Senator’s remarks ill-advised — but consider his pain
The Conservative senator who suggested that murderers in Canadian prisons be given rope with which to hang themselves is an emblem of the degradation of our political discourse. This is Tea Party talk sneaking up from the U.S., where Oklahoma State Sen. Ralph Shortey (real name) has just introduced a bill banning aborted human fetuses in food.
Shortey’s bill was based on urban myths and a trail of coincidences stretched to breaking point. Equally, Sen. Pierre-hugues Boisvenu, a victim’s rights campaigner appointed to the Senate by Stephen Harper in 2009, ignored the fact that 28 prisoners in federal custody have killed themselves since 2008 and that hanging is the means of choice for 90 per cent of such suicides. So Boisvenu’s offer of prison-issue paraphernalia was unnecessary. Human beings, even depraved ones, who make this decision will find a way.
Boisvenu has since offered a conditional apology to families of suicides. He has not further amplified his suggestion that immigrants be “filtered” for anti-canadian attitudes like the ones of the murderous Shafia trio. Who would admit to being willing to slaughter a disobedient daughter?
And this is how half-baked plans to improve the world appear. They are blurted out.
Worse, they sort of make a dribble of sense. Who, given a perfect world, doesn’t have a plan for Paul Bernardo, and it doesn’t involve anything as mundane as rope. My husband and I have had absurd arguments over which of us would kill anyone who harmed our children, my husband claiming that only he has the emotional stability for long-term incarceration, I saying that only I have the sick cunning to commit the crime successfully in the first place.
See? I just blurted that out. No one should consider our idiotic scheme. There are no fetuses in pancakes and the Shafias will have to measure out their 25 years in miserable grains of sand.
Boisvenu is a one-issue senator and shouldn’t have been appointed. Rather he should have continued his good work in another sphere entirely. Although the Quebec man who has filed a criminal complaint against Boisvenu is out of line, Liberal leader Bob Rae was right to say that his remarks were “unacceptable” and that counselling suicide is illegal.
And yet . . . and yet . . . consider the man’s pain before you judge him.
The senator’s daughter, Julie Boisvenu, 27, was kidnapped, raped and murdered in Sherbrooke, Que., in 2002 by a convicted sex offender named Hugo Bernier. Her decaying body was found in a field six days after she disappeared. Bernier called it an accident. He said on the stand that they were having consensual sex in her car when his hand slipped and he fell on her neck.
Sen. Boisvenu and his family had to listen to this in court in 2004. Bernier was convicted of firstdegree murder and sent to prison for 25 years. Just over one year later, Boisvenu’s younger daughter, Isabelle, 26, died in a highway car accident. I don’t know how the man rises each morning and finds any words at all, even ill-considered ones. To see your child dead before you at the hands of a monster and yet to strive to make the lives of other families better? Boisvenu, who has helped build a women’s shelter and a youth camp, is a hero, if flawed. He mentioned rope because doubtless he has thought of rope for himself, as anyone would. But no, never suicide, never, please! What troubles me in Canadian life is the damp cloth we put over people who have a case to make, even if it is daft. We don’t have tall poppy syndrome, we have suffoca- tion syndrome, as if Canadians were growing slowly in the dark like mushrooms. Beware anyone who shines a sudden light into their heart and the hearts of others. I worry that Sen. Boisvenu was kneejerk-ridiculed by people who didn’t know his backstory. I worry that he has now been lumped in with people like hard-right yellers like Ezra Levant whose proclamations are so repellent that one doubts his sanity and thus hesitates to call him out on his viciousness. NDP MP Pat Martin, whom I like and admire, shouldn’t have called Boisvenu an “ass---e” and worse, refused later to apologize for it. That term should be saved for drycleaners who shrink your pants and city workers who install the wrong tree in your front yard, a tree that 20 years later is still a blot on the landscape and diseased to boot. Also, the driver of the other car. And that guy who said that thing that time. It isn’t the right word for a good man who thinks hourly of his dead daughters and every day tries to do the right thing for other parents, other daughters. hmallick@thestar.ca