Absolutely. I apologize.
We recognize that what hurts and kills women and girls is actually gender inequity, and we are 100% in support of Women's Shelters Canada's work over the last 10 years to advance a national action plan on gender-based violence that takes into consideration the experiences of women and girls all across the land, both in rural and urban settings, and that has taken great effort to highlight prevention, support services, legal responses, social infrastructure and specific supports for indigenous survivors across the country.
Coroners have consistently identified access to firearms as one of the top five of 10 risk factors when determining when a woman will die in domestic violence situations. We understand that the presence of a firearm in the home must be determined and, if present, should be considered a high risk factor for homicide by a family member.
In Canada, women own less than 2% of registered firearms. This analysis helps us understand that women are twice as likely as men to experience being sexually assaulted, beaten, strangled or threatened with a gun or a knife. While firearm-related violent crime continues to represent a small proportion of overall police-reported violent crime, the proportion of lethal violence that involved a firearm rose from 26% of all homicides to 37% in 2020.
We are, of course, concerned about the relationship to gun violence and the killing of women and girls, but we must also recognize that 42% of intimate femicides were actually because of stabbings and knife violence, which speaks to the piece around the cultural shifts that would need to happen. Given that femicides are not currently uniformly documented, we understand that firearms in femicide are also not documented accurately and that would be an important piece of this action.
As my colleagues have said earlier, Battered Women's Support Services also endorses the National Association of Women and the Law and its submission on this matter. I would like to point out a few pieces that we agree with.
One is the removal of the employment exception. This is very important, because we understand that a job that requires using a gun is never the only vocation open to an individual. Regardless of an individual's past or qualifications, there will always be jobs available to them that do not have that requirement, so we are concerned that this section would be interpreted by how permissive chief firearm officers may be in granting conditional licences not based on need but based on an individual's job preference.
In echoing what Lise mentioned earlier, we understand that research suggests that police officers are even more likely than the general population to commit physical violence against a partner. Needless to say, the obstacles to reporting domestic violence are heightened for victims of police officers. Police officers are rarely disciplined or prosecuted for acts of domestic violence. They should not benefit from a legal exemption to losing their licence when they do so.
The other piece we think is important is strengthening the provisions around a licence in cases of domestic violence. We most definitely are concerned about giving chief firearms officers broad discretions to determine whether domestic violence has occurred. We are concerned that we do not have a proper definition of domestic violence and family violence in the bill. This would be an essential piece.
As has been stated earlier, we think there is good language within the Divorce Act, but more than that, we must also recognize that domestic violence and stalking are not defined, and that stalking is also a lethality factor.
We also would want to be certain that we are defining protection orders in the regulation. We would not want to see an opportunity where a protection order—