Yvonne Mackie: Animal Alliance Environment Voters Party Candidate, Newmarket – Aurora
Posted by auroracitizen on April 21, 2011
We have established this post to allow readers to ask Yvonne questions directly — it will be up to Yvonne whether to take the opportunity to respond.
Her website is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Alliance_Environment_Voters_Party_of_Canada
Moderators will review the questions to ensure they are really questions and not simply an attempt to promote another candidate/party in the guise of a question. Anonymous comments will face a higher standard 🙂
Aurora Citizen 
George Gonsalves said
I wonder what your and your party’s position on abortion is.
Robert the Bruce said
Hasn’t this been handled by the SCoC already?
Fuimus
George Gonsalves said
As I understand it, there is no existing legislation on abortion and the control of them, after the Supreme Court decision. The matter still needs to be dealt with and no party has the courage to do so. My point in asking this question, to which I have not had an answer, is the “party’s” stand on animal rights. I know they are against the killing of baby seals and I wonder whether this extends to the killing of human babies.
Anonymous said
Are the baby seals aborted?
Tim the Enchanter said
George
None of the parties are addressing the abortion issue because Canadians by and large don’t consider it an issue. That doesn’t mean abortion itself is trivial but politically it’s a no-go zone, especially during an election.
Most Liberals and the NDP are pro-choice. Some Conservatives might be itching to open the debate but Harper has already declared it’s not on the table.
There’s been rumblings in the past about banning late-term (third trimester) abortions and I wouldn’t be surprised that if the Cons ever got a majority they might try that on as a sop to the far-right but according to the stats I’ve seen , the instances of late-term abortion is so statistically small banning it would be akin to Aurora passing a by-law prohibiting the use of nuclear weapons in public parks. ie; a meaningless make-work project for lawyers and bureaucrats. In any event, late-term abortions are most often due to medical necessity anyway.
I pulled some stats off the internet.
“Among provinces, British Columbia and Quebec have the highest percentage who are pro-choice, and the Prairies have the highest percentage who are pro-life.”
“In a June 2008 Angus Reid Strategies poll, almost half of respondents (46%) believe abortion should be permitted in all cases.”
“Roughly one-in-five Canadians (19%) would subject abortion to greater restrictions than now, 22 percent would allow the procedure only in cases such as rape, incest and to save the woman’s life, and seven percent would only permit abortion to save the woman’s life.”
“In addition, half of Canadians (49%) believe abortion should be legal under any circumstances. Conversely, 42 per cent of respondents want the procedure to be legal only under certain circumstances, while five per cent would outlaw abortion altogether. Younger, wealthier, and university-educated respondents are more likely to uphold the legality of abortion.”
“In a March 2010 EKOS poll, a majority of Canadians (52%) describe themselves as pro-choice while just over one in four (27%) describe themselves as pro-life. One in ten respondents (10%) describe themselves as neither pro-choice nor pro-life and 11% did not respond.”
In my opinion, making abortion illegal will not end abortion but will just turn back the clock to when rich girls ‘took a trip’ and poor girls visited someone in a back alley on the wrong side of town.
In today’s information age there are few if any secrets.
Perhaps I’m being cynical but I bet there are at least two career-suicide nightmares that frighten the bejeezlies out of even the most zealous anti-abortion politician.
The one where a no-name backbencher stands in the House waving proof of why the Honourable-member-opposite’s daughter was REALLY in that Swiss clinic. You could cry about violation of privacy but no-one would be listening.
or
The one where the distraught parents appear on TV and tell the story of how their daughter bled to death because of some back-alley butcher. You could offer condolences and mumble something about how “she had other options” but no-one would be listening.
The abortion debate brings up all kinds of medical, legal, ethical and religious questions but most of us – including our politicians – seem to be quite satisfied to leave it as a personal choice for a woman to make.