Justice Committee on Feb. 18th, 2021

[Carla Neto]

Yes. Thank you. Some of it has already been said.

I think when the police appear at a home and the perpetrator, or the man, is impeding the woman from speaking, perhaps wanting to be the interpreter or saying things like, “Well, she doesn't really understand English very well”, or “She's sick and she's not doing well”, and is clearly trying to keep the police from speaking to the person, that is an indication. The evidence of coercion or control will be assessed later. Once that victim is in safety, and once charges have been laid through the investigation, it is very easy to find out.

Some of my colleagues already mentioned the control, the extreme control, the surveillance of the person even at work. The person goes to work and their abusive partner is calling, questioning colleagues, picking the person up at the door, and not allowing the person to go to family members or to speak to friends. They're controlling every movement. It is not difficult to assess coercive control.

I think on the question the chief was trying to answer, it may be difficult, when you attend a call, to ascertain whether there is coercive control, but it is not difficult when you observe and see what's happening. Is this person speaking freely or is there an appearance of fear?

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thanks to both of you for those clarifications.

Early on in the pandemic, when I talked both to women's service providers and to the police in my own riding, we saw a sharp spike in demand. When I talked with all of them, they told me there was a pattern of behaviour that was pretty easy to determine. They felt that the bill I eventually drafted moved from an incident focus to a pattern focus. I wonder whether you think that will be useful for both the enforcement and the victims.

I'll start with you, Ms. Neto.

[Carla Neto]

Absolutely, there is a pattern. There is a pattern of control. That means that the abusive person has the same control in every aspect—the way you think, the way you speak, what you do, your social media. In fact, they're not just controlling the social media. They're also threatening to use images, for example, that the person doesn't want to share with family members and friends on social media. So it will absolutely be critical.

I think this pattern of coercion and control has always existed. It exists whether or not there's physical violence. I think we have been placing so much emphasis on the actual physical violence that we forget that the physical violence doesn't just happen all of a sudden. It starts with control. It starts with coercion. It starts with verbal and emotional and psychological abuse.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Ms. Youssef, do you think such a bill would help victims recognize that the behaviour they have been subject to is actually unacceptable?

[Yasmine Youssef]

Yes, I do think so, if it is combined with the training necessary and the awareness. I think that's the part that ends up being missed. A lot of times when we have women come to us, they don't realize it until we tell them: this, this and this—it's abuse. With that awareness piece, I think it would definitely help women recognize it sooner, hopefully not get to the point where physical abuse is taking place, and hopefully get the help they need before that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Iqra Khalid]

Thanks very much, Mr. Garrison.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Iqra Khalid]

We'll now go into our second round of questions, starting with Madame Findlay for five minutes.

Go ahead.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Thank you to all the witnesses.

Having practised in the family law area [Technical difficulty—Editor].

[The Chair, Liberal, Iqra Khalid]

Sorry, Ms. Findlay, your voice isn't really coming through.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Sorry, my boom wasn't down. My apologies. I'll just start again. Thank you.

I want to thank you all very much for being here for this important topic.

Having practised family law for many years, I'm well aware of these situations and have, in fact, seen situations where civil restraining orders and criminal orders are just pieces of paper to abusers, who have then actually killed their partners or severely hurt them after.

I know this is all too real, and it crosses all socio-economic sectors of our society, but I think often it's particularly hard on new Canadians, who have less understanding of our judicial system and the supports that so many of you provide.

This question is for Chief Duraiappah.

I want to thank you for your service to the Peel community. I understand that your area has been one of the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, and I can only imagine the complexities that brings to your policing. My understanding is that half of Peel's homicides in 2019 were intimate partner or family violence, which seems like an incredible number to me—13 out of 27, I'm advised.

Did Peel see a similar split during the pandemic in 2020?

[Chief Nishan Duraiappah]

Thank you for the question.

Yes, the same split was roughly what we saw last year in our homicides. Domestic or intimate partner, family-related homicides were just shy of 50%.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Earlier this week, we heard testimony from a survivor of domestic violence that victims are often not believed by law enforcement. Have you seen this in your work, and what would you suggest could be done to rectify that issue?

[Chief Nishan Duraiappah]

With certainty, over the progression in maturity that policing and law enforcement have seen.... Without a doubt, survivors' experiences have probably seen a lack of reception from policing, but it's my experience now that it has matured so much in the last decade. Our shift to looking at risk and mitigating risk versus dealing with what we see being presented at the doorstep has changed insofar as now we are equally frustrated with our inability to stop the cycle of violence.

