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Amy Hamm: Tumbler Ridge inquiry will require bravery from public officials  

Will an inquest be willing to explore, the shooter’s transgender identity?

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British Columbia’s chief coroner announced this week that he will hold an inquest into the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting. Any inquest will be fruitless — and perhaps even counterproductive — if run by persons too afraid to ask politically uncomfortable questions.

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I worry this will be the case — because Canada’s institutions are brimming with people who do whatever our loud, “progressive” minority tells them to do. Regarding Tumbler Ridge, the difficult questions we must ask include what role, if any, gender ideology played in one of Canada’s worst mass shootings.

Amy Hamm: Tumbler Ridge inquiry will require bravery from public officials   Back to video

Coroner Dr. Jatinder Baidwan, in his announcement, said the inquest will “provide an independent and transparent forum to publicly examine the circumstances surrounding the deaths, assess systemic and procedural issues, and make evidence-based recommendations aimed at preventing similar incidents in the future. Importantly, it will involve the participation of the people in British Columbia through a jury of five to seven people.”

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All of Baidwan’s proposals sounds great — so long as those involved are willing to both acknowledge, and then explore, the Tumbler Ridge shooter’s transgender identity. This is not to say that we should immediately assume that gender ideology is singularly, or even partly, responsible for the tragedy in Tumbler Ridge. It is only to say that it will require bravery on behalf of public officials to ask the right questions.

Was the teen shooter, Jesse Van Rootselaar, on cross sex hormones? Other medications? If so, did this contribute to the violence? Did Van Rootselaar have mental health diagnoses that were ignored or undertreated in favour of “gender-affirming care” — which critics, me included, point out is sometimes offered by health-care professionals as a panacea for other mental disorders? (Importantly, can we acknowledge that “gender affirming care” is now a globally-recoginzed medical scandal, even?) Was Van Rootselaar involved in, or radicalized by, online trans communities that focus on perceived oppression or discrimination against transgender-identifying persons? Or, as transwoman Laura Targownik asked in the Post, “Does (gender) dysphoria directly increase propensity to male-coded violence, or is it a background element in a far more complex phenomenon?” 

Not every question will be about the teen killer’s identity, either: we need to know why guns were in the home — returned, even, after being legally confiscated; we also need to know if OpenAI could or should have informed authorities of the teen’s troubling online activity leading up to massacre. In the hours after the shooting, I reported on how Van Rootselaar’s mother, Jennifer Strang, (one of the first victims) had asked for online advice regarding her child’s disturbing behaviour from at least the age of seven. Why couldn’t she get the help she so clearly needed for her child?  

But these questions are all easy to ask. No one is going to go on a professional witch hunt against the persons who ask them. The same cannot be said about those who ask questions regarding gender ideology.  

Everyone in Canada knows, at this point, what happens to persons who dare to challenge or oppose the mainstream gender narrative of the far left. It’s ugly, and hateful. And, should Canada’s “progressives” respond to the difficult-but-critical questions about Tumbler Ridge with their usual vitriol and vengeance, it could mean that B.C. loses its best opportunity at a public reckoning for the horror and devastation that will mark the small community of Tumbler Ridge forever. It could mean that we fail to do justice for all eight of Van Rootselaar’s victims, most of them children.  

As much as the Tumbler Ridge inquiry will depend upon public officials being unafraid to ask the right questions, it will also depend upon a public that is willing to tolerate a collective discomfort — and even outright offence — at facing the truth. We probably are not going to like what we see, but we must not avert our eyes.  

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