OTTAWA — The abortion issue inevitably made its way on Parliament Hill, as Liberal and Bloc Quebecois MPs tried to score political points off the leaked draft of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that could overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion in the United States.
nationalpost.com
Blah blah blah…Emotions have been running high since Politico revealed on Monday night that it had obtained a draft decision of the U.S. top court that would overturn the landmark 1973 ruling legalizing abortion nationwide. The chief justice has since confirmed the authenticity of the document and ordered an investigation into the leak, the first in the court’s 233-year history.
Tuesday morning, Conservative MPs were instructed not to comment on the matter by the leader of the official opposition’s office and those instructions were leaked to Canadian media outlets almost immediately.
“It would be inappropriate to comment on matters before the U.S. Courts. That is why Conservatives will not be commenting on the leaked opinions from the Supreme Court of the United States,” explained Conservative interim leader Candice Bergen in a statement.
Bergen is one of the 39 Conservative MPs who have received a “green light” (?) from the Campaign Life Coalition for her “pro-life” views, but she reiterated that the party’s position has not changed since the Harper government and would not reopen the debate.
“The only ones reopening this debate are the Liberals, and Justin Trudeau is once again using women’s reproductive rights to wedge and divide Canadians,” she said.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hinted on Wednesday, not for the first time, that Canada might need abortion legislation … or maybe new abortion regulations … or maybe neither … or maybe something else. Not for the first time, it made little sense.
apple.news
“A woman’s free choice is a choice to be made by her alone,” Trudeau declared before a Liberal caucus meeting. “Every woman in Canada has the right to a legal and safe abortion.” That’s true, legally speaking: Inasmuch as the law is silent on abortion, there is no legal impediment to a woman obtaining one. So what’s the problem?
Later in the day, Trudeau was asked if he was talking about amending the Canada Health Act, or regulations made thereunder, or about strong-arming provinces to increase access, or about making some kind of grander legislative statement. Quite clearly, the prime minister had no idea. “What I asked of (Health) Minister (Jean-Yves) Duclos and Minister (for Women Marci) Ien (was) to look at is the framework that governs abortion to ensure that everything is best placed to protect people,” he answered. “We’re going to see what (their) recommendations are.”
The smart money is on those recommendations coming to naught, once the immediate furore over the U.S. Supreme Court’s apparent intention to overturn Roe v. Wade dies down a bit. But there is definitely a chance, also, that Trudeau’s Liberals could blunder into a perfectly defensible legal status quo and make things worse.
The party has never had any compunction about shamelessly politicizing abortion, and then blaming the Conservatives for politicizing the issue (and usually getting away with it).
To wit, during Wednesday’s question period, when Conservative MP Michael Barrett asked Trudeau why Canada was lagging other countries in dropping vaccine mandates, Trudeau donned his coyest smirk and demanded Barrett express support for abortion rights. When politicians play silly buggers, things can occasionally get out of hand.
On the other hand, the SCOTUS decision might have a salutary effect of focusing Canadians’ minds on the real issues at hand, rather than on cartoonish predictions of the country turning into a dystopian misogynist nightmare.
Canadian political reporters spend an inordinate amount of time peppering leaders with questions about abortion, knowing precisely the answer they’ll get: Some expression of slavish devotion to the status quo. That obsession would be far better satisfied holding the Liberal government to account for what Trudeau freely admits are wide gaps in access to abortion.
New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island have gotten bad press in recent years for holding out against more abortion access. But according to a Globe and Mail report this week, a safe abortion is more than a two-hour drive away from cities as large as Windsor, Ont., and more than a six-hour drive from significant northern communities like Thunder Bay, Ont. and Prince George, B.C.
Admittedly though Thunder Bay ON and Prince George BC are pretty much hours away from anything anyway but just the same I guess. Trudeau constantly identifies this as a problem, when pushed, and yet the sum total of his government’s efforts consists of $140,000 in healthcare transfers withheld from New Brunswick … which was then refunded as a token of pandemic goodwill. Not exactly draconian.
It would be far more productive to inquire of Trudeau why he hasn’t improved the situation more than to demand the Conservative leader du jour yet again pledge never to touch the debate.
But as for legislation, now wouldn’t just be a nonsensical time to intervene — nothing SCOTUS does affects any Canadian’s health-care rights!
As unique as Canada’s legal vacuum on abortion is, it’s actually quite elegant. (Indeed, our rights are often best protected when our governments have no interest in codifying them at all.)
It certainly reflects the dominant progressive view in Canada, which is that abortion is a medical procedure like any other, no matter at what point during a pregnancy it occurs. (You won’t find anything about splenectomies or kidney transplants in the Criminal Code either.) Some see all the difference in the world between an abortion at eight weeks and an abortion at 30. One doubts a fetus would appreciate the difference.
Defending that vacuum has always been an awkward stance for Liberals, even if they didn’t quite realize it. They tend to believe Canadians had no rights until Jean Chrétien wrote them all down and called it the Charter. We can’t just let rights exist out there in the wild; God knows what people might do with them. We must carve them into tablets and revere them!
And they’ve never really had to try to defend that status quo: The ostensible threat of social conservatives turning Canada into Alabama was enough. Logically or not, with Alabama and other states now free to limit abortion in their own image, that simplistic narrative might not be enough to get the Liberals through the day. They might just have to grow the hell up and manage the situation as it actually is, not as they imagine it to be.