Now I think survivors experience a general frustration with the lack of effectiveness of the tools we have. In their minds, without a doubt, they interpret that—and I'm not speaking as a survivor—as our not taking it seriously or not managing it well.

For example, this proposed legislation, although not a panacea, is another arrow in the quiver.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

My understanding, and I have law enforcement people in my own family, is that there is a lot more education of officers on de-escalation but also perhaps more sensitivity to these situations where the mandate is more to believe the person complaining, at least initially, to try to defuse the situation rather than just walking away from it. Is that correct?

[Chief Nishan Duraiappah]

Absolutely, that is true. I'll use the word “maturity” again, which we've seen in equipping our officers from a standpoint of understanding what's behind the behaviour, whether it be a perpetrator or what a victim is presenting...has increased.

To go to a previous question, we've been equipped with a variety of tools. One of the questions was, how are we going to determine the course of behaviour? We do have risk assessment tools that can come alongside us to help an officer peel back the nuances that aren't so obvious.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

We have very little time left. You brought up an issue of someone out on bail with no-contact orders and it led to the death of a victim. How would you see stopping those tragedies in the future in terms of police versus courts?

[Chief Nishan Duraiappah]

Very simply, clearly we don't need to criminalize everybody, but repeat high offenders who show a propensity for victimization I think need to be treated differently from people who are provided a GPS. There's a slew of other criminals whom I'd happily provide the GPS to, or I'd hope the courts would, but somebody who repeatedly reoffends—intimate partner or gun and gang violence—in my view needs to be seen a little differently at the court level from a reform standpoint.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Iqra Khalid]

Thanks very much.

We will now go to Mr. Kelloway for five minutes.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thank you, Madam Chair. Hello, colleagues.

Thank you to the witnesses. It's been said by each MP: Thank you for the work you do at the grassroots. It's exceptionally important.

Also, I have a very quick story. Twenty years ago, I married into a police family. My father-in-law was the chief of police and my brother-in-law is now the chief of police in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality. Twenty years have given me a great appreciation and a deeper understanding of the work involved in policing; it's vast and at times very complicated.

Chief Duraiappah, my questions are going to be directed to you, based on the family I married into. I want to address a question around our government's approach in the past little bit. As you know, we implemented a firearms ban after the tragic incident in my home province in the spring. I'm wondering if you could tell the committee about the role of firearms in the home and how it impacts domestic violence. Does this impact coercion and control?

[Chief Nishan Duraiappah]

The access to firearms—legal or illegal—is just another factor that compounds the risk to an individual. With the legislative ability, especially the new bill, we know there are opportunities now for application to the firearms officer when there's even just a risk or a possibility of risk to look for either a temporary retraction or prohibition of the firearms.

I keep coming back to that quiver analogy; we'll take any tool we can get. I think there's no one solution to mitigate risk for intimate partner or family violence, but every incremental change that can help us round off a corner, even though it might not be dealing with the highest or most immediate risk, in my view is a benefit to us.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thank you, Chief.

I remember reading that you and the Peel Regional Police were looking at alternative ways to deal with domestic violence. I'm wondering if you can unpack for the committee a bit more about the ideas you were exploring and how these may have changed in light of the pandemic.

[Chief Nishan Duraiappah]

Absolutely. Really, it reflects a fundamental shift from our being the emergency responder and dealing with everything in that wheelhouse of enforcement and leaning on our community partners to help invest in other spaces.

What we've done is apply an emphasis on social development, risk mitigation and of course prevention. We'll always be trying to do our best in the law enforcement space. An example of how we're doing that here is that we really deconstructed things. A few weeks from now, I have 50 officers starting in a community centre—not a police facility—and they are going to be the sole subject-matter experts to be able to respond in the soup-to-nuts response for intimate partner or family violence and be responsible for case-managing them.

The idea is that we want the seamless integration for community service providers to be with us on the ground floor, an immediate integration into legal aid, settlement services, mental health, housing. There are a lot of stigmas. Some of those partners are also cautious about seeing uniforms or investigators in their building too, but this is the paradigm shift, where we recognize we're better together and we have an opportunity to improve that. The emphasis is going to be on getting upstream.

We know that domestic violence.... By the time we're called, it's probably the 10th time—I think our witnesses will have better stats than me—the individual has experienced something.

We want to get them off-ramp far earlier, sir.

[Mike Kelloway, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Thank you very much.

Madam Chair, how much time do I have?