Status of Women Committee on May 9th, 2024

[The Chair, Conservative, Shelby Kramp-Neuman]

I would like to call the meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting 108 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

Before we begin, I would like to remind all members and other meeting participants in the room of the following important preventative measures.

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These measures are in place so that we can conduct our business without interruption and to protect the health and safety of all participants, including the interpreters.

In accordance with the committee's routine motion concerning connection tests for witnesses, I am informing the committee that all witnesses have completed the required connection tests in advance of the meeting.

I'd also like to make a few comments for the benefit of all members and witnesses.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For members in the room, please raise your hand if you wish to speak. For members on Zoom, please use the “raise hand” function. The clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best as we can, and we appreciate your understanding in this regard.

All comments should be addressed through the chair.

When there are 30 seconds remaining, I will raise my 30-seconds card. When your time is done, I'll raise another card suggesting that your time is done.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, November 27, 2023, the committee will resume its study on coercive behaviour.

Before we welcome our witnesses, I would like to provide a trigger warning. We will be discussing experiences related to violence and coercive control. This may be triggering to viewers with similar experiences. If you feel distressed or need help, please advise the clerk. For all witnesses and for members of Parliament, it is important to recognize that these are difficult discussions, so let's try to be compassionate in our conversations.

At this point, I would like to welcome our witnesses.

From the Salvation Army, we have Barbara Ridley, executive director, governing council at Sudbury Cedar Place; and Taylor Briscoe, assistant director, public affairs.

As an individual, we have Carmen Gill, professor, department of sociology, University of New Brunswick, joining us by video conference.

From the Women of the Métis Nation, we have Lisa Pigeau, director of intergovernmental relations, also joining us by video conference.

Each organization will have five minutes for opening remarks followed by a round of questions.

At this point, I will give the floor to Ms. Ridley and Ms. Briscoe.

You will have five minutes to share. Please go ahead.

[Barbara Ridley, Executive Director, Governing Council, Sudbury Cedar Place, Salvation Army]

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and committee members. On behalf of the Salvation Army, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you on the committee's study of coercive behaviour. We are honoured to represent the voices of the women and families we serve who too often have found themselves without a voice.

My name is Barbara Ridley. I'm currently executive director of the Sudbury Cedar Place women and family shelter in Sudbury, Ontario. Prior to this, I worked in community and hospital settings, providing training across the province on the subjects of women, addiction, mental health and trauma.

At Cedar Place we provide shelter to 28 women, children and families. Each night our beds are full. Nearly all individuals we serve have experienced coercive violence, children included. In our city, with a population of over 168,000, police respond to an average of eight intimate partner violence-related incidents a day. These numbers have climbed steadily since 2013, with the Greater Sudbury Police Service responding to 2,846 incidents annually.

When these incidents occur, the police call us. We do everything we can to meet the increasing demand on our emergency shelter. This represents similar trends across the country. The Salvation Army provides nearly 4,000 shelter beds nightly, with 439 serving women and 79 serving families across Canada. When a woman or a family arrives at our door, there is a unique history of trauma that arrives with them. Coercion is undoubtedly a part of their history. These acts become particularly egregious when children are involved.

I think of Mary, who finally had the courage to leave her partner after 10 years of extreme isolation from family and friends and continuous daily rants. How would you feel as a mother, hearing your partner call you a slut or an idiot every day in front of your children? These types of rants were coercive behaviour to ensure that she would stay. Sadly, she arrived at the shelter without her children, wrongfully believing she would not be able to financially provide for them. All she knew was that she feared for her life.

Coercion creates generational trauma. As the committee considers changes to the Criminal Code of Canada, we hope that a re-examination of family law is not forgotten. Children deserve their own legal protection. We would encourage the creation of a stand-alone law that further punishes the coercion of children through threats, manipulation, intimidation and isolation.

Concurrent with legal changes, there needs to be a substantial investment in an educational campaign, created and distributed in partnership with social and legal service providers, to empower individuals with the knowledge that such laws exist and how they can seek protection.

I think of Susan, who arrived at our shelter with a lack of knowledge about her rights and services that kept her prisoner within her own home. She represents the thousands of women who remain hopeless without knowledge.

It is an incredible act of bravery to seek protection from abuse. We must ensure that the act of reaching out in itself does not deter or retraumatize the individuals. Healing from coercive abuse requires long-term, continuous support services. Every step in this process increases the risk these women face.

The women we serve ask for the steps to be centralized for ease of access, safety and rapid response. Legal protections and survivor support services are critical, but they also represent that abuse has happened. The Salvation Army advocates for a root cause approach with increased investment in housing and social service provision so that dignified and appropriate services can be provided to survivors and families in a timely and robust fashion.

