Top court won't hear repeat abuser's bid
BOWDEN, ALTA. - A man who made headlines in 1989 for trying to stop his girlfriend from having an abortion has failed in an attempt to overturn an order requiring him to tell his parole officer whenever he strikes up a relationship with a woman.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear Jean Guy Tremblay's appeal of a judge's order that was made in 2000.
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Jean Guy Tremblay (file
photo)
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Three justices of the court who had been considering his application dismissed it without awarding him legal costs.
Tremblay is scheduled to get out of the Bowden Institution in Alberta on July 2, when he will have finished serving a five-year sentence for the latest in a series of 14 attacks on women.
Most of them have been romantic partners whom he has threatened, stalked, unlawfully confined or brutally assaulted.
His history of violence goes back to at least 1989, when his then-girlfriend, Quebec woman Chantale Daigle, decided to abort the baby she was carrying rather than bring a child into an abusive relationship.
Enraged, Tremblay won a court injunction to prevent the abortion, in a ruling that fanned the fires of the country's ongoing debate about a woman's right to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy. The Supreme Court eventually overturned the injunction.
Tremblay headed back to Canada's top court to challenge a long-term supervision order that a judge imposed on him in 2000 when the Crown sought to have him declared a dangerous offender.
- FROM MARCH 28, 2004: Violent man won't be named dangerous offender
"A long-term supervision order is really designed to make sure that the individual is a minimal risk to society, as opposed to just being out there unsupervised," said Doug King, a criminologist at Mount Royal College.
The order means that Tremblay will have to live under certain conditions set by the National Parole Board for 10 years after he is released, even though he will have served his full sentence.
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Mike Halko of the National
Parole Board.
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He will have to undergo psychological counselling, he must live in a halfway house in Ottawa for at least 90 days, and he can't contact any of his victims or their families.
But the major condition is that he has to report all relationships with women to his parole supervisor.
"Essentially it requires him [to report] whenever he enters any relationship with an adult woman, whether it's casual or intimate, whatever it might be," said Mike Halko of the National Parole Board.
Critics say that will be virtually impossible to enforce.
"How can a probation officer or anyone else be assured that in fact they will report any relationship they become engaged in?" said Mary Ann Sanderson, who works with a Calgary women's shelter. "It seems quite a nebulous sentence."