Honourable senators, I speak today to Bill S-242. I want to begin by thanking you, Senator Manning, for your commitment to advancing this bill for the purpose of trying to address the longest-standing and ongoing pandemic in Canada, violence against women.

I also want to thank our sisters, friends, colleagues and too many billions of women whose experiences must directly inform our understanding of the urgent and persistent need to act. Our endless love, gratitude and respect go to too many women and girls, including Georgina McGrath, who have demonstrated their incredible courage and strength in sharing their experiences and insisting that we all shed light on the shamefully pervasive, yet too often hidden, terror visited and blamed on the women who are most victimized. These realities disproportionately lived by First Nations, Métis and Inuit women are the horrific backdrop to this legislation.

For decades, many of us have spoken about and worked on issues of violence against women and girls, and the obvious question is this: When will we actually commit to ending it?

On Saturday, we marked the thirty-sixth anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre. I remember holding my then one‑month-old infant son Michael on the first anniversary as I read news coverage of some of my friends being attacked for having the audacity to call the deaths of the 14 young engineering students femicides.

Most everyone called it the act of one rogue young man. Most women immediately recognized it as a horrific but logical extension of male-centric laws, policies and practices. As I hugged my son, I promised him I would do all I could to raise him as a kind, loving, compassionate and caring man who could hopefully withstand the inevitable social pressures to conform.

I am proud that my now 35-year-old, 6-foot 3-inch, former rugby and football player Michael is a kind, compassionate grandson who helps care for his 91-year-old grandfather, and is a young man who shares all he has with others, who sends gifts and travels across the country to visit those who have loved and mentored him — from our former colleague Mizhana Giizhik‑iban, to Lee, who opened her home as one of the first shelters for women fleeing violence, to Tona, whom he first met in segregation at the Prison for Women when he went with me, often as Santa’s elf.

Thirty-six years later, no one questions the nature of the December 6 attacks. We go to extraordinary efforts to demonstrate our knowledge and understanding. We wear ribbons. We attend events.

But let’s remember a similar response just five years ago. Initially, many called the incidents that gave rise to the Mass Casualty Commission the acts of one rogue, evil man. Many women across the country knew differently, however, recognizing that the White man of relative privilege, whose abusive behaviour was condoned, facilitated and excused for years, was not as anomalous as we would like to think. In fact, most mass murderers were first known to have abused their power and to have engaged in, not one, but many, acts of intimate partner violence.

We must meaningfully address the realities and circumstances that contribute to the disturbingly unabated rates of violence against women and seemingly emboldened instances of sexual assault and femicide.

As you heard from Senator Manning, yesterday was international Human Rights Day. Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms entitles each of us to equality rights as well as to life, liberty and security of the person, although leaving growing numbers of people without adequate resources and safe shelter continues to undermine these rights for far too many. Any framework aimed at addressing violence against women must include mechanisms to ensure the government recognizes and upholds positive obligations to address poverty and homelessness. Calls for guaranteed livable income in Canada as a means of preventing violence and ensuring equality now span more than five decades, from the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women to the 1993 National Action Committee on the Status of Women’s 99 Federal Steps to End Violence Against Women, to the 2019 Calls for Justice of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

As the Federal Ombudsperson for Victims of Crime concludes: “There’s a whole science of crime prevention that would align well with the principles of guaranteed livable income . . . .”

I am heartened to see governments beginning to consult about guaranteed livable income for women escaping violence. I know that for too many who stayed in abusive relationships or who fled violence only to be forced onto the streets, the possibility of some greater economic security provides some hope.

This holiday season, as we reflect on the year and reach out to those around us, I find myself revisiting current realities versus what could be — the lives that could be saved, the people who could be supported, the travesties that could be averted — if we ensured that everyone had food, shelter, health care and access to opportunities to choose what they need. I am haunted by what we will continue to risk if we persist in failing to dismantle the deep‑rooted colonial and misogynistic inequalities that perpetrate and perpetuate violence against women.

We know that when we do not care or intervene to protect women and children from violence, we effectively deputize them. When the state does not respond and act when they call for help, we send the message that it is their responsibility to protect themselves from violence. This is exponentially true for poor, racialized — especially Indigenous and Black women — and disabled women. When they are not able to protect themselves, fault and shame too often is heaped upon them.

