Canada’s Trudeau Government To Repeal Law Protecting Parents Who Engage In A ‘Barbaric Cultural Practice’ Called Spanking

A Commentary by Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

 December 23^rd, 2015

 Most Canadians no doubt remember that during this past fall’s federal election, the then Conservative government of Stephen Harper vowed to wage war against what it called “barbaric cultural practices.”

Niagara Falls MP Rob Nicholson – from Harper’s justice minister to Ambrose’s justice critic, still doing the ‘wrath of God’ shtick

One of the weapons the Harper government promised to employ in this war was a “snitch line” we could call to report to police anyone we saw wearing strange or foreign clothing or engaging in any other conduct we deemed to be “barbaric” or falling outside a zone of acceptability or tolerance for old stock Canadians.,

Now I’ve got to say this.

As much as I found this snitch line idea totally repulsive, if Harper and his party for old stock Canadians had won another term of government this past October, and if they had gone on to set up such a line,  I would use it the next time I see something I’ve unfortunately seen too many times in shopping mall and other places – an adult grabbing an arm of a toddler they are presumably a parent of until the child is dancing on tippy toes, then smacking his’ or hers’ backside until the child is reduced to crying and tears. 

I’d have no problem reporting that to the snitch line although I doubt a Harper government or any derivative of a Harper government involving longtime Harper lap dogs like Rona Ambrose, Jason Kenny and Niagara, Ontario’s Rob Nicholson, would take my complaint seriously for the following reasons. 

First, I don’t think that spanking is one of the things the Harperites had in mind when they began banging their drums about barbaric cultural practices unless, perhaps, a child is being wacked by woman wearing a niqab. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never a woman wearing a niqab spanking a child in public. But even if they don’t, the divisive rhetoric coming out of the Harper camp during the election suggests that this whole snitch line thing was about firing up phobias about brown people, particularly people of the Muslim faith. 

Second, the remnants of the Harper camp continue to stand behind a section of the Criminal Cod of Canada – Section 43, to be precise – that protects parents, and to some degree protects school teachers, from facing prosecution for using what the section calls “reasonable” physical force (whatever reasonable means) in disciplining a child

In 2012, when Niagara Falls Riding MP Rob Nicholson was serving Harper as Canada’s Justice Minister and doing his stone-faced, tough on crime thing, one of his assistants, Julie Di Mambro, responded to a Canadian Medical Association report calling spanking an “anachronistic excuse for poor parenting” and calling for the repeal of Section 43 by stating that “parents are in the best position to raise their children” and that “we believe it is up to them, not the government, to decide what is best or their children so long as it is within reason.” 

This followed disturbing reports during the previous 10 years of children in southern Ontario being strapped and beaten by parents and others attached to fundamentalist Christian churches and schools.

And just this past December 21st, when reports appeared in the national media that the new Liberal government of Justin Trudeau is planning to repeal Section 43 – “a move,” added The Toronto Star, that will “bring Canada in line with its responsibilities under the United Nations Convention of Rights of the Child,” and “send a strong message that physical punishment, even when well-intentioned, is harmful to children” – Cheri Elliott, an assistant to Nicholson, who is now justice critic under Conservatives’ interim opposition leader Rona Ambrose, told The Globe and Mail, that Nicholson’s position hasn’t changed since his days as Harper’s justice minister.  

“We believe that parents are in the best position to raise their children,” said Elliott, and “it is up to them, not the government, to decide what is best for their children so long as it is within reason and not abuse.” 

No doubt there is still a bedrock, fundamentalist Christian “spare-the-rod-and-soil-the-child” constituency for this in Canada, even though a list of other countries around the world – among them Poland, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Israel, Brazil, Argentina and many others – have banned corporal punishment for children. 

So where is Canada at when it comes to deciding who doing what constitutes a barbaric cultural practice? 

Thankfully, Harper and his party for old-stock Canadians are no longer in a position to call the shots on that one.

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