Honourable senators, a special thanks to my colleagues across the aisle the Canadian Senators Group for giving me this time.

This week, senators were introduced to the executive staff of LEAF, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund. I am a “LEAF mother,” a co-founder of LEAF, which was launched on Equality Day, April 17, 1985, the first day when the moratorium on Charter equality rights entrenched in our Constitution was lifted. Retired senator Nancy Ruth is also a “LEAF mother.” Honourable colleagues, I recall how we anticipated that the strategic litigation initiated by LEAF would not be necessary in about 20 years. That was almost 40 years ago.

LEAF was on Parliament Hill this week to launch a new report authored by esteemed legal scholar Dr. Amanda Dale entitled What It Takes: Establishing a Gender-Based Violence Accountability Mechanism in Canada, which examines Canada’s gender-based violence epidemic, Canada’s obligations to solve the crisis and recommends the naming of a gender-based violence commissioner with the independence, powers and persuasive role necessary to create systemic change in government and in community, which is consistent with Canada’s new National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence, or GBV.

In other words, this would be an independent, federal accountability mechanism to amplify effective countermeasures to the epidemic of gender-based violence in our country built on recommendation V.17 of the final report of the Mass Casualty Commission, or MCC, to the Governors in Council of Nova Scotia and Canada, in which the MCC detailed events that gave rise to the deaths of 22 people, one of whom was expecting a child, in Nova Scotia in 2020.

The MCC found that at the heart of this public violence lay a link hiding in plain sight: gender-based violence. GBV occurs along a continuum of words and deeds.

Honourable colleagues, many of you, along with some members in the other place, have signed the parliamentary civility pledge launched by the Canadian Association of Feminist Parliamentarians in June. My office is regularly receiving more signed pledges.

On November 19, the AGM of this association will be held to continue this campaign to reduce forms of violence in our parliamentary work environment, in part because we are convinced that the public does not want to spend its money on such bad behaviour. There are 74 members so far: 56 MPs and 18 senators. I encourage all of you who are not among the 18 to increase this number. Thank you. Meegwetch.