Roughly 100 per cent of Canadians agree that Bernardo and Luke Magnotta simply should not be in a medium-security facility
The issue of serial killer Paul Bernardo’s prison accommodations roared back to life this week, after Conservative MP Frank Caputo toured the medium security La Macaza Institution in Quebec. We also learned this week that murderer Luka Magnotta — who now goes by Violette and identifies as transgender — had been transferred to La Macaza as well.
Caputo complained of luxurious conditions, including when it came to recreational activities. “I walked outside and I had a look and I said, ’What’s that? That looks like a hockey rink,’” Caputo waxes aghast in a video posted online. “It was. … Inmates can go and they can get skates and they can play hockey!”
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Canada’s most horrific murderers are living better than most Canadians.
This is a disgrace. Canadians need to know about it. 👇🚨 pic.twitter.com/NX2HUyj3gj
Marcia Penner, friend of 15-year-old Kristen French — Bernardo’s and Karla Homolka’s third victim, whom they raped and murdered in 1992 — wrote an impassioned letter to Anne Kelly, commissioner of Correctional Service Canada (CSC), demanding (again) that Bernardo be returned to a maximum-security prison.
“My best friend Kristen French doesn’t get to skate anymore,” Penner wrote. “She was a very skilled and talented figure skater. She could have taken her love and passion for the sport to the top. But that dream was stolen from her, as was her life. A beautiful life that was filled with so much promise. All taken away by that psychopath monster who is now living the good life.”
(Conservative MP Michelle Ferrari posted Penner’s letter on X.)
In addition to “pickup hockey,” Penner complained specifically about Bernardo’s access to “tennis, billiards … a five-star gym facility and … a workshop with tools.”
The Canadian Press added a clarification in its report, however. It turns out, according to a CSC spokesperson, that “there is currently no functioning hockey rink … at La Macaza.” There hasn’t been for two winters, meaning Bernardo wouldn’t have been able to take to the ice.
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Why on earth Canadian Press decided to lead their story with this tangential information, however, I cannot fathom. This was certainly the least compelling aspect of Caputo’s reported tour. He said he was shown around Bernardo’s cell, and then came “face to face” with the man himself. (CSC officials confirmed the visit.) MPs are entitled to visit prisons, and I very much think they should. But that’s a heck of a story. It didn’t need a gotcha lede or headline.
Yet Canadians were introduced to the story with headlines like “No working rink at prison where Tory MP says inmates play ‘taxpayer-funded serial killer pickup hockey’,” and, even more aggressively, “Prison service account contradicts story Conservative MP told after touring facility where Bernardo held.”
It’s just one article, just one headline. And to be clear, the detail about the rink, however incidental, was worth reporting: Caputo said Bernardo had access to pickup hockey, but he actually doesn’t. Once reporters stop checking and calling out minor variances from the truth — even when they’re accidental, as apparently in this case — that’s when the real whoppers start slipping through. Politicians get emboldened by that. Indeed, I fear that’s happening in city and town halls all across the country as we speak, for lack of journalists to hold them to account.
But because of that gotcha angle, this is now all caught up in the Tories’ dreary war on the media. “The lying Canadian Press is yet again carrying water for Justin Trudeau and his incompetent Liberal government,” Poilievre spokesperson Sebastian Skamski wrote on X. “Instead of performing the most basic function of journalism, CP protects their Liberal masters.”
Skamski posted two photos of the hockey rink to prove that there is, in fact, a hockey rink — which was not in dispute.
It’s dreary and childish and I wish they would stop. Knowing they won’t stop, I wish media would stop giving them so much ammunition for this campaign.
On another note, it was fascinating to watch Liberal partisans wave those headlines around on social media claiming some kind of vindication: “Paul Bernardo and Luka Magnotta cannot play pickup hockey, because the hockey rink at the prison is broken. So there.”
Basically, from what I can see, essentially everyone — Conservative, Liberal and miscellaneous — agrees that Bernardo and Magnotta should not have access to pickup hockey. But I suspect if you had asked Canadians last week whether medium-security inmates should have access to recreational facilities along the basic lines of the ones at La Macaza, many Canadians would have said yes.
I would have been one of them. The vast majority of these prisoners are going to be paroled in relatively short order (which is reason enough to wonder why they should be consorting with the likes of Bernardo). Keeping them bored, idle and angry is no help to anyone.
The central problem, it seems to me, isn’t with La Macaza at all. The central problem is that roughly 100 per cent of Canadians don’t think Bernardo or Magnotta should be there, or at any other medium-security facility. The Liberals insist on being held hostage to the same supposed correctional experts who sent Terri-Lynne McClintic to a zero-security healing lodge. The Conservatives needn’t be. The odd ministerial intervention when CSC loses its mind would solve the problem at hand. We needn’t start ripping up hockey rinks and throwing out pool tables.
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