Women are now the majority in this chamber. We know the drill. We were raised to be careful about what we wear, where we go, whom we’re with. Worse yet, when we are attacked, we face interrogations such as “Are you sure you didn’t lead them on?” “Why did you wear that?” “Were you drinking?” “Why did you stay?” “Surely you could have escaped if you had really wanted to.” “Did you fight?”

We hear it from parents and teachers, colleagues and employers, police, prosecutors, judges and jailers, even those who are supposed to be supporting and defending us. Perversely, some of the greatest condemnations can come from those with platforms, power and the ability to change things.

As the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls laid out so clearly, it is too often those failed by other systems who are most directly deputized to protect themselves by state inaction on their behalf, yet, when they do act to protect themselves or others in their care, state inertia melts into near-immediate action and reaction, and the full weight of the criminal law is often brought to bear.

The Indigenous women whose stories I share today have too often been failed by everyone in the criminal legal system, even their own lawyers. They start as victims, but their experiences as victims and survivors are systematically overshadowed as Canada’s failure to protect and support them gets recast as their own fault, and state actors work to criminalize them.

Indeed, as the technical briefing on Bill C-16 revealed this week, that this proposed legislative response to violence against women and intimate partner violence will not alleviate these concerns. It relies on the same criminal law-based responses that have not protected women in the past and, horrifically, will further entrench current inequalities, inequities and injustices.

Carol Daniels died of cancer in 2022 without ever seeing justice. She was a First Nations survivor of childhood sexual abuse and had carried what happened with her for years without ever speaking about it. No one protected her.

She was a teenager with nowhere to go, when a young woman invited her to join her partying. Carol soon realized the woman was in fact procuring her for sexual exploitation by a man whose home was full of videos and photos of young Indigenous women whom he had raped and assaulted, and there was a video camera set up in front of his bed. Carol said some of the women looked like they were dead.

Fearing she would be next, Carol decided to flee. When the two — the man and the woman — tried to stop her, Carol grabbed a knife from the kitchen and fought to escape. The woman was wounded and later bled to death, and the man called the police.

Carol was charged. She did not disclose to lawyers that she was acting in self-defence. She was ashamed of the childhood trauma that she had experienced and blamed herself for being in that situation in the first place. She felt “naive” for being ensnared by someone looking to yet again prey upon her.

Her lawyers failed to inquire and consequently failed to adequately defend her or to contextualize how Carol’s experiences of racism, sexism and violence affected her actions in trying to defend herself and other young women from further predation.

Carol was convicted of second-degree murder. She was sentenced to a mandatory minimum penalty of life imprisonment with no parole eligibility for 10 years. Her lawyers appealed, but again did not raise the question of whether Carol should have even been considered criminally responsible for trying to escape her predators. Instead, counsel focused only on whether being transferred across the country to the Prison for Women in Kingston — at the time, the only federal prison for women and the site of suicides of six Indigenous women — would violate her Charter rights. As a result, in addition to her wrongful conviction, Carol was sent, at the outset, to serve her sentence in solitary confinement in the Saskatchewan Penitentiary for men.

Carol spent nearly three decades in federal prison. By the time she was released on parole, she did not have long to live. She remained under constant surveillance by parole officers in her final months, her every action scrutinized and at risk of being used to justify throwing her back in prison.

I have worked and walked with so many survivors trying to find the pathways, supports and connections they need in order to integrate into and contribute to their communities.

I have watched Canada instead waste hundreds of thousands of dollars per person per year on cages, cells and isolation for victims of violence whom we failed to support. It didn’t have to be this way. So much could have been different for Carol and so many others.

Tona’s story is well known in this chamber. One year ago yesterday, on International Human Rights Day, we voted to pass “Tona’s Law” and sent it to the other place. The bill is currently being studied again by the Legal Committee and will hopefully soon be returned to the House in this new Parliament. Meanwhile, Tona continues to advocate tirelessly for these measures, despite her terminal cancer diagnosis and her current state in palliative care.

As she continues on borrowed time but in ever more progressive decline, her hope is to ensure, before she dies, that not a single human being will ever again suffer the types of abuses and isolation that she did in prison.

How did Tona ever end up labelled as dangerous? How did a young survivor of the Sixties Scoop, forced to break into buildings to escape sexual abuse, end up alone in a segregation cell, chained to the floor of the Prison for Women in Kingston? How did police, when Tona was found sheltering in a school to hide from abuse, end up charging her with breaking and entering instead of offering support and protection to a victim of assault?

What would they have done if they were her, a teenager who had gone in search of her birth parents and ended up with no resources, no one to turn to for help and nowhere to go? What would you have done? What would I have done?

