Calls are growing for a coroner’s inquest to be called into the horrific public murder of a woman in Kelowna last week.
Thirty-two-year-old Bailey McCourt’s estranged husband, James Edward Plover, is accused of viciously attacking McCourt and another woman on July 4, just hours after he was convicted of assault by choking and uttering threats, related to a separate incident in 2024.
Plover is now facing charges of second-degree murder in relation to McCourt’s death and remains in custody.
“This was a highly visible and tragic event, and we recognize the profound impact it has had on many individuals and the community,” said Insp. Chris Goebel at the time.
The BC Conservatives are now among those who are calling for an inquest, as three British Columbian women have been killed in incidents of intimate partner violence in the span of less than a week.
“This man had just been convicted of choking and threatening a woman and was still allowed to walk free. The system failed at every level, and that failure ended in a brutal, preventable murder. This cannot be swept under the rug,” Opposition Critic for Public Safety Elenore Sturko said in a statement.
Although convicted in the morning of the day the fatal assault took place, Plover wasn’t in custody at the time. Angela Marie MacDougall, executive director of the Battered Women’s Support Services, says that in itself, it is an indictment of the justice system.
MacDougall says current public safety mechanisms don’t take intimate partner violence seriously.
“She was not only failed by one person, she was failed by every institution that should have protected her. … at every level, the system failed to not only assess the risk correctly, but take the lethality seriously,” MacDougall said.
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Along with McCourt’s killing, a woman died in a suspected murder-suicide in Abbotsford, and another woman died during a domestic violence call in Surrey just this week.
“We have a situation right now in British Columbia where violence against women is almost decriminalized in the way that the system responds to it, and that women are an afterthought,” she said. “The system is so focused on itself without thinking about the victim’s safety. It’s so focused on its own apparatus without considering the needs of the victim at all.”
Multiple studies show strangulation and choking are risk factors for eventual femicide. One study published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine in 2008 found that “68 per cent of IPV survivors report experiencing strangulation at least once in their relationship.”
MacDougall says we can’t treat McCourt’s death as a tragic surprise.
“It was an absolute, foreseeable outcome of a system that continues to treat violence against women, gender based violence, as private, as minor, and as of no consequence to victims,” she said.
She says the province lacks the political will to properly fight gender based violence, despite an independent report released just a couple of weeks ago that said that kind of violence has become “normalized” in B.C.
“I don’t believe right now the government has a plan, has a clear idea of how it’s even going to address this. And I know for a fact that they’re not even talking about these killings, that they’re continuing on with whatever checklist they need to do,” MacDougall said.
MacDougall says it’s not a “failure of knowledge, it’s a failure of will.”
“We expect that women are just going to suck it up and just expect that this kind of violence will continue and that these offenders can do this with impunity.”
MacDougall says intimate partner violence is a public safety crisis, and is being handled by a ministry with “no mandate” to address it.
“We have no quarterback, we have no plan, and we have, right now,o ur provincial leadership kicking it to the federal government, telling the federal government to take action on this when we know that the province has what it needs to do right now, and isn’t,” she said.
Plover is set to appear in court on Thursday, July 10.
