I would like to move CPC-15. I just want to provide a bit of context on this one first.
Let me say that I genuinely trust, despite our disagreements across party lines on some parts of this legislation, that we all understand the horrors of intimate partner violence. I think we cannot look at that.... While understanding that intimate partner violence can happen to both men and women, we know that women disproportionately bear the brunt of this.
This has been an issue that I have been very fortunate to never have encountered in my family, but I have had friends—women—who have been in very abusive relationships. One had to leave the country to feel safe.
I have also been very grateful to have testimony from witnesses locally, whom I sought to include in this committee's work. Jennifer Dunn, from the London Abused Women's Centre, was very eloquent in her comments, as she always is. We had Valora Place in St. Thomas as well. We had Chief Thai Truong from the London Police Service, which has also been a tremendous advocate for protecting women from the violence that, sadly, all too often faces and confronts them.
One thing that came up in the testimony we heard before this committee and in other conversations I had, including with Megan Walker, who was formerly the executive director of the London Abused Women's Centre and whom I've come to know quite well, is that we need to have explicit protections and explicit reference to women when we're talking about femicide. This came up in multiple witnesses' testimony, where femicide was alluded to in a header but not actually defined or established with any degree of clarity in the bill itself.
My amendment, simply put, replaces intimate partner violence with femicide. This is something that women's advocates have argued is important, because they believe “IPV” is too euphemistic and doesn't actually speak to women and to the issue.
It defines very clearly that femicide is “first degree murder when the victim is female and the death is caused by her intimate partner.”
It's a very clear definition. It's a very simple one, and it's one that acknowledges the horrific harms that women in abusive relationships have to confront in these cases, tragically, when there is a murder involved.
I welcome any feedback and input from the committee on this, but that was where this came from, and those were the consultations that went into this amendment.