First I think we do have to acknowledge that even in the male population in prison, people of colour and aboriginal men are overrepresented. The institution of racism gets reinforced within the prison system. We do see in our transition house women getting charged. Often a man calls police on a woman, and she is racialized and he is not. He's a white man. She is more likely going to be charged. That is a phenomenon.
The problem is that whenever we neutralize the gender, even in this bill, there's no analysis showing that this is male violence against women. Let's say the police wanted a pro-arrest policy; the interpretation was supposed to be pro-arrest in favour of the woman who is battered. What we see is a pro-arrest policy that has no gender analysis and arrests the woman often, and sometimes not even the man but just the woman.
He's right in saying that does happen. The answer is not to argue against reverse onus; the answer is to correct this idea of gender neutrality within the law and to recognize within the law that there is a phenomenon of male violence against women. It happens that the majority are women and the perpetrators are men. Unless we start to infuse all these bills with that, there are going to be consequences.