Forgive and forget?

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair suggests that’s the way for Canadians to go when it comes to killer Karla Homolka.

While most of the country was horrified the woman who aided and abetted Paul Bernardo in the murders of three schoolgirls was volunteering at a Montreal school, Mulcair stunned onlookers in Ottawa.

“Everybody is going to have to take their own stock of that and ensure that first and foremost that the security of their kids is taken care of,” Mulcair said Wednesday.

“Beyond that, it becomes a question of forgiveness.”

Forgiveness?

From who? From the criminal background check people who determine who is and who is not safe to be around children as a coach or school volunteer?

From the parents of raped, tortured and murdered Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy?

Forgiven from any rules? Rules have certainly been bent before for Homolka, now 47.

Even though she was knee-deep in the gruesome crimes against her own sister Tammy, French and Mahaffy, she was able to make a deal with the Crown to testify against her husband in exchange for pleading guilty to two counts of manslaughter where she would receive a 12-year sentence.

It proved to be a mere speed bump for her as she went into prison, got her university degree, and came out of prison to marry her lawyer’s brother and move to a remote southern island before finally coming back to live in a Montreal suburb with her three kids.

Good Christians or people of other religious faiths are certainly entitled to forgive her if they choose to.

But going on school field trips or being around kids when you are known to be involved in one of Canada’s worst-ever crimes against children is not forgivable.

In fact, for those with custodianship of children, it is unforgivable.

But Mulcair tried to make this point in a society already way too lenient on violent offenders.

As reported by the Canadian Press, Mulcair feels Homolka has “paid her debt” and suggests it’s time to leave her alone.

“If you’re ensuring the safety of the kids, beyond our revulsion at the horror of the crime, is there any room for atonement and forgiveness?” Mulcair questioned.

Forgiveness is not the question of the day. What is, is the safety of the kids.

But for those who remember this horrific case well, when it comes to forgiving Homolka for helping lure French into the car or being at home with imprisoned girls, or offering her own sister to her husband for Christmas, there will be no forgiveness.

She did not pay her debt to society.

“I saw those tapes and I saw the look in her eyes when she came out of court years later,” Tim Danson, the French and Mahaffy families’ lawyer, said. “The eyes were the same.”

The veteran lawyer feels she is “still dangerous” and a “psychopath.”

She is not somebody who has fully paid for her crimes and her role in her husband’s crimes, as Mulcair suggests.

Karla Homolka got away with murder. Three times.

Sorry, Mulcair, there is no forgiving that.

jwarmington@postmedia.com