toewsjudge

Victor Toews lives in a charmed world, it seems. He may have fallen afoul of the law once upon a time, but that’s hardly uncommon in Stephen Harper’s circle, and it didn’t stop him from becoming this country’s Minister of Justice. (Let no one say that our Prime Minister doesn’t have a finely-tuned sense of Orwellian irony.) In that office Toews distinguished himself with petty acts of cruelty and an ill-concealed liking for torture and mass surveillance, which may have endeared him even more to the PMO.

Toews railed against same-sex marriage, honking on about the “sanctity” of traditional boy-girl wedlock, then seduced his babysitter, whose age the mainstream media have seemed strangely reluctant to search out. (He was her employer: under the Criminal Code, the age of consent in such circumstances is 18.) He proceeded to have another affair, and father a child with this mistress, which, oddly enough, led to his wife pulling the plug. Toews also objected strenuously to adding sexual orientation to the Criminal Code, claiming this would put “the jackboot of fascism on the necks of our people.” Really, one would expect Toews, of all people, to know what fascism is.

A seasoned bigot and devotee of sado-politics at its least refined, Toews has now gone to his Conservative reward—a coveted seat on the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench. The fix was in.

And so it comes to pass that he’ll be pulling down $288,000 a year, on top of a $79,000 federal government pension, and a Manitoba pension, too, for his years as an MLA. All that scratch can buy you out of a whack of babysitter trouble.

And guess what? This appalling morality tale in reverse may not yet be concluded. Another pressing reason, I think, to make sure that Harper is booted in 2015.