Yes, there are many things.
I think the first mistakes in this case date from the very first time this man was ever arrested for violence against women and from every time after that. From what we've seen from the record, he was essentially warehoused in a prison for 15 years and then let out without any meaningful rehabilitation. We don't believe in a punitive carceral approach. We believe in serious meaningful rehabilitation and in finding ways to make sure that if someone has been incarcerated, on the day they come out they are in a different position.
When it comes to violence against women, it's an area that's particularly mistreated in the criminal justice system at every step. We are in solidarity with a lot of the demands of women who experience intimate partner violence, in terms of the criminal justice system simply not being able to address that. A lot of men are violent towards women and only towards women, and that's not addressed.
We're glad there will be training on intimate partner violence. However, that doesn't address the case here of Marylène Levesque, who was a sex worker who was murdered at work, so not in the context of an intimate partner relationship. We think that should be included. When I heard about this training, my first thought was that obviously, once again, they will talk about us without ever consulting us regarding what should be said in that training and how that should be implemented.
I think it goes beyond training. We need actual policy changes. We need to review why we incarcerate people, what we do with them while they're incarcerated, how we identify those who can't be rehabilitated, and what conditions we can put on them.
I'm quite concerned that one of the outcomes of this will be to make it harder for inmates to get out on parole. We know that a majority of people trying to get parole are in prison because of poverty, colonialism and racism. We know that indigenous people are overrepresented and Black people are overrepresented. Is the outcome going to be that the actions of this one white man will lead to more problematic incarcerations of Black and indigenous people? We're quite concerned about that.
We need meaningful reform, not simply training and statements against the sex industry.