Honourable senators, I rise today to continue to speak to Bill C-337, the judicial accountability through sexual assault law training bill.

I began my speech last week by stating my support for the bill's goal of responding to the criminal justice's system's shameful failure to address violence against women and children, particularly those who have been sexually assaulted.

On the topic of Bill C-337's proposed mandatory sexual assault training for those applying for judgeships, I spoke about Angela Cardinal, a homeless and marginalized indigenous complainant in a sexual assault case, whom a judge ordered to be jailed alongside her attacker and as though she was also the accused, over five nights while she was giving testimony.

The judicial treatment of Ms. Cardinal reminds us that dynamics of misogyny targeted by sexual assault training as contributing to violence against women are also tangled up in dynamics of racism, colonialism, impoverishment and class biases.

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During committee hearings in the other place, the Native Women's Association of Canada highlighted the effects of intersectionality that have made indigenous women like Ms. Cardinal three times more likely to experience sexual assault during their lifetimes than non-indigenous women in Canada.

This statistic was confirmed last week in Statistics Canada's new study on women in the criminal justice system. The Native Women's Association of Canada links decisions and comments made by judicial officials, and others for that matter, in sexual assault cases to the perpetuation of racism, sexism and a message that indigenous women's lives are not valued, as well as the pandemic of violence that has given rise to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

The connection between indigenous women's experiences within the justice system and the ongoing effects of colonialism invoked by NWAC has been expounded by Professor Dalee Sambo Dorough, an expert in international and indigenous human rights. In her essay entitled, "Indigenous Peoples' Rights to Self-Determination and Other Rights Related to Access to Justice: the Normative Framework," Professor Dorough quotes the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women's definition of access to justice as including not only "removing legal and financial barriers" but also social barriers such as "intimidation by the law and legal institutions."

Professor Dorough's work encourages us to see, in the harmful stereotypes that indigenous women in particular encounter in the justice system, a dimension of continued colonialism and a denial of rights by denying the status of indigenous women as rights claimants.

In recognition of NWAC's testimony and that of other witnesses, the committee in the other place added to Bill C-337 a requirement for social context, as well as sexual assault training. I applaud this step to raise awareness of dynamics of intersectionality in the context of sexual assault and would encourage further consideration of these new provisions to ensure that they are effective and that they account for how political context and inequality also contribute to the ongoing denial of women's, particularly indigenous women's, legal rights.

Bill C-337's judicial training measures stem from judges' treatment of women and the need to address and challenge misogynist myths. The cases exemplifying the need for such measures continue even more recently than Robin Camp's 2014 comments with respect to such indigenous women as Angela Cardinal and others who have faced impoverishment, homelessness and their own indigeneity.

Bill C-337 also addresses a second set of myths surrounding the presumption that the ability of judges to assess credibility and reliability to do justice for those who have been sexually assaulted is supposed to come naturally, without any training. Professor Elaine Craig drew attention, in her testimony before committee in the other place, to the fact that regardless of the independence of the mechanism that is used to appoint judges, we are still working from a small pool of very privileged individuals. The task of understanding the experience of another and interrogating our own assumptions about gender, race and class is one with which many of us struggle on a daily basis, and that can also be no easier for judges, even in their increasingly relative diversity, to address. As too many cases reveal, the prerequisite for serving as a judge — 10 years of service as a lawyer practising in any field of law — will not necessarily impart these skills.

Bill C-337 proposes mandatory sexual assault and related context training, and it's geared toward ensuring that judges live up to the high standard imposed on them by virtue of their position as gatekeepers of the justice system.

In addition to requiring sexual assault training for judges, the second goal of Bill C-337 is to increase transparency and accountability by requiring that decisions in all sexual assault cases heard by a judge without a jury be written or recorded in order to bring to light those cases where outcomes have been skewed by sexist and other discriminatory assumptions or stereotypes. The recent examples of highly publicized cases of discriminatory and problematic conduct or reasoning by judges in sexual assault cases include questioning why a woman would not simply "keep her knees together," asserting that "drunks can consent" and jailing women to force them to testify in unsupportive and re-victimizing contexts. These known cases highlight the ease with which misogynist and often racist statements, completely at odds with the experiences of women victims of violence, can go unchecked in our criminal justice system. The reality is that too many women have been virtually normalized to accept, to an outrageous extent, such that, for too many, it really exemplifies the blindfolded iconic symbol of justice, a symbol of our legal system, which becomes a system unable to see the consequences of how it treats those who are victimized, particularly those marginalized by race, sex, impoverishment and, increasingly, disability.

Discounting cases that have received media attention as being abnormal or isolated incidents obscures the extent to which misogyny is normative and systemic, an everyday occurrence in courtrooms across our country. The cases that have received publicity are simply ones that we are able to learn about usually because of someone's research or a reporter happening to be a witness and report on the case after the court case has finished.

Bill C-337 thus requires the recording of judgments as but one step forward, illuminating the full extent of this problem and ensuring greater accountability of judges and, presumably, others in the system and the need for protections for those who have been sexually assaulted. In order to be as effective as possible, however, these requirements aimed at greater transparency must be supported by other measures. Witnesses at committee in the other place notably emphasized the need for adequate resources to support the increased cost and time required to render written decisions.

Another recommendation was to ensure that the resulting written decisions be published in a way that ensures accessibility for researchers and members of the public. In particular, given that the role that researchers such as Professors Elizabeth Sheehy and Elaine Craig have played in studying, exposing and increasing public knowledge of such cases as the Robin Camp case, consideration must be given to directing resources toward regular collection of data by experts in order to permit the study and further the education of all system actors as a whole in order to move beyond the current piecemeal awareness of the problem.

I close by reiterating my support for Bill C-337's goal of making the criminal justice system, and particularly its participants, more aware and respectful of women's realities regarding their often lifelong experiences of marginalization and discrimination.

I hope that we can work together to make Bill C-337 as effective as possible and to offer the beginnings of a long overdue response to the violence against women and children that is all too often condoned by our justice system.