I’m just adding to the list of our friends who are here for a very important debate this afternoon: Yamikani Msosa from the Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women—very happy you’re with us today, Yami.

It’s an honour to rise to talk about this subject in this House.

I think you’re going to find when it comes to issues of gender-based violence and intimate partner violence, there’s a lot of agreement in this House. Where we need to focus the mind, I think, is on strategies about what we do.

The good news is that there has been a lot of research published lately on gender-based violence. Where I’m from in Ontario, the Renfrew county inquest that just happened into a serial murderer who wreaked havoc in that community, funded by this government—$150,000, by the way, from this government to support that work, an important investment, and what it has yielded is a significant amount of recommendations for us, to think about how we get in front of this.

It pains me to say this, but when I was a faculty member at Nipissing University in 2005 and I saw the way—particularly men—in a seminar class I taught, that third-year undergraduate students at Nipissing University were treating women in small group activities, and when I saw things in the hallway between staff and students, it disturbed me at a deep level. And I asked myself that question one asks: What is the choice one makes when one is a bystander to these sorts of things? I guess because I come from a position of education and trying to understand how behaviours develop, I always ask the question—I would pull someone aside privately, to give them that respect, and say, “What motivated you to say that to her in that small group conversation—to not just disagree with the point but to belittle the person? What was that about?” Eventually, what I was able to unearth through interactions like that is animosity and anger—I’m not a therapist, but I’m married to one—and when I was able to see that, I was able to try to reach that person and say, “You’ve got a lot of anger, and I’m not sure why it’s manifesting against women colleagues here in this class, but that’s not going to help you succeed in this course. I really encourage you to seek out some of the supports we have here on this campus that are paid for by the public so you can figure out how you get ahead of this, because this is going to become a problem for you in your studies at this university if this pattern repeats itself. That student put up with that in that small group, and she didn’t need to. She had every right to call you out and stand up to you. And if it doesn’t change, I’m going to be approaching her and you so you resolve this matter.”

That’s how I dealt with just one interaction—and we’re talking about low-level, lateral violence, relatively speaking.

But what the government is talking about with this legislation are, in some cases, lethal acts of gender-based violence. And that’s what I want to talk about today in the time I have to speak to this bill.

I want to talk about the first place I went to do post-secondary education. I’m the first person in my family to go to post-secondary education. I went down the 401 and went to Queen’s University in Kingston. I didn’t really know what I was going to study. I just decided I was going to pick the courses and choose my own adventure, figure out where I was going to go. I ended up doing a lot of politics—shock—and a lot of sociology.

Two years before I got there, there was an incident that shaped me even then, as a high school student, known in Ontario history as the Gordon House incident. I think it’s important that I talk about this incident because, certainly, it has informed my approach to gender-based violence and how we help not only survivors but perpetrators.

In 1989, in October, Queen’s University ran something—it’s very common; I think I just heard the member from Etobicoke–Lakeshore talk about it—a “no means no” campaign. It was meant to just put it to students—as the member for Toronto Centre said several times, with legislation that they’re bringing forward—a consent-based culture for intimacy on campus. The reaction at Gordon House, which is one of the residences at Queen’s University, from some folks, particularly men in that dorm room, was to hang banners outside the window reading things—I’m just going to pause for a second for people watching this, listening to this. If you’ve had experiences of violence in your life or a friend—I’m just going to give you a warning: Some of this stuff is difficult to hear, but I think it needs to be said.

For the campus’s “no means no” campaign, there were some people at Gordon House who hung banners outside their windows that read, “No means tie her up,” “No means more beer,” “No means harder.”

I’m embarrassed to tell you, Speaker, that I was a grade 11 student when these things were happening, and I remember thinking at the time, “Well, there’s going to be an investigation. Something has got to happen. There has got to be a conversation about this.” There was nothing of the kind.

The president of Gordon House went on to say that the incident wasn’t terribly important because, really, what happened was that the incident upset a small minority of feminists and that it shouldn’t be a crime to offend people. That’s what one person said.

The university itself did not convene any restorative justice process to try to understand why people felt the need to hang these banners—what was in their minds, what they were reacting to, how to have a conversation about this. Nothing happened whatsoever.

I showed up there in 1991, as an undergraduate student, and I talked to some of the people who lived through that. I asked them, “What did you do to get the university’s attention?”

Well, my goodness, 50 people—largely women students—did a sit-in at the principal’s office, at David Smith’s office. They demanded funding for a consent-based culture on campus, beyond just some kind of ad-and-pamphlet campaign, so students could understand what a consent-based university culture would look like, what it would mean. They had to get into the local media. They had to speak their piece. There was an acronym for this group of 50 students. I’m not allowed to say one of the words of the acronym, because it’s not parliamentary language, but I think people can figure it out. The group was called ROFF, Radical Obnoxious—F—Feminists. They were people who were fed up with the lack of activity on campus. And what did they demand? They demanded not just consequences for people hanging those banners, because rather like we just heard in the debate, one can have consequences for unacceptable behaviour, and that’s fine, but if there’s no investment in preventive measures—education to help bring along, particularly, men who believe you can objectify someone and you can control someone, and that you can therefore humiliate them with that perceived power you may have—penalties are pointless. You’re always going to be dealing with the outcomes of bad decisions. So those folks at ROFF sat down, and they got the university’s attention.

