Thank you.
My name is Paulette Senior. I'm the CEO of YWCA Canada, and I'm here today with my colleague, Ann Decter, who is our director of advocacy and public policy.
Thank you for the opportunity to present our concerns today. We've been advised that YWCA Canada is the only national women's organization invited to present at these hearings. If that is true, we are honoured to take on this role, but we're also shocked that only one national voice for women has been invited on an issue that is ever so crucial to women's safety.
Women's safety, or the lack of it, is what brought Canada's gun control laws into being. The future of gun control cannot be debated without reference to violence against women.
We are the nation's oldest and largest women's service organization. Founded in 1870, we are 140 years old this year. The YWCA movement is as old as our country, and for well over a century has provided a strong voice for women, in particular for women in vulnerable circumstances. YWCA Canada is the country's largest provider of shelter to women and children fleeing violence.
We are here today because a tool of public safety is under threat, the non-restricted firearms registry. Each year more than 100,000 women and children in Canada leave their homes for “violence against women” shelters. Many of them come through the doors of the 31 shelters operated by YWCAs across Canada looking for safety, a roof over their heads, and support. Our member associations operate shelters in Canada's large and small centres. We serve rural populations in Sudbury, Brandon, Prince Albert, Lethbridge, Peterborough, Saskatoon, Yellowknife, and Iqaluit--places where shotguns and rifles are part of the culture.
Our member associations are opposed to Bill C-391 because it will put women and children in their communities at greater risk. Lyda Fuller, the executive director of YWCA Yellowknife, says, “I worry about Aboriginal women, who surely must have a right to protection. I’m asking rural and northern MPs to think about the safety of Aboriginal women and about rates of teen suicide.”
YWCA Canada passionately supported the implementation of Canada's gun control laws, including the long-gun registry, because of the dangers and risks firearms pose to women experiencing violence. While there is much to criticize in how the registry was developed, we agree with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police that the registry has made Canada a safer country.
There are experts here today who can give you full details on the registry and how it works, but what we offer is the perspective of service providers working for women's safety, service providers who see the effects of violence on women and children day in and day out.
We see a modern database with real-time access from a patrol car to the location of almost 6.8 million long guns and rifles. Police forces across the country appear to be rapidly increasing their use of this database. Average daily inquiries for 2009 were more than double the usage in 2005. Annual queries increased from 425,000 in 2004 to 3.4 million in 2008, to over 4 million in 2009. It is not useless; it is very well used.
So what are we to think? While Google is busily scanning every book in the world to release online and businesses are ramping up iPhone apps, the Canadian government wants to erase 6.8 million database records locating firearms against the expressed advice of the nation's police forces.
Whose interests are being served here? We can say, without a doubt, not those of women vulnerable to violence. How many lives has the registry saved? No one really knows, but evidence clearly shows a continuing decline in homicides committed with rifles and shotguns coinciding with the increasing use of the long-gun registry by Canadian police forces. At the same time, the use of firearms and violence in general has increased.
Long guns are the most common type of firearm used in spousal homicides. Over the past decade, 71% of firearm spousal homicides involved rifles and shotguns; only 24% involved a hand gun.
While spousal homicides with rifles and shotguns have decreased, homicides by all other means have not. The average number of women killed annually by their spouses without using a rifle or shotgun between 1995 and 1998 was 52; the same figure for 2001 to 2004 was 56.
A central argument against the long-gun registry is that operating costs are excessive; money would be better spent elsewhere. This is not supported by current reports. While there is no question that development of the registry included exceptional mismanagement, set-up is complete and the registry exists. Millions of dollars have already been spent and unfortunately cannot be recovered. What can be recovered, with the right steps, is the continuing cost of violence against women, estimated by this government at $4 billion per year.
We would be very pleased to return to the committee at a future date and discuss that public safety issue.
The question facing parliamentarians is not the mismanagement of the registry in the past but the future of a modern database that is constantly consulted by Canadian police forces in the course of their duties. Are we expected to believe that our police services would consult a useless system more than four million times in the year?
YWCA Canada is a national organization with broad reach, and we'd like share some comments from some of our members across the country. Earlier I mentioned Lyda Fuller, who is a director of YWCA Yellowknife, with shelters in Yellowknife and Fort Smith for women and children fleeing violence, groups for children who have witnessed violence, and workshops for teens related to dating violence. This is what Lyda Fuller would like for you to know today:
Women have told us that the guns used here [in the north] predominantly for hunting--long guns--are also used to intimidate, subdue and control them. We hear this over and over again, in small communities without RCMP and in larger communities with RCMP.
Women do not want these guns to be unregistered, but do not feel safe in expressing this opinion other than in whispers to people who may be able to voice these 'unpopular' opinions and who may be heard. Of course men in the communities don't want to register their guns.
When RCMP fly into a community to respond to domestic violence, they need to know where the guns are, and how many a household has. We've already had deaths of Mounties in the north.
Long guns, because of their prevalence here, are also used in suicides, which are epidemic in northern Canada.
I am just stunned that we have both the police chiefs, tasked with public safety, and vulnerable groups asking for protection--both wanting the long gun registry to continue--and that these voices may be ignored.
Please make it clear that it is not city-born, city living folks who are asking for this registry to continue; it is the voices of northern women who fear for their lives and their mental health who are asking for protection. We see women who have experienced years of brutal intimidation. These women cannot safely express their need for protection themselves, and it is up to Canada to understand this and respond in an appropriate way.
That is Lyda Fuller.
We have another message from the north. This one is from Iqaluit in Nunavut, where YWCA Agwik Nunavut is in development and provides shelter for homeless women and for women fleeing violence. It's from Caroline Anawak, the executive director there:
Having lost 3 brother-in-laws, 3 nephews, 2 nieces, two former students, 2 neighbours in Nunavut, I remind the Government of Canada that Nunavut leads all of North America in suicides.
The cost of this tragic loss of life is sorely under-estimated. The painful message it helps to send is a message no mother, no father and no elected representative should ever want to hear.
Do the “right” thing, not the expedient thing. Loss of life must be stopped.
On behalf of our 33 member associations across Canada, the thousands of staff and volunteers who make our work possible, and the tens of thousands of women we serve, we echo Caroline Anawak. Do the right thing. Protect mothers and sisters and daughters. Protect women and girls. Maintain the non-registered firearms registry. There are still lives to be saved.
Thank you.