How did prison staff not realize the impact of strip searches on a survivor of abuse? What other approaches did they try before responding to her resistance with ever harsher and more cruel solitary confinement, until the harms became irreparable — isolation-induced schizophrenia? How did they come to minimize, in her records, the abuse and the violence that she lived, calling it a “sexual relationship” with her birth father rather than the incestuous rape that it was? How can we call what happened to Tona anything but layers of injustices and miscarriages of justice?

The conditions that she experienced in prison have cost Tona her health, and they will cost her, her life. In the meantime, she keeps going, seeking, through “Tona’s Law,” to uphold the rights of others and to ensure that they have access to the community and health supports that she was denied and that would have and could have made all the difference for her.

S.P., a woman we often referred to as just “S,” has demonstrated the life-changing impact of such community-based supports. S was a survivor of physical, sexual and psychological abuse — first for a decade at residential school and then by her husband. She was also once Canada’s longest-serving woman prisoner. The legal system not only failed to protect her but also obscured her victimization. She was sent to prison as an accessory to her husband’s drug dealing without any inquiry into the abuse she experienced and the impact of this violence on her actions.

While in prison on a shorter sentence, S pleaded guilty to the murder of a prisoner whom she considered a sister. Everyone at the Prison for Women, staff and prisoners alike, were clear that the woman had died by suicide. Yet no one, including S’s own lawyer and a judge, prevented S from pleading guilty. She was sentenced to life in prison.

S pleaded guilty years after her friend’s death and long after the inquest and all investigations had ceased. The judge in her case appeared to acknowledge she would never have been charged had she not come forward and claimed responsibility. The plea was linked to her intense feelings of personal responsibility for her friend and was accepted by the judge despite glaring inconsistencies in her so-called confession. The legal system not only appeared unconcerned with the true circumstances of how an Indigenous woman died in a federal prison; it did not hesitate to inflict lifelong punishment, without evidence, on another Indigenous woman.

Three decades later, writing the Naslund decision about another woman with a history of abuse who pleaded guilty to homicide despite having a defence, Justice Sheila Greckol of the Court of Appeal of Alberta reminded us how very little has changed when she said:

. . . a woman subjected to . . . years of egregious abuse may be accustomed to seeing herself as worthy only of harsh punishment. That does not mean the justice system should follow suit.

For S, this baseless conviction was entered into her record and subsequently used by the prison system to label her as “violent” and justify segregation and other harsh conditions. As a result of this label, S had limited opportunities to work toward release and build community ties. She served not only 10 years of mandatory parole ineligibility but also a further nearly three decades of prison time.

By 2020, S’s health had deteriorated after decades in prison, including significant amounts of time in solitary confinement. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, authorities were eager to move her somewhere where she could receive long-term care, yet they characterized her as such a significant risk that not a single institutional or community setting would agree to house her.

I cannot describe how devastating and enraging it was to watch another woman, whom I had spent decades walking alongside, losing touch with reality and physically deteriorating.

After years of legal and administrative battles, S was finally released to the only people who wanted her — her sister and nieces and nephews. Within months, surrounded by love, care and support, S’s health — physical and mental — miraculously transformed. Corrections and community staff alike marvelled, and one officer said to me recently, “Whenever I see her now in the community, she is smiling and happy. We hardly ever saw her smile inside.”

I visited and had dinner with S recently. Five years on, S is thriving in the community and contributing to her family.

I couldn’t help but imagine what it could have meant if she had had access to such supports from the start. It is a travesty that S had to wait so long. It is worse yet to see how re-characterizing women like S as violent, instead of as survivors of violence, has all too often helped excuse and ignore the ways that Canada is leaving behind those most in need of support.

L.N., known as “L,” was once called the “most dangerous woman in Canada.” In reality, she is a First Nations woman, another member of the stolen generation. By the time she was 12, L had been raped and prostituted. When she anaesthetized herself to those realities by drinking, child welfare authorities intervened. When she resisted state intervention, police were called.

L was punished over and over for responses to the violence to which she was subjected first outside and then within prisons and other institutions. She was charged with assaulting child care workers and police when she tried to stop those who stripped and restrained her. When she — correctly, as it turned out — identified a prison psychologist as a sexual predator, she ended up barred from treatment and then segregated for allegedly threatening him by making those allegations.