It was one of the reasons I wanted to go to Queen’s, because I thought, “There’s a community of students who aren’t just going to wait for politics to happen. If they see something that’s not right, they’re going to take politics into their own hands and they’re going to say, ‘This is unacceptable. You’ve got to change it.’”

Something I’m embarrassed to say, as well—embarrassed, disgraced, upset; there are a bunch of words I could use. I talked about the Gordon House incident in October 1989. What is the incident that we are going to be commemorating across this country, as we do every year, on December 6, 1989? The École Polytechnique massacre. And what is the origin of the École Polytechnique massacre? It is a man who believed that his future had been compromised because of a feminist agenda that discriminated against his ability to go into engineering, and the way he was going to resolve it, in his one maniacal moment, was to walk onto a campus with a weapon and murder people.

I would submit to you, Speaker, as we think about this issue of why we need not just a consent-based culture on campus but a consent-based culture in Ontario, and what we do to create it, that these are the bookends of the spectrum. You have flashpoints, when you see an incident where someone felt motivated or inspired to put out hateful speech, threatening, essentially, rape culture on a campus, with zero response until the students at that university rose up and demanded better. And then, on December 6, 1989, you had the lethal incident where somebody took it upon himself to do something that one would want to believe no human being would ever want to do. I want to submit to you that these things are related.

I want to fast-forward to 2021, because my alma mater, Queen’s University, has said since the Gordon House days that they want to resolve this issue, but it’s not resolved. I think that for the administrators at Queen’s—where I used to work at Nipissing University in North Bay and where I also worked at Carleton University—this continues to be a work in progress. Queen’s has run a campaign on its Instagram page called @consentatqueens. You can check it out yourself. What they have found in the course of that work is that more and more students are coming forward to talk about what is happening to them on campus—that things are being put into their drinks; that suggestions are being made to them live in class, in front of everybody else, not even hidden. It was in 2021 that Queen’s authorized, with student participation, this online campaign.

We have a daughter and a son in our home. I have no doubt that our daughter is going to go on to do incredible things. In our place, we joke about her being 14 going on 40; she’s ready already.

But I think about the environment, as the member for Brampton North mentioned, that people are walking into right now. Turning on any one of our devices, as we have to do in this job at any given time, will expose you immediately to issues of objectification of women and implied behaviour about how men are supposed to behave, dominance culture. And there are things we can do to fix that.

I want to suggest there’s a link between this bill, Bill 26, and a private member’s piece of legislation my friend from Orléans put forward in the last session—and I understand he’s putting it forward again. MPP Stephen Blais, the member for Orléans, has asked this government to consider the ability for municipalities to remove city councillors, sitting elected office-holders, when they are independently investigated and proven to be engaged in acts of sexual misconduct that fall short of the Criminal Code. This is what has happened in our city. It’s one of the reasons why the issue of gender-based violence has seized our community.

Former councillor Rick Chiarelli was investigated not once but twice—twice—with 35 women coming forward and detailing some of the most egregious, ridiculous, creepy forms of behaviour you can imagine a political adviser doing in an office. From the time those women consented to go through that process of forming their complaints, do you know what they had to deal with? They had to deal with a mental health crisis themselves, job loss. They paid the economic price for Mr. Chiarelli’s behaviour. They had to deal with the anguish of the hate piling on them on social media for having the courage—the three of them who were public—to speak out publicly. For the 32 others who weren’t speaking out publicly, they carried the weight of that question of “What is going to happen to this gentleman?”

What our whole city saw is that Councillor Chiarelli was able to maintain his seat. The most the city of Ottawa could do, under the Municipal Act, was to deduct his pay.

Folks may have seen it; you may have missed it—at the last sitting of city council for Ottawa, which just happened, the last act of that city council was former councillor Rick Chiarelli standing up to give his farewell speech on Zoom and the entire council meeting that was present in the chamber getting up and walking out. Some people who had served multiple terms as councillors chose that decision; it was better for them to get up and walk out than to give their farewell speech to their residents in the city of Ottawa. That’s how fed up we are back home with Councillor Chiarelli—independently investigated twice, involving at least 35 people, probably more.

MPP Blais is asking the government for its help to work on a reform to the Municipal Act that would say that in independently investigated cases of sexual misconduct, a decision can be made to remove a sitting office-holder, that is subject to judicial review. The person can get the decision judicially reviewed, and if it’s overturned, they get their position back. I would suggest to the member for Brampton North and others promoting this bill that if what you want is a sense of serious consequence, that is exactly, I would think, in keeping with what you’re talking about right now. I would love to see, in this session of this Parliament, this legislation come to pass across all party lines.

