First, I would like to thank the committee for welcoming us and thank Parliament for inviting us this week, we delegates from the Daughters of the Vote. I would also like to thank my colleagues for their testimony. Some very important issues have been identified.
My name is Élisabeth Gendron, and I am the delegate for Trois-Rivières. I am here to talk to you about access to justice. Access to justice is a concern in Canada, especially in Quebec. Access to justice is not equitable, especially when comparing people with money with those who have less. This inequality is also evident between men and women. Based on these findings, it makes no sense to say that our justice system is supposed to be the foundation for the protection of vulnerable members of society if it fails to serve its role owing to the complexity of the judicial process and the lack of resources for the underprivileged.
Inequality before the law is especially evident in family law, in the case of women who may be experiencing domestic abuse. The law is not designed to properly protect them and their children from violent former spouses. Similarly, in divorce proceedings, in many cases these women cannot afford a lawyer or the legal aid program is completely overloaded by the thousands of requests it receives every year.
In 2014, for instance, the legal aid clinic Juripop, which offers low-cost legal services, stated in its annual report that the majority of its family law clients were women who head single-parent families with one or two children. I observed this myself when I did a work term at the clinic.
Similarly, in 2016, the Commission des services juridiques du Québec noted that women accounted for 62% of its clients in family law, civil law and youth protection.
This is also a serious problem in the criminal justice system. The group that appeared recently spoke about that. Statistically speaking, women are more often the victims of crime than they are the accused. In Canada, in 2008, 83% of victims were women, more than two-thirds of them under 18 years of age. Let us also remember that approximately 88% of sex offences go unreported.
Criminal prosecutions are currently designed in a way that more often than not disregards the victim, treating her as a mere witness to the crime and not a central figure in the proceedings whose interests should always be considered in determining the sentence.
Similarly, it is unacceptable that women are not taken very seriously and that their credibility is constantly called into question by decision-makers and prosecutors. These two obstacles no doubt explain why many women are reluctant to report crimes in which they have been the victim. Criminal justice needs to change and be reconfigured to give a greater role to the victims, if they wish of course, so they feel heard to a greater extent. Moreover, the rules of evidence no doubt need to be changed so that victims' testimony in sexual assault cases is not systematically called into question.
In closing, I would say that women, especially poor women, are not well liked by the justice system. Although a number of initiatives have been taken in recent years to address the situation, it is essential that members from all parties turn their attention to this problem so we can work together to resolve it and ensure that our justice system truly represents and reflects the interests of all Canadians, including women.
Thank you.