In closing, I would like to share the story of every woman and child who enters our shelter and has suffered from coercive behaviours. They're all hoping for a fresh start. The average length of stay at Cedar Place has grown from 16 to 53 days over the last five years. The lack of rent geared to income or deeply affordable housing forces individuals to move out into the community into shared accommodations. Ultimately, many of them return to homelessness. In the rush to find safe housing, many find themselves in financially unstable situations. They too return to homelessness.

The lack of appropriate housing demands swift and decisive action, with legislation requiring capital investment to mandate, grow and preserve deeply affordable safe homes, including rent-geared-to-income housing.

Taylor and I are happy to provide further details and answers to any questions that you might have about the needs and the trends across the community.

We want to thank this committee for the opportunity to be a part of this study, and we look forward to the members' questions.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Shelby Kramp-Neuman]

Thank you, and you're right on time.

Next I would like to welcome Carmen Gill.

You have five minutes.

[Professor Carmen Gill, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of New Brunswick, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the members of the committee for inviting me to present in this meeting on coercive behaviour.

My research focuses on the police response to intimate partner violence, IPV, especially coercive control. As such, I conducted a survey with police officers on their perception of IPV involving coercive control. IPV is multi-dimensional in nature and encompasses numerous forms of violence. It is often seen as an episodic and a one-term event, failing to address the complexity of an issue involving repetitive tactics used by abusers.

Violent behaviour does not necessarily involve physical violence or a single incident, but instead consists of a repeated and continuous pattern of behaviour that occurs over lengthy periods of time. Regardless of the violence, when the violence starts, whatever it looks like, it is the abuser's way of maintaining control over his partner.

Since the criminal justice system primarily places emphasis on the evidence of physical violence, first responders are to find evidence of such violence. Consequently, there is neglect in questioning the context of the abuse and the harm caused within the situation, which results in coercive control being unaddressed or dismissed. It is almost impossible for police officers to recognize a deprivation of rights to freedom, the obstruction to liberty and the control situation.

The recognition of coercive control as an offence would finally be a recognition that power and control over an intimate partner is a crime against the person. This would allow those caught in an abusive relationship to report when they are experiencing abuse, even if it's not physical violence.

Police officers must assess whether a situation is considered as IPV and potentially criminal. At the same time, we're asking them to recognize the signs of coercive control. Their assessment is twofold. On one hand, police officers are to determine if it is an isolated incident that is situational and caused by tension that led to a conflict escalation. On the other hand, they must assess if the situation involves a controlling pattern from the abuser, which would not be an isolated incident.

Coercive controlling behaviour is not always visible to outsiders and demands a deeper interaction with the survivor to determine the pattern in place. These patterns are built up over time and characterized by a combination of different tactics to control the intimate partner. It encompasses three pillars under which various behaviour can be identified. The first is the denying of resources or rights. The second is surveillance and micro-regulation. Finally, it is the manifestation of violence.

Coercive control blends into intimate relationships and is normalized in our society. It appears so normal that even survivors may consider that they are not abused because they were not physically assaulted. Identifying coercive controlling behaviour is like putting together a puzzle. It makes sense once the pieces of the puzzle relate to one another. Every professional working with survivors is in the delicate position of going beyond what they see on scene or what they consider what is IPV to ensure that they have a broad understanding of the context of the situation.

I think the revised Bill C-332 illustrates some of these tactics that can allow identification of such behaviour. How do you read a situation without visible physical violence? To optimize their response, police officers need to have a clear understanding of those behaviours and what they look like. They need to gather evidence that would not be looked for, and it starts by allowing identification of coercive control behaviour.

We have to remind ourselves that an enactment of coercive control offence will only be successful with support and adequate training of those who are going to implement it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Shelby Kramp-Neuman]

Thank you very much for that.

At this point I would like to welcome Lisa Pigeau to speak for five minutes.

[Lisa Pigeau, Director of Intergovernmental Relations, Women of the Métis Nation]

Good afternoon.

My name is Lisa Pigeau. I'm the director of intergovernmental relations with Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak.

I'd like to acknowledge that I'm joining you today from Spencerville, and that I humbly reside on the traditional territories of the Anishinabe, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Oneida peoples.

Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak, also known as LFMO, advocates nationally and internationally for the rights, needs and priorities of Métis women, youth, children and 2SLGBTQQIA+ Métis.

