During the Women’s March in Edmonton, Alberta, in January of 2017 at the Alberta Legislature grounds, a female reporter was assaulted by male Dion Bews (aka Jason Dion Bews, Dion James Bews or Dion James), described as the owner of an Edmonton-area guitar shop. Bews was determined by an Alberta Judge to have assaulted and battered Ms. Gunn by punching her camera, which in turn struck her face.
The victim was Rebel News reporter Sheila Gunn Reid, and Bews was found guilty of a crime related to this event in a criminal court and ordered to pay damages in a subsequent civil suit.
Rebel News described Bews as an “NDP thug who hit our reporter Sheila Gunn Reid in the face at the women’s march”, and stated the issue is “about taking a stand against violence from Canada’s alt-left” who tried to “violently censor her”.
Bews was later featured in a 2021 CBC/Radio-Canada story (March 2021), which Rebel News described as an “advertorial” about his guitar business under the name Dion James: CBC later claimed that they were aware of his prior involvement in the incident when publishing the feature. In August 2021, Gunn Reid claimed that documents obtained via a Freedom of Information (FOIP) led to the conclusion that she will remember this incident “every time I see CBC lamenting their female journalists getting mean tweets. They gave the guy who assaulted me free publicity… [and] never amended their story to reflect the true facts”. She went on to say that “[B]ut it’s CBC, so they are pretty good at ignoring the facts about men who put their hands on women. Just look at how they treat Justin Trudeau.”
This is presumably in reference to one or more of alleged public allegations against former Liberal PM Justin Trudeau with regards to his questionable treatment of a female journalist and rumors of his involvement with a former student at West Point Grey Academy in Vancouver, BC, which have not been substantiated.
In August of 2000, Trudeau (then 28 and a teacher) attended the Kokanee Summit music festival in Creston, BC: an unsigned editorial in the local newspaper accused him of “groping” and inappropriately handling a female reporter assigned to cover the event. The editorial quoted Trudeau as apologizing the next day, and reportedly saying, “I’m sorry. If I had known you were reporting for a national paper, I never would have been so forward”.
The reporter, Rose Knight, has confirmed that the incident occurred as described in the editorial, and described the interaction as “definitely not welcome and definitely inappropriate”.
