The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (Bill C-36) is inspired by the Nordic Model of sex work laws; pimps and johns will be held criminally accountable but not the sex workers themselves. At first glance, this seems reasonable—it isn’t the sex worker who will be punished. However his or her safety, critics say, will be in jeopardy.

These new laws will prevent workers from discussing safe sex practices online with clients, Caroline Newcastle, a sex worker and representative with Prostitutes of Ottawa-Gatineau, Work, Educate, Resist (POWER), a non-profit group for current and former sex workers, told the Toronto Star. “It’s essentially full re-criminalization,” she adds, point to the phrasing of  the proposed laws. In the same Star report Valerie Scott—one of the original workers named in Canada V. Bedford—calls the bill “a huge gift to sexual predators.”

“This will simply move sex workers out into more isolated and more marginalized areas of the city,” elaborates Jean McDonald, head of sex worker support group Maggie’s, in an interview with the Globe and Mail.

Today, human rights group Pivot released a press release that links to an open letter to Stephen Harper signed by 200 legal experts from across Canada expressing their concerns: “Targeting clients will displace sex workers to isolated areas where prospective customers are less likely to be detected by police.”

Justice Minister Peter MacKay says the federal government wants to pass the new bill this week, CTV News reports, calling it urgent. However, NDP justice critic Francoise Boivin says she wants the government to slow down and thoughtfully craft a new, Charter-compliant law.

The safety of these women is not something to push through and get over with. Hopefully, the next five months will be spent actually consulting these workers in order to come to a decision with their safety in front of everything else.

Peter MacKay Bingo from Gender Focus

Good news: apparently all women have to do to get one of those old boys jobs, is apply. On June 13, Justice Minister Peter MacKay reportedly said, at a private Ontario Bar Association meeting, that women and minorities “simply aren’t applying” for positions in federally appointed courts. Simple. Director of the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic Avvy Yao-Yao Go says this isn’t true. After reading MacKay’s comments she became angry. In her 23 years as a lawyer, she knows many worthy candidates from minority groups who have applied, Yao-Yao writes in a letter to the Toronto Star. “Perhaps MacKay is counting on the fact that most women and racial minority lawyers who have applied for judicial appointment wouldn’t dare come out to prove him wrong,” she writes. “So let me be the first to acknowledge that I, too, have put in an application as an act of challenge with no expectation of ever being appointed, not only because I am a woman of colour, but more importantly, because my politics are not in sync with the current government.” Indeed, decision making in regards to the federal courts system is up to politicians. It isn’t shocking that a woman of colour who openly criticizes the Conservative government’s policies on immigration, refugees and poverty reduction feels this way. MacKay pointed to motherhood as one of the reasons women aren’t applying, reasoning moms have a greater bond with their children. The truth is less about this bond and more about traditional gender roles. Like the ones MacKay graciously illustrated with his Mother’s Day and Father’s Day greetings—you know, moms do the work and men shape the minds of our future leaders. Oh wait, he blamed a woman on his staff for that one. Yes, women do the majority of child rearing and housework. We are also hired less because of this, because even if we haven’t had children, we can potentially get pregnant, and will need to take a break because of it and may need future accommodations. Mothers will also need to find affordable childcare that exceeds a 9-5 day, and will need to decide if it is worth making less at a job where their male partner would make more. It is hard enough to get the opportunity to gain the education and experience needed for these top jobs—never mind getting hired. But hey, MacKay is on to something, maybe it is something as simple as we just don’t apply. Right, Avvy? It can’t be that MacKay is stuck in the 1950s, because, as his own wife says, he employs female staff members.

Hillier is a former NATO forces commander and was Canadian Chief of Defense Staff until last year. In his recently released memoir, A Solider First, Hillier offers his take on the first headlines about detainee torture in 2007.

Canada had no official policy on detainees when our government first sent troops to Afghanistan in 2002, he writes, and the “minuscule number” of prisoners wasn’t a major concern in the early days. When the fighting heated up in spring of 2006, our military started handing their captures over to American Coalition troops, and then the NDS, Afghanistan’s intelligence service.

The main thing, Hillier contends, is these were the bad guys. “We were capturing these guys red-handed, in many cases in the middle of firefights or attacks on Canadians, and many were found with gunpowder or explosive residue on their bodies.”

Not so, says Richard Colvin.

As a Canadian diplomat, Colvin volunteered to go to Afghanistan in 2006, after the death of Glyn Berry. He stayed for 17 months.

While working for the Department of Foreign Affairs, and later in the Canadian Embassy, Colvin visited detainees. He told the parliamentary committee that he sent numerous reports to Canadian Forces and Foreign Affairs, airing his concerns about who was being captured, and the horrific abuse most, if not all, of the detainees faced contrary to the Geneva Convention. Many were innocent locals, farmers and truck drivers, Colvin said. His reports were mostly ignored, until he was asked to stop putting them in writing in 2007.

The government has attacked Colvin’s credibility and denied that the current government knew anything about torture. Peter MacKay called the opposition a bunch of “bobbleheads and muppets” during question period when Bob Rae asked about the government’s knowledge and action on the issue multiple times, in both official languages. MacKay’s continued response was to reference “the previous government” (and presumably his predecessor, Gordon O’Connor).

If Hillier stays true to his book, he’ll deflect the blame too. Any torture that might have occurred during the early transfers, he writes, was due to the “nascent” nature of the Afghan prison system. The system wasn’t perfect, and as for prison reviews: “it took an awfully long time to get them organized.”

During the ten pages in his book Hillier devotes to the issue of detainee abuse, most of it is centralized around what a good job he believes many Canadian Forces soldiers did not killing the prisoners themselves. “We had all learned something from Somalia,” he writes repeatedly. Yes, we did. The Canadian Forces saw its budgets hacked to bits, its numbers drop, and the country’s pride in its image of the “peacekeeping” soldier suffer a critical blow.

The Canadian Forces has changed dramatically since the death of a Somali teenager at the hands of two Canadian soldiers in 1993. An inquiry into that matter lasted four years, and never uncovered what the upper levels of government knew about the incident, or any attempt to cover it up.

Only time will tell whether Hillier’s testimony, and that of others called to speak before the committee, will be any more revealing.