Thank you to our witnesses, Mr. Mausz and Mr. Hills, and especially to Professor Donnelly.
Professor Donnelly, I hope you can hear me. I just want to acknowledge that you come from the great town of Windsor. It's where my wife's family is from. We'll find a way to make sure that your comments are fully reflected in our deliberations, and thank you for bearing with all of the technological deficiencies today.
I want to thank Mr. Doherty, as well, for advancing this private member's bill.
Mr. Hills, you said that this has been the subject of your advocacy now for about a decade. I believe there is a fairly strong consensus that making some of the modifications to the Criminal Code along the lines that have been proposed in this legislation would be another mechanism or another tool by which, one, we deter people from threatening or trying to do harm to people who work in your professions by specifically enumerating them, but, two—and this is a point that I thought Mr. Doherty made—by extension, showing that we value the work that you do.
I want to briefly dig into the scope of the challenge that we face. The trend lines are all very worrying. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated recently that there are approximately 2,000 emergency medical services personnel injured every year in violence-related incidents. That's in their country.
Here in Canada, in 2019, the Canadian Nurses Association noted—and these are their words—“one-third of nurses worldwide [reported] being victims of physical assault”.
That is consistent, Mr. Mausz, with the statistics that you provided. We were talking about a range of about one in four paramedics being encountered with some kind of threat of or actual violence.
What I'd like to ask is, on the issue of reporting or under-reporting, you said that approximately 40% of people who have been either threatened or are the victim of an assault do not report it. That is significant. It's high.
What are some of the ways in which we can reduce the barriers so that the people in your profession feel they can step up, report the incident, be treated with dignity, be treated in a way that is trauma-informed—which is part of the line of the work that you do, coincidentally—so that we can shine a greater light on this problem?