Thank you very much. It is a pleasure and honour to be with all of you again today.

As I have stated before in this committee, our organization’s statement of purpose is to work to address the persistent ways that criminalized women and gender-diverse people impacted by this criminalization are denied humanity and excluded from consideration of community.

We understand the instinct to want to address the harm that happens in our communities because we share this instinct. However, our organizations respond every day to the negative and unintended consequences of the laws that are written by well-intended people who are far removed from the lived realities of the people whom we work alongside. Unequivocally, we emphasize that Bill C-48 will not meet its aim to prevent more harm from happening, and it will not produce safer communities for all.

We hope you all had a chance to review our brief that was jointly submitted with the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund, or LEAF, the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic and Luke’s Place. We agree with and underscore the comments made by our colleagues before this committee.

Today, we want to underscore one of the two proposed amendments to the legislation contained within our brief, which is the removal of the proposed amendment to section 515(6)(b.1) of the Criminal Code, which deals with the reverse onus provision for intimate partner violence. We will use our time today to contextualize and humanize the importance of this amendment within a broader call to abandon this legislation entirely.

First, we will bring examples of the real crisis related to the bail system, particularly focusing on how this provision will continue to criminalize and harm survivors of intimate partner violence, and then how this will feed into a culture of wrongful convictions, which produces “offenders” from marginalized communities.

You’ve all heard from many of the witnesses here that the provincial and territorial jails across the country are filled with people who have not been able to access justice and are still awaiting trials. In the Prairies, we see that the majority of the women and gender diverse people there are Indigenous.

The present conditions of confinement in these jails are so deplorable that even those of us who routinely go in there are quite disgusted. The advocates in our network have witnessed people placed in cells covered in feces. Without access to water, one woman resorted to drinking the water from her toilet. Other women we spoke with have been placed two to three in a small cell and were not allowed out of that cell even to wash themselves for over two weeks.

You have heard from others that people are dying in alarming numbers in pretrial detention. We should all become familiar with and shocked by the findings of the December 2022 report on deaths in custody in Ontario, which highlighted that being on remand increases a person’s risk of death.

As well, of course, people in pretrial detention for what some of you may consider even a short period of time still lose their employment and their housing and, in the case of the many parents we work with, lose custody of their children. The ripple effect, then, on families of those in pretrial detention is immeasurable.

I will speak now in the words of one woman named Jessica, which is a pseudonym, who said, “Remand time is like death. There is no access to programs, no mental health supports and almost no health care. I spent 96 days waiting for justice and, in the end, they withdrew the charges and let me out. But by the time I got out, I had lost my apartment because I couldn’t pay rent. All my belongings were thrown away, and my beautiful cats were taken. I came out with my disability support cut off, nowhere to live and no access to my lifesaving medication. My life was ruined. And for what?”

Many of the people we work with who are criminalized are victims or survivors of intimate partner violence as well. In the work that we do, we know that the laws of domestic violence are often weaponized against people who experience domestic violence. Elizabeth Fry Societies work with the people who are then referred to what some of the provinces have, which are domestic violence courts. In these domestic violence courts, they require people to do the work that they have prescribed with the intention that they will then receive a discharge. These are the people who would be caught up in the revolving door of criminalization should Bill C-48 pass as it is written.

Why do we spend all of this time detailing the horrific conditions in pretrial detention? Champions of this legislation believe it is targeted and will only impact people who are posing a real risk by imposing reverse onus on “violent repeat offenders.” That sounds like a scary term, “violent repeat offender,” but factually, people in Canada receive initial conviction and become people —

[Translation]

In conclusion, these people are thereafter referred to as offenders in the first place upon shaky ground.

I hope that in the questions I can speak to you about Professor Kent Roach’s recently published book entitled Wrongfully Convicted because there is a causal link between the conditions —

[Translation]

I agree. May I also answer that?

It may surprise you to learn that there are only three or four bail beds for women in the entire city of Toronto and those bail beds are only for Indigenous women. There are no bail beds in northern Alberta, and there are no bail beds in Nova Scotia for women.

The conclusion that Catherine is bringing us to is that we need more resources in the community. People are often released on bail to homelessness. As a result, they are often put into situations where they are breached and do go back. This is the revolving door that we are already talking about. If we really want to address the systemic failures, we need to resource our communities.

We understand that this all comes back to the same well-intended legislative reform that Bill C-48 is premised on, which is that we want to protect people. We want to protect vulnerable people. The people we work with are some of the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our society. Unfortunately, they are frequently subject to dual charges. People come to their houses. They can’t determine or bias exists in the police officers who arrive, and they end up laying dual charges. Both parents are then caught up in the legal system. The repercussions from that are far-reaching, particularly if there are children involved. It is one of those nuanced aspects of the law that we really need to be talking about.

I so appreciate you providing me the time to talk about Wrongfully Convicted by Kent Roach. His first chapter is titled “False Guilty Pleas.” It details very clearly the causal link between pretrial detention conditions, our already onerous bail system, which has been discussed ad nauseam here in committee, and innocent people then pleading guilty, which is a very real present social problem that Bill C-48 will exacerbate.

The majority of Canada’s discovered guilty plea wrongful convictions, he writes, involve women, Indigenous and racialized people or those living with mental health issues.

We look at the fundamental right to presumption of innocence, and related to that the right to reasonable bail that is enshrined in our Charter. We see that this is a critical foundation that is at risk with this particular piece of legislation. He actually has quite a few examples of how this has happened to specific people, but I won’t go into that.

I will answer your second question. The data is probably found within the provincial systems because intimate partner violence and the domestic violence courts that I spoke about earlier in my remarks are provincial courts. I was speaking to someone just last night in preparation for my comments who said to me just yesterday one of the people they work with was charged with intimate partner violence because she was in an argument with her partner and she had their child’s toy with her and she ended up smacking him on the leg, unintentionally. Someone was filming that, and he called the police. Now she has a domestic violence charge. That is not unusual. This is not a one-time thing. You heard from Michael Spratt yesterday that he encounters that in his work every day, so when I say frequently, this is a frequent occurrence in the work that we do.

Just recently, the government tabled a bill, and it has become law, and it’s the federal framework to reduce recidivism. Much discussion was put into what elements reduce recidivism in our community, and those are housing, employment, peer supports, mental health supports and resources. All of these seem quite clear to us when we’re discussing recidivism, but I think the discussion could quite easily come way further upstream, which is talking about all of these elements in community before people are criminalized in the first place.

I beseech everyone here to consider the criminalized women and gender-diverse people we work with as worthy of our protection and valued members of our communities.

Is that question for me?

Thank you.

I believe that my colleague Ms. Owens has already brought to the table discussions around existing laws that are purported to support people and prevent people from experiencing domestic violence, and we know that it still doesn’t happen. Our recommendation is to not try to create laws at the back end that continue to criminalize people and harm people that we work with but rather invest at the front end to ensure that people are not experiencing the type of precarious situations that will eventually lead to potentially being criminalized under these domestic violence laws.

For us, we work with women and gender-diverse people, so those are the people that I’m talking about in my remarks.

Certainly we do not in any way in our remarks try to make statements that would say that it’s okay to harm someone. It’s not. Working to prevent harm is what we do every day. We don’t believe that putting in a provision like this reverse onus for intimate partner violence will actually keep the people we work with safe, is what we’re trying to say. Even if it is 80% men who are charged under this provision, it’s still not going to keep people safe.