(Ottawa) A bill which, according to the Liberals, has the potential to reopen the debate on abortion was tabled Monday by an elected Conservative who is not at her first attempt in this area. The Conservative Party assures us that this is not the intention.
The elected official who brought forward private member’s bill C-311, Saskatchewan’s Cathay Wagantall, has tried to reopen the debate on the legal status of the fetus several times in recent years.
This time, she is proposing to add two offenses to the Criminal Code so “that the crimes of knowingly assaulting a pregnant woman and causing physical or emotional harm to a pregnant woman are taken into account by judges” when determining the sadness.
The Trudeau government wants to take the time to analyze the bill, but MP Rachel Bendayan is already expressing concern that Cathay Wagantall wants to “open the debate again through the back door”.
“I know a bit about her background, she has demonstrated on several occasions that this is a priority”, she maintains, indicating that during the last Conservative Party leadership race, MP Wagantall had supported Leslyn Lewis, who is she too is fiercely anti-abortion.
The winner, Pierre Poilievre, swore, like his predecessors, that the abortion debate would remain closed under his leadership, and that he would let his MPs vote freely in the event that a private member’s bill was put to the vote.
“But I am worried, and the government is worried, loose Rachel Bendayan in an interview. After the overthrow of Roe v. wade in the United States, I don’t think we can take that right for granted, even in Canada. »
‘Nothing to do’ with abortion
The Quebec lieutenant of the Conservative Party, Pierre Paul-Hus, assures that C-311 has “nothing to do with abortion”, and that his objective is rather in favor of a “determination of an aggravating factor of s ‘attacking a pregnant woman’.
“And I hope that all parliamentarians will support it,” he urges.
Rarely do private members’ bills make it very far in the House of Commons. For example, the last one, which was filed by Mr.me Wagantall on sex-selective abortions was never debated in the House.