There is so little that is funny about Anne Cools, ya takes it where ya finds it.
What she is saying now (from the article in the Hill Times; the committee's proceedings don't seem to have been published yet):
"I work in the Senate, which is supposedly a very enlightened place, and I have been hit by Senators. I have stood around here and watched Senators hit children. If this is such an enlightened place, let us think of the greater world. Yes, I have seen Senators here in the Senate hit children," she said during committee hearings on legislation, S-21, banning corporal punishment.
And from the Yahoo article:
Cools said the incident of a senator hitting a child was a few years ago at a Speaker's reception and involved a senator's grandchild, but she could not remember the exact date.
"The child had been doing something and I was sitting talking to someone and all of a sudden there was this exchange," she said.
"She came in and was not very happy at all; I would say she was quite upset and angry, and she just grabbed the child and slapped it," Cools said, again refusing to name the senator in question.
What an amazing coincidence that the unnamed senator in question allegedly happened to be a woman. Cools' particular hobbyhorse is her campaign to persuade the world that women are fundamentally nasty.
Anyhow. Here's what Cools had to say at a sitting of the Senate on March 10, 2005, on the subject of Senate Bill S-21, to amend the Criminal Code to remove the section permitting corporal punishment of children (which the Supreme Court narrowed but did not strike down last year):
http://www.parl.gc.ca/38/1/parlbus/chambus/senate/deb-e/044db_2005-03-10-E.htm?Language=E&Parl=38&Ses=1(no copyright issues)
Perhaps I should begin by saying that section 43 of the Criminal Code could do with some change. There is no doubt about that, and I have no problem with making some change to it, but I do have a problem with the wholesale repeal of this section, leaving ordinary parents exposed to criminal prosecution.
We should note at all times that section 43, on its own, does not advocate violence; neither does it advocate assault against children, physical punishment or aggression toward children. If one listened to the debates that are going on across this country and the United States of America, one would believe that the law is an advocate of assaults and violence against children, which it is not.
I should like to record my strenuous opposition to this bill, because a wholesale repeal will have the effect of leaving millions of parents in this country exposed to criminal prosecutions.
<here, she inserts a few anecdotes to demonstrate the true nastiness of women when it comes to the things they do to children ... in her career in the field, she just doesn't ever seem to have met any male abusers ...>
... The debate, for some strange reason, does not differentiate between what I would call harsh violence, a physical assault against children, and what the literature is beginning to describe as physically non-injurious spanking, which is delivered in the absence of rage and anger by a parent.
... Having said that, honourable senators, the debate on this bill has focused on what I would call the mean-spirited, harsh-assault cruelty to children, terrible maltreatment, and it has not focused at all on the parent who may slap a child or something of that nature, nor on the fact that the repeal of section 43 will expose all those parents, millions of them, to the risk of criminal prosecution.
Yes, it's far better if parents assault their children with cold calculation rather than anger. I mean, apparently; she characterized the incident she's now whining about, of the unnamed senator who was allegedly angry and allegedly hit a child, as "she just grabbed the child and
slapped it".
Huh. Isn't that really exactly the conduct that Cools is going all-out to PROTECT, by opposing the repeal of section 42?? (Really; the law does not and cannot make a distinction between acts based on how pissed off the person who committed them was.)
So ... where exactly is her beef?
My goodness. Someone seems to have missed that she's made this allegation before, in the full Senate, at that March 2005 sitting:
There is another witness I hope the committee will call. He is Dr. Robert Larzelere of the University of Nebraska Medical Centre. ... He is very strong on the point that discipline of children must be administered in an absence of rage and anger. I see this daily. I have seen it right here in the Senate. I have seen a female senator, in a rage, reach out and hit a child.
"In a rage"? At a Senate function? I'll believe that when I see it.
This one's just a despicable turd. And I hope senators, and the media, pursue this crap.
There are 37 women in the Senate currently, and were unlikely any more "a few years ago". (Cools was appointed in 1984, so the trail might get murky.)
http://www.parl.gc.ca/common/senmemb/senate/isenator.asp?sortord=W&Language=EThey're probably all old enough to be grandmothers, but it's unlikely they all actually are. One of the ones who is, if nobody else, needs to rise on a point of privilege on this one. There are probably no more than a couple of dozen people Cools could have been talking about, and they're all smeared until she explains herself.
Anything that would get this witless sycophant to shut up would be a good thing.
Completely aside, I can't resist this from that Hill Times article:
When Tory MP Jason Kenny rose in reply to a question of privilege on Thursday and called Liberal MP Don Boudria "stupefiedly ignorant," House Speaker Peter Milliken just couldn't let it pass.
Well, I'd find it hard to let it pass too, but not for quite the same reasons.
"Stupefiedly" ignorant? Wtf is
stupefiedly?
If it were a word, and I were to use it in a sentence, it would go like this:
I listened stupefiedly as Jason Kenny rose to speak ...
For future reference, Jason, the word you were wanting is "stupefyingly".
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