Barely an adult, at 21 years old, she ended up labelled a “dangerous offender” based on things she said, rather than anything that she did. It took six and a half years to overturn that designation. In 2026, at age 53, it will be 27 years since she was finally released from prison. Ten years in custody, many years of solitary confinement, 20 shock treatments, countless suicide attempts and hundreds of incidents of self-injury have left their irreparable physical and psychological scars. Yet, L has survived. She has spent a quarter of a century volunteering in her community, providing young people with the support, mentorship and advocacy necessary to prevent repeated and horrific violence at the hands of individuals and the state.

I share these few stories not because they are outliers or exceptions but rather to underscore these women’s shared lived realities. Nearly all — at least 9 in 10 — women in federal prisons are victims and survivors of physical and sexual abuse.

Past tough-on-crime approaches have not kept women safe. Worse yet, they have punished and criminalized those most in need of support. As the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls clearly revealed, the same issues and circumstances that give rise to Indigenous women and girls being victimized, disappeared, murdered and homeless also render them more likely to be criminalized and imprisoned.

The government has stated its commitment to addressing intimate partner violence. Bill S-242 is important because it provides the opportunity for strategies that move beyond simplistic, criminal law-based responses to violence against women and the possibility for meaningful measures to uphold substantive equality and redress the root causes of misogyny, racism and colonial violence.

Last week, I was honoured and humbled to vote along with you, honourable colleagues, in support of one such step. As highlighted by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, the Senate’s amended version of Bill S-2 can help to redress the long-standing Charter violations that have put First Nations women and children at particular risk of violence by forcibly separating them from their communities of support.

There are many more such steps before us to unravel the layers of systemic inequalities underlying violence against women, particularly Indigenous, Black, gender-diverse and disabled women. I hope and trust that we will have the courage to take them together.

At a time when it seems that misogyny has been emboldened in nearly every public space, I want to highlight the importance of the men in this chamber, the other place and beyond using their platforms and privilege to step up, redouble efforts and model the behaviour needed from our leaders and role models in order to uphold equality for all.

Let us be clear: Perpetrators of intimate partner violence and abuse against women are not social outliers; rather, they are examples of an all-too-frequent outcome of the patriarchal and misogynistic social norms and structures in which we are raised — structures that focus on exerting privilege and authorizing dominance over women, both of which enable abuse without consequence.

When I think about how, through the framework for government accountability provided by Bill S-242, Canada might effectively redress violence against women, I recall a day several decades ago. I volunteered with women’s groups and youth escaping violence, while my paid work was with the John Howard Society.

Given my work with victimized women and children, I had some preconceived notions and biases against those who perpetrated such violence. I decided I must face my biases and undertook to work with men in prison convicted of abuse. I wanted to understand who they were and why men committed violence. I knew too many who acted with impunity and virtual immunity.

Working with those who were convicted confirmed that they were primarily men marginalized by poverty, race, disability and also too often because of their own previous experiences of violence. That didn’t excuse their behaviour, but Canada’s system was and is holding to account those easiest to “catch” and call out, while failing to change the systemic inequalities that underlie women’s victimization and too often cover and condone violence inflicted by those who are more powerful and privileged.

Many of the men I met in prisons were doing incredible work toward taking responsibility, contributing positively to community and facing realities such as the fact that they may have been victimized but that in no way excused their own behaviour in their victimization of others.

I left the work that I was doing with them, however, because the men working in the prisons as well as co-workers reinforced rather than challenged the very discriminatory, racist and sexist attitudes toward women. It was not just demoralizing; it was debilitating. It meant men doing the work to address their behaviours were now at heightened risk of being victimized themselves, both by other prisoners and those tasked with controlling their care and custody.

I’m still haunted by the response of one man to our efforts to assist him and others to take responsibility, to learn and to grow. One day, he asked me where and how, if not in the existing prison system, I would ensure that he was held accountable and rehabilitated and, for that matter, what I’d do with the other men. I said that while they might not experience it as freedom — and I was prepared to live with my own hypocrisy — I thought if we could assign 10 to 20 good men to live with them and model caring, kind, compassionate, women-positive and equity-promoting behaviour, then I would be prepared to live with that until such time as those men might vouch for their behaviour and then they might be free. His response: “Where would you find those guys, Kim?”

My hope for this bill is that it will help us to meaningfully answer him, Georgina, Tona and so many others.

Thank you, Senator Manning. Thank you, Georgina. Thank you to all whom I have had the privilege of knowing and who have informed my thinking, my knowledge and my nightmares.

Meegwetch. Thank you.