Canada's Liberal MPs Don't Care About Women and Children in Prison

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Last week, I was pleasantly surprised to see Frank Caputo, MP for Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo, release a video drawing attention to the issue of men in women’s prisons. He did so by focusing on the particularly disturbing case of Adam Laboucan, a BC man who now goes by Tara Desousa and who sexually assaulted a three-month-old baby boy in 1997. Despite this, Laboucan is now housed in a female prison with a Mother-Baby program because he “identifies” as a woman.

You can read more about Laboucan over at Reduxx but be warned, it’s not an easy read: CANADA: Man Who Raped Infant Quietly Moved to Prison with Mother-Baby Unit After Transgender Claim.

To my continued pleasant surprise, Caputo brought this case up in the House of Commons. But, as you can see in the video above, Minister of Public Safety Dominic LeBlanc completely shrugged off this entire horrid state of affairs by saying that “no child has ever been harmed in any way during this program’s implementation.”

Because no male baby rapist has harmed a child in this program yet, LeBlanc doesn’t think there is any reason to be critical of their presence in women’s jails. Something tells me he would have the exact same blasè attitude if a child had indeed already been harmed because the decision to house male sex offenders in women’s jails was never made on the basis that nothing bad has happened yet, but rather on the basis of “gender identity.”

(And indeed, as my friend and advocate for women in prison Heather Mason will tell you, many women have serious complaints about the men they have been forced to share a prison with, including about Laboucan.)

Somehow, the situation in the House of Commons got even worse. As shown in the video below, in response to Caputo bringing this issue up, Minister of Labour and Seniors Steven MacKinnon calls him a “slimeball,” accuses him of raising an “absurd question,” and calls the opposition members “snowflakes.”

My only gripe with Caputo is that he did not make it clear that Laboucan is a man. Sure, in the initial video one can surmise as much because Caputo calls him “Adam” and shows pictures of him, but in the House of Commons, one could easily have been mistaken in thinking that the “Tara” he is referring to is a woman. I don’t even care if he wants to refer to Laboucan with the pronoun “they.” I think it’s silly, but that’s less important to me than making it clear that this is a MALE sex offender in a women’s prison.

He asks what Laboucan is doing in a prison with babies—a question of extreme importance. But he should also be asking what Laboucan is doing in prison with women in the first place.

But Caputo, at least, is bringing this issue up.

MacKinnon, on the other hand, heard that a man who had raped a baby was not only being housed in a women’s prison but a women’s prison with infants and children in it. His response to this was to call the MP who brought the issue up a “slimeball.” He then defended his comments, hurled another insult, and tried to make a cringy joke—as if he hadn’t just heard one of the most horrific things imaginable.

I often celebrate that gender ideology is on its way out (though still a long way from the door), but then it strikes me that these are the kinds of people we are dealing with. It is a sad example of the banality of evil that one can hear about such a horrific situation and not feel the impulse to instantly correct it but to shrug it off and insult those who point it out instead. This is who we are still up against.