Matt Gurney: Our feminist government, despite warnings, gets mugged by reality

Allies told us vulnerable Canadian women in a conflict zone might get abducted. We didn't believe them. Guess what happened next.

By: Matt Gurney

In recent months, maybe going back over a year, the big debate has been whether Canada is broken. It's draining. The fact that we're debating it at all is not a great sign. It's with an almost perverse sense of relief that I can assure readers that this column isn't about whether or not the country is broken, as in our bureaucratic and political systems are too dysfunctional to tackle the challenges we face today and will face in the future.

No, today we're back onto safer, if still depressing, terrain: whether Canada is just crushingly naïve. 

A somewhat tongue-in-cheek opening aside, the topic before us today is serious and upsetting. In recent weeks, Canada has started the process of returning 19 women and children from prison camps operated by Kurdish forces in areas of Syria once controlled by the Islamic State. These women and children are Canadian citizens. They are being held as suspected relatives of Islamic State terrorists and soldiers. 

These returns of Canadians (or their children) have occurred before. They're always controversial. Of course they are. For all the obvious reasons you might be expecting this column to get into. Let's take a raincheck on that one, though and instead stay laser focused on the specific problem here: of the 19 women and children we were planning to bring back to Canada, 14 made it.

Five vanished.