Liberal, Bloc MPs try to reopen the abortion debate to corner the Conservatives
'We can see, from our neighbours down south, that the debate has been reopened. We can think we’re immune to that scenario, but the goal of the exercise was to prov…
Blah blah blah…Emotions have been running high since Politico revealed on Monday night that it had obtained a draft decision of the U.S. top court that would overturn the landmark 1973 ruling legalizing abortion nationwide. The chief justice has since confirmed the authenticity of the document and ordered an investigation into the leak, the first in the court’s 233-year history.
Tuesday morning, Conservative MPs were instructed not to comment on the matter by the leader of the official opposition’s office and those instructions were leaked to Canadian media outlets almost immediately.
“It would be inappropriate to comment on matters before the U.S. Courts. That is why Conservatives will not be commenting on the leaked opinions from the Supreme Court of the United States,” explained Conservative interim leader Candice Bergen in a statement.
Bergen is one of the 39 Conservative MPs who have received a “green light” (?) from the Campaign Life Coalition for her “pro-life” views, but she reiterated that the party’s position has not changed since the Harper government and would not reopen the debate.
“The only ones reopening this debate are the Liberals, and Justin Trudeau is once again using women’s reproductive rights to wedge and divide Canadians,” she said.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hinted on Wednesday, not for the first time, that Canada might need abortion legislation … or maybe new abortion regulations … or maybe neither … or maybe something else. Not for the first time, it made little sense.
Chris Selley: America's abortion storm might finally force Canada's Liberals to grow up — National Post
The SCOTUS decision might get Canadians’ thinking about real issues, like gaps in abortion access, rather than cartoonish predictions of Canada becoming a dystopian misogynist nightmare
“A woman’s free choice is a choice to be made by her alone,” Trudeau declared before a Liberal caucus meeting. “Every woman in Canada has the right to a legal and safe abortion.” That’s true, legally speaking: Inasmuch as the law is silent on abortion, there is no legal impediment to a woman obtaining one. So what’s the problem?
Later in the day, Trudeau was asked if he was talking about amending the Canada Health Act, or regulations made thereunder, or about strong-arming provinces to increase access, or about making some kind of grander legislative statement. Quite clearly, the prime minister had no idea. “What I asked of (Health) Minister (Jean-Yves) Duclos and Minister (for Women Marci) Ien (was) to look at is the framework that governs abortion to ensure that everything is best placed to protect people,” he answered. “We’re going to see what (their) recommendations are.”
The smart money is on those recommendations coming to naught, once the immediate furore over the U.S. Supreme Court’s apparent intention to overturn Roe v. Wade dies down a bit. But there is definitely a chance, also, that Trudeau’s Liberals could blunder into a perfectly defensible legal status quo and make things worse.
The party has never had any compunction about shamelessly politicizing abortion, and then blaming the Conservatives for politicizing the issue (and usually getting away with it).
To wit, during Wednesday’s question period, when Conservative MP Michael Barrett asked Trudeau why Canada was lagging other countries in dropping vaccine mandates, Trudeau donned his coyest smirk and demanded Barrett express support for abortion rights. When politicians play silly buggers, things can occasionally get out of hand.
On the other hand, the SCOTUS decision might have a salutary effect of focusing Canadians’ minds on the real issues at hand, rather than on cartoonish predictions of the country turning into a dystopian misogynist nightmare.
Canadian political reporters spend an inordinate amount of time peppering leaders with questions about abortion, knowing precisely the answer they’ll get: Some expression of slavish devotion to the status quo. That obsession would be far better satisfied holding the Liberal government to account for what Trudeau freely admits are wide gaps in access to abortion.
New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island have gotten bad press in recent years for holding out against more abortion access. But according to a Globe and Mail report this week, a safe abortion is more than a two-hour drive away from cities as large as Windsor, Ont., and more than a six-hour drive from significant northern communities like Thunder Bay, Ont. and Prince George, B.C.
Admittedly though Thunder Bay ON and Prince George BC are pretty much hours away from anything anyway but just the same I guess. Trudeau constantly identifies this as a problem, when pushed, and yet the sum total of his government’s efforts consists of $140,000 in healthcare transfers withheld from New Brunswick … which was then refunded as a token of pandemic goodwill. Not exactly draconian.
It would be far more productive to inquire of Trudeau why he hasn’t improved the situation more than to demand the Conservative leader du jour yet again pledge never to touch the debate.
But as for legislation, now wouldn’t just be a nonsensical time to intervene — nothing SCOTUS does affects any Canadian’s health-care rights!
As unique as Canada’s legal vacuum on abortion is, it’s actually quite elegant. (Indeed, our rights are often best protected when our governments have no interest in codifying them at all.)
It certainly reflects the dominant progressive view in Canada, which is that abortion is a medical procedure like any other, no matter at what point during a pregnancy it occurs. (You won’t find anything about splenectomies or kidney transplants in the Criminal Code either.) Some see all the difference in the world between an abortion at eight weeks and an abortion at 30. One doubts a fetus would appreciate the difference.
Defending that vacuum has always been an awkward stance for Liberals, even if they didn’t quite realize it. They tend to believe Canadians had no rights until Jean Chrétien wrote them all down and called it the Charter. We can’t just let rights exist out there in the wild; God knows what people might do with them. We must carve them into tablets and revere them!
And they’ve never really had to try to defend that status quo: The ostensible threat of social conservatives turning Canada into Alabama was enough. Logically or not, with Alabama and other states now free to limit abortion in their own image, that simplistic narrative might not be enough to get the Liberals through the day. They might just have to grow the hell up and manage the situation as it actually is, not as they imagine it to be.
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