We’re talking about campus environments here with this bill—very important. We all know, and I know personally from being a professor, that there is absolutely a power imbalance between the person who gives you your grades, which have a big impact on what you do with the future of your life, on what you actually end up doing in the work world—there’s a lot of power in that person. So the question I have is, what do we then say to that office-holder if we allow for further impunity? If what this bill is intending to do is remove that impunity from people or challenge it, I would encourage the government—because, as I understand it, they haven’t done that yet; the member for Toronto Centre can correct me if I’m wrong—to seek out conversations with people representing faculty and staff in the university and college sector, because those organizations also want to build a consent-based culture in this province. We don’t want to rush a product to fruition that might end up not achieving the objectives you’re trying to see.

Let me end with an anecdote from a leader back home, on gender-based violence. Another sad story that is manifesting itself, I think, in a positive way—Mr. Rafael Ready worked with the diplomatic corps, helping embassies set up all over the world. He lives in the member for Ottawa South’s community, just south of us in Ottawa Centre. In the summer, sadly, you may have heard, it was his family that had the heinous double-murder attempt that involved his wife and one of his two daughters. This was a situation of an offender who had been marked, who had a history of violence, and there wasn’t requisite support to make sure that this family was safe. So what is Mr. Ready committed to do? Well, I happen to know Mr. Ready, because both of the family members he lost are members of the same karate dojo that my son trains at. I knew the two women he lost—wonderful folk. Mr. Ready has decided to take his grief, take his loss and mobilize it in a way to make sure that femicide is actually a part of our Criminal Code and that education about violence and violent behaviours, particularly among young men, is something we deal with immediately.

There’s a program the Ottawa Police Service runs back home called MANifest Change, and it tries to find ambassadors in communities across our city to really encourage positive behaviours. When they see these kinds of controlling, misogynist behaviours, they don’t say, “Okay, you’re a perp, you’re a creep, you’re terrible.” They ask the questions I tried to ask, as a professor, that I began with in my comments this afternoon—“What motivated you to say something like that? What’s going on? Why do you perceive that person to be lesser than you? Would you like your mom or your sister or your aunt or your niece to be treated that way?”—to get through to that person.

Mr. Ready is someone who has strength that I can’t comprehend, because at this moment of intense grief—he was out of the country when this incident happened, setting up yet another one of our diplomatic presences in Latin America. It took him seven days to get back home—seven days—but when he finally got back home and dealt with what he had to deal with, surrounded by the love in that community on Anoka Street, his next calls were to MPP Fraser and to me. He said to both of us, “What have we got to do to reach people, particularly young men? What are we going to do with the mental health crisis in our communities? I don’t want this to happen to any other families.”

So we return to Bill 26 and we return to Gordon House, and I guess we realize, as a chamber, that we really—despite good intent—haven’t moved far enough. We still aren’t funding programs to support survivors. We still aren’t thinking through how we reach perpetrators who are drawn in, however it may happen—violent behaviours towards others, particularly women. We still are thinking, I think, that just having severe consequences is enough. I think it’s important, but I want to submit to you—and I hope I’ve made the case this afternoon—that I don’t think it’s enough.

I think, inside every person, is the potential to change, for the most part. The amount of sociopaths we have in our society—the Paul Bernardos of our society—are a tiny fraction. Most people have the capacity to change; however they’ve been taught to dehumanize other people, they have the capacity to change. We fail ourselves, as a society, I believe, on campus and elsewhere, if we don’t mobilize the resources of this province to help them. The organizations that MPP Andrew knows very well—doing the consultation work that you’ve done, my friend—that are scraping pennies together to support survivors—or whether it’s what MPP Stevens was talking about, with the survival kits. These organizations need to have robust funding. They need to have support because what they can do is prevent Gordon House incidents, prevent École Polytechnique incidents, prevent Councillor Chiarelli-like incidents.

We can build an Ontario, as the member for Brampton North said, where everybody feels safe and everybody feels heard.

I listened to the remarks by the member from Brampton North with interest, and I agree with a lot of what he said.

What I’m about to ask is a serious question; it’s not a gotcha question, it’s not a “playing politics in the chamber” question. We’ve been following the research about gender-based violence really closely in our city, and I like the fact that you’re talking about emphasizing support for survivors. But I also want to ask: What is the plan for perpetrators? People don’t learn to objectify other people and dehumanize other people genetically. These behaviours are somehow taught and reinforced. What is the plan, with this bill, to reach people, particularly men, who take a position of power and abuse that position of power? How do we reach them beyond consequences, no NDAs, threats—what’s the plan for education, particularly now on campus, when so many men are drawn into behaviours that are threatening to women?