Verbal assaults; threats; humiliation; isolation from friends, families and support networks; exploiting, spying, denying, blame-shifting, intimidation, punishment, tracking, a pattern, not a single incident: These are all terms that can be included in the definition of coercive behaviour. Is this an inclusive list? No, it's not.

The problem is, how do you prove a pattern of controlling behaviours when the impacts are insidious and one may not realize they're experiencing coercive behaviour and report it. More often, it may not be realized until physical violence ensues. Almost two-thirds of Métis women self-report experiencing physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. Nearly half are survivors of intimate partner violence.

Canada has used as an example a bill passed in the U.K. about controlling and coercive conduct. What the U.K. bill does not consider is the specific implications around Métis women and the historically strained relationship with police and other colonial processes. Pair this with the fact that systemic racism is still rampant in all structures that are intended to protect us.

Upon criminalization of coercive behaviour, will police officers be able to assess intimate partner violence situations that do not present the physical violence when they arrive on scene? Will they have enough understanding of the dynamic to see whether someone is in a potentially harmful situation?

It must also be asked in what scenarios outside of intimate partner violence women and gender-diverse folks face coercive control. Can it be experienced in an employment scenario or in health care systems? Yes—we see this in the case of forced and coerced sterilizations and in other systems.

The burden of proof will always fall upon the victim, who must try to convince authorities that they have been coercively controlled.

The emphasis on physical violence and injuries in risk-assessment tools leads to the minimizing of non-physical violence. Interpretation is further complicated by systemic racism and further compounded by the individual biases of persons in positions of authority.

At the same time, we hear of an increase in threats utilizing technology, such as text messaging and social media channels. A fundamental concern that has been raised by Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak is that reports of IPV are often weaponized against women and gender-diverse folks. This is the case when child welfare is brought in. The victims have already been threatened by the abuser that if they call the authorities they will lose their children. One may not feel that their interests will be protected if they report physical violence let alone coercive behaviour. Further to this, LFMO supports a ban on parental alienation accusations in order to protect women and children in family court. Parental alienation is used to silence mothers and children who report family violence.

What is required to counteract coercive behaviour is a vigorous plan for information sharing, training, education and awareness. Solutions to coercive behaviour require broad investment in the transition health sector, health care and education systems, community services, housing, and justice.

LFMO has several recommendations with respect to combatting coercive behaviour.

We'd like to see a scaling-up of distinctions-based, wraparound cultural supports; a guaranteed livable income with no service cuts; expanded access to secure, no-barrier housing; increased access to food security, transportation, holistic health care, education, and child care; access to free, responsive legal services; the decriminalization of survival; and the banning of parental alienation accusations against the mother in family violence cases.

LFMO remains committed to pushing back against wider systemic oppression that supports conditions for violence to flourish and that makes access to justice and care for Métis women and gender-diverse people even more difficult.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Shelby Kramp-Neuman]

Thank you, all, for your opening remarks.

We will now move on to our first round of questions.

Ms. Vien, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Ladies, thank you for taking the time to enlighten us on the subject of coercive behaviour.

Ms. Gill, since we began the study, everyone has told us about the difficulty regarding the burden of proof, which rests on the shoulders of the victim. It's extremely difficult, because it's hard enough to identify these behaviours upstream and to prove them in a court of law. The very fact of reporting it to the police is already a challenge, and submitting the evidence in the judicial process is another.

To your knowledge and from all your research, will criminalizing coercive control really make things easier? We currently have Bill C‑332 on the table, which is very interesting. Will its adoption make it easier for women to denounce behaviour, to be believed by the police, to win their cases and to convince a judge that they have been victims of coercive behaviour?

[Prof. Carmen Gill]

First of all, if the bill says that a certain number of repeated behaviours must be determined, police officers are going to have the precise tools to better investigate this type of offence and ask a certain type of question. The burden of proof won't rest solely on the victim, but also on the police officer, who will be able to gather evidence that doesn't necessarily involve injury or property damage. He will ask more targeted questions about coercive behaviour. Body language can also be analyzed. If police officers are wearing body cameras, a number of recorded elements can be used later. Crown prosecutors, among others, in Quebec—

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Excuse me for interrupting, Ms. Gill, but are you talking about cameras in the house? I may have misunderstood.

[Prof. Carmen Gill]

No, I'm talking about the cameras worn by the officers of certain police departments on their uniforms when they intervene. That can provide evidence. Evidence can also include emails, statements from relatives showing that the victim is no longer in contact with them, or testimonials from friends. So the burden of proof won't necessarily rest solely on the victim.

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

You talked about a series of tools, investigative strategies that could be facilitated. I'll have several questions for the Salvation Army later.

