Honourable members, I am testifying on this bill as an individual with expertise in sexual assault law. I was just asked this morning as a representative of the Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre. Our executive director was unable to be here. She is travelling across Ontario working with 11 police forces, trying to persuade them of the benefits of what's called the Philadelphia model in terms of policing. She asked me, as secretary of the board, to speak on their behalf. I am a law professor and an expert in the area of sexual assault law, with over 30 years of experience teaching, researching, and advocating for the rights of women who have experienced sexual violence.
The Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre is the third-oldest rape crisis centre in Canada. It was established in 1974. For 43 years, they have been providing crisis line support, face-to-face counselling, and group counselling to thousands of survivors annually. In the current climate, those numbers are increasing exponentially. It's a feminist organization that has fought tirelessly for legal and policy change at the local, provincial, and national level to secure women's rights to report sexual assault, and for these crimes against women to be investigated, prosecuted, and adjudicated with professionalism and attention to women's equality rights.
The Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre has challenged police practices of unfounding of women's sexual assault reports and documented police failures as early as 1975. Currently, our executive director, Sunny Marriner, has led the country in successfully advocating for the Philadelphia model, a model that requires review of police files on sexual assault investigations by independent violence against women advocates.
To speak for myself and the Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre, we support the bill overall. We read it as a significant effort by government to remedy discriminatory practices in the criminal justice system and to inspire trust on the part of women to report sexual violence. There is some urgency to this reform, as women flood traditional and social media with their disclosures of perpetration, yet the reporting rate by women has plummeted from one in 10 to one in 20 in the last several years. We are therefore at a crisis point in terms of the credibility of the criminal justice system for crimes of sexual violence.
I start by noting that we support the provision requiring that all bills include a charter statement assessing compliance with the Constitution of Canada. We trust that this compliance review will include an assessment of each bill's impact on women's equality rights protected by section 15, and women's section 7 rights to security of the person and to trial fairness. When assessing criminal laws that will impact an accused person's rights, the charter requires us to also consider the countervailing charter-protected interests of complainants.
We see the bill as modernizing the criminal law in keeping with current social realities in terms of the role that social media plays in both sexual activity and sexual violence by men against women. We thus support the provision that characterizes communications that are sexual in content or purpose as sexual activity for the purposes of the rules governing the admissibility of sexual history evidence. Moreover, this provision is consistent with legal decisions from some courts in advance of the bill that have interpreted sexualized text messages as sexual activity for the purposes of the rape shield provision, so in some ways this is not a major change in law.
We also support the provisions that provide legal standing and access to legal representation for complainants who face defence applications to introduce their prior sexual activity as evidence into the trial. The provision mirrors the provisions regarding complainants' rights to standing and representation to respond to defence applications to admit their private records. It was previously inexplicable to us why women had standing to defend the privacy of their confidential records but not their private sexual activities.
We think that the bill's extension of the records regime to private records in the hands of the accused, even those without sexual content or purpose, is also an important advance in terms of protecting women's privacy. Although we recognize that the provision has a broader reach, it means that no advantage can be gained by extrajudicial interception of private diaries or other such records. It's true that the defence will lose the element of surprise when required to have such records vetted for admissibility, but it must also be recognized that complainants in sexual assault trials themselves experience forms of jeopardy that require recognition and accommodation.
Bill C-51 also serves to codify some aspects of sexual assault law already established by the Supreme Court of Canada in interpreting the statutory regime. While strictly unnecessary, we support the amendments that do not add confusion to the already exceedingly complex law of sexual assault.
For example, the Ottawa Rape Crisis Centre supports the provision requiring evidence that a complainant expressed her voluntary agreement to sexual contact in order for an accused to rely on the defence of mistaken belief in consent, even though this is not a legal change, but simply a reiteration of the law interpreted by the Supreme Court of Canada almost 20 years ago in Ewanchuk.
We do have serious concerns, however, that the provision purporting to codify the J.A. decision misses the mark. It introduces the potential for confusion and may inadvertently limit legal interpretations on the meaning of incapacity. We say this because the introductory notes to the bill describe this provision as a codification of J.A. However, long before J.A., courts had ruled that unconscious people cannot consent—how could it possibly be otherwise—and, in fact, J.A. stands for a much more significant principle: that you cannot consent in advance of a sexual activity during which you are unconscious.
It would be wonderful if the bill actually codified J.A. and put that principle into law, particularly because, as Professor Mathen noted, it was a majority decision, not a unanimous decision. I think it would be wonderful if, in fact, this law codified J.A. It does not at the current moment.
The other problem that we worry about.... It's true that the bill does not foreclose the possibility that incapacity can include states approaching, but not reaching, unconsciousness. I think the bill ought to go further and explicitly state that proposition. It does not at the current moment. It simply leaves open the possibility that there are other ways in which one could be incapable. In fact, we think it ought to go further and begin to map out the considerations that judges should look at in determining incapacity short of complete unconsciousness.
Those are my submissions. Thank you.