Thank you, Mr. Chair, vice-chairs and committee members.
I want to first acknowledge that I'm Zooming in from my home on indigenous land, the traditional territory of many first people of this land, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinabe, the Chippewa, Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. It's home to many diverse first nations, Inuit and Métis. My work is done in solidarity with them, especially indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people, who are the targets of ongoing systemic racism.
My submission today centres on our collective responsibility to ensure that they have equitable access to justice in this new process.
My name is Nneka MacGregor, and I want to also acknowledge my colleague, Maya Roy, who co-authored this submission. I am the co-founder and executive director of this organization. We're an NGO with pan-Canadian operations that works to eradicate violence against women, women-identified, two-spirit, and trans-identified people through personal and social advocacy. As an organization created by and for survivors, we use our shared experiences to help change public perceptions.
Thank you for the opportunity to comment today. The focus of my submission will be on proposed section 84, on diversity, and on identifying ways and opportunities for the bill to address systemic and individual biases, especially those based on race and gender, as a way of preventing further harm or impacting the integrity of the processes that are being proposed under this bill.
I want to emphasize the critical importance of ongoing training on understanding and addressing gender-based violence as well as training on uprooting anti-Back and anti-indigenous racism and biases for all members of the judiciary, and ensuring that such training is a mandatory requirement for anyone who will be serving in any capacity under this act.
In our work with survivors of gender-based violence, my organization frequently receives reports on how court systems retraumatize survivors of violence who are seeking justice. For example, in our 2019 research with survivors of gendered sexual violence across communities, we documented reports of bias based on gender and racial stereotypes and the impact on survivors' experiences of the criminal court process, including egregious statements made by judges in some of the cases.
I want to share one example of a woman in Renfrew Country who noted that the court process was almost more traumatizing than the actual incident of violence. She said, “I ended up in hospital because of court.”
It is also imperative that the judiciary and other parties selected to serve in any capacity under these proposed provisions have an evidence-based demographic understanding of how systemic oppression and human rights violations impact sentencing practices.
The current demographic reality in Canada is that Black-identified and indigenous people are disproportionately overincarcerated. For example, Statistics Canada has documented that one in six adult admissions into custody is from population groups designated as visible minorities. We know that these populations do not have a greater propensity for criminal behaviour than their white counterparts, but the reason for their overrepresentation—