two-day old Twitter posts that said she was only in the upper chamber because her husband killed himself.

Twenty years earlier on the same night, she and her husband had been among the last people to leave their wedding reception.

It was the second time this summer the Conservative senator from Saskatchewan was told on social media that she is only in the Senate because Dave Batters, a former Conservative MP, died by suicide.

The senator said she is accustomed to personal criticism online but invoking the death of her husband crosses a line.

“This was just beyond the pale,” she said Friday. “I thought, no, they don’t get to do this to me.”

Dave Batters was a twoterm Conservative MP from Saskatchewan. In September 2008, he announced he wouldn’t run again and went public about his battle with severe anxiety and depression.

On June 29, 2009, he took his own life.

Denise Batters, a lawyer, became a vocal mental health advocate and in 2013, then-prime minister Stephen Harper — who delivered an emotional speech at her husband’s funeral — appointed her to the Senate.

In late June, a former federal NDP candidate in Saskatchewan posted on the senator’s Facebook page that she was “only sitting in the Red Chamber because her husband, the MP, committed suicide.”

She posted a response at the time, but kept it off Twitter to avoid it getting national attention. The poster apologized on June 28 on her Facebook page.

On Wednesday night, she was minutes away from boarding a flight from Toronto to Saskatchewan when she went on Twitter and came across two tweets posted on Monday. A Twitter user with the handle @swancoole tweeted that Harper appointed her to the Senate in 2013 only because her husband killed himself and taxpayers are now supplying her life insurance.

The tweets appeared to be in response to online criticisms the senator levelled against the Liberals for paying a new consul-general more than a female recruited to a similar position.

In her response to the Twitter user posted online Thursday with the intent it be widely shared, the senator wrote that she would give anything to have her husband back and that the tweets shame those left behind by suicide and perpetuate stigma around mental illness.