A woman, whose name I've unfortunately forgotten, was talking to us about training for Crown prosecutors and judges. Yet on Tuesday, we heard some pretty startling testimony from a victim, who said she didn't know if this training would change anything. Personally, do you believe in the training?

[Prof. Carmen Gill]

It's essential, that's obvious. We won't be able to enshrine an offence of coercive control in the law if we don't train the people who work in the justice system. It starts with police officers, so that they know what coercive control is. It will also have to be done for Crown attorneys, defence counsel and judges.

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Thank you, Ms. Gill.

You spoke of three pillars: deprivation, surveillance and the manifestation of violence. You confirm that my notes weren't bad. Do these three pillars necessarily have to come together, or is one of them enough to say that we're dealing with a case of coercive behaviour?

[Prof. Carmen Gill]

You can do micromanagement and surveillance, and there may not be any manifestation of physical violence. When I say coercive control, it implies both non-physical violence and physical violence. All three elements don't have to be present to be in the presence of coercive control; even if there's only surveillance, that's enough.

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Time goes by so fast, Ms. Gill. I've taken up all my speaking time to chat with you.

I had a lot of questions for the other witnesses, but I'm sure my colleagues will raise them.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Shelby Kramp-Neuman]

Thank you, Dominique.

Anita, you have six minutes.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much.

I want to thank all of the witnesses for being here.

I'd like to start my questioning with you, Ms. Gill. You were talking about the research you've done, particularly on perceptions and with police. One thing we've heard in this committee on the issue of criminalization of coercive control is that without the wraparound services, it could actually backfire and be used against the women.

You mentioned that sometimes the survivors themselves are not even aware that they are victims of this until maybe afterwards, when they start seeing others. In that case, how difficult would it be, if there were a criminal offence, for that kind of enforcement by the police? What would we need to have, if we did do that, to make sure that it didn't get used in ways that would actually harm women?

[Prof. Carmen Gill]

Thank you for the question.

I think more and more as we're talking about coercive control we're raising awareness within the population. What I'm seeing is that women are calling me and asking when this will be criminalized. I already know, from doing round tables with police officers, that they are looking for something. They understand that there's something happening when they respond to a scene, but the situation is not criminalized because they don't have the evidence that they are supposed to find—physical violence, injuries, damage to the property. They are left with nothing.

Whether we criminalize coercive control or not, police officers need to better document the situation even if it's not criminalized. If they are to understand what coercive control is, they can better support the victim and also potentially refer the perpetrator somewhere.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much.

I have a question for Ms. Ridley and the Salvation Army.

You're seeing these women, these survivors, very quickly, and the children as well, when they're trying to get out of these situations. What do you see as the gaps in being able to help people who have been subject to coercive control, not just to get out but also to be able to stay out and not go back? More importantly, how do we prevent it in the first place?

[Taylor Briscoe, Assistant Director, Public Affairs, Salvation Army]

Thank you for the question.

I think, as you said, it's a systemic approach to creating a sustainable solution. As Barb said, for many of the women who enter our shelter, their length of stay has increased. We've gone from 15 or 16 days to up to 53 days that they have to stay, because there is that gap in the spectrum of housing supply in that supportive, deeply affordable space.

That is the space these women need to enter, because there is an aspect of financial control. They haven't had access to the funds. They haven't been allowed to work. They need an affordable rental, and that supply has been drying up. We need increased investment in that space, absolutely. We don't want individuals to stagnate in their survival process. Once they have reached out for help, if there's not continuous momentum, there is a real danger that they will go back to their abuser. That's why we need to have the supply, so that they can move quickly through.

The other side of that is the support services. These are lifelong support services. This is an abuse that puts a mark on your soul for the rest of your life. It opens up on a random Tuesday. It opens up on special occasions. It's a piece that will live with you.

What we're seeing for the immediate service need is that we're looking at a community hub model. We spoke about the dangers: I'm having to go to a lawyer to seek custody; I'm going to the shelter to see how I can have housing support; I have to go to someone else to see an employment counsellor. Every time I leave, my life is at risk. How do we centralize these services into one location, or somehow into a community hub model, so that there's one place I can go and access all of my services and I'm not at risk long term?

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

It sounds like these women are very courageous. Thank you for for that.

[Barbara Ridley]

Can I add just one more thing?

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Yes. Then I have a question for Ms. Pigeau.

[Barbara Ridley]

I'll make it quick.

What we do know for sure is that the police definitely need further education on this. I also know that we need a really robust education plan throughout our country so that women know what it is and actually feel safe enough to get the help they desperately need.

Thank you.