Madam Speaker, let me first just say that it is an honour and a privilege to formally second this bill, which has been presented by my friend, the member for Kamloops—Thompson—Nicola.
We all come to this place to leave our mark and make a difference. I think this piece of legislation is one of the ways there could be a measurable outcome. This bill would certainly do all of that. I strongly support it, as all members in the House should, because it would take meaningful and concrete action to protect people from the growing scourge of intimate partner violence, which has even been called an epidemic in Canada.
It seems like everybody has stories of their own experiences with intimate partner violence. We hear about it from a close friend or family member. We read about it online or on social media. In some cases, we have heard in the House that members have experienced it themselves.
I will never forget something that happened in my first month of being a member of Parliament, when I was so ill-equipped for this job, not knowing what was ahead. A woman sat across from me, veiled behind a brave smile. Her long sleeves were covering bruising, and her face was masked with heavy makeup in some places. She claimed, with a quiet confidence, that when she told me she had tripped, she knew I would understand what she was saying without my ever asking for any more details.
The story she eventually told made me realize that, in that moment, behind closed doors, every single word in her old life had been a weapon, and every single apology had been a trap. It all started with control, not fists. Then came the fear. Then came the silence, and for her, then came the isolation. The story she told me ended long after it first began. She ended up packing a small bag. It took all the courage she had. Her first step out of her door was her first step to freedom.
These are the stories of survivors, the ones we have to believe, the ones who have to be protected. We blur out the details of these stories not for effect, but to protect those who are still silently struggling, long after they have walked out the door. I just want to say to those who may be watching today, that if this is them, they should please talk to a police office, please talk to somebody they trust.
This does not always look like that textbook experience that happened to me in my first month on the job. Keira Kagan’s story was different. It was a story from right within my own community, a story that happened among my own peer group. Keira was a bright, beautiful four-year-old girl. She had a smile that would light up a room and a sense of curiosity that made everyone around her know that someday she would go places, but tragically, she never got there. She will never graduate from school, start a career, start a family or have kids of her own.
Keira was killed five years ago by her father in a horrific act of domestic violence. Her life was stolen from her before it had hardly begun. The warning signs were all there. At least 22 different risk factors were identified in a report released after Keira’s death. Her father was in a custody battle with her mother, Jen. He had a history of mental illness and domestic violence against Keira’s mother and against other partners. He displayed misogynistic attitudes, threatened others and even committed acts of violence against pets. However, despite all of that, despite all the red flags, the warning signs and the cries for help, Keira was still released into her father’s custody in what can only be described as a colossal failure of the system. She was killed just a few days later.
In the last Parliament, the House unanimously passed a bill called Keira’s law, which expanded training for judges to include domestic violence and coercive control. The bill introduced by my hon. friend picks up where that bill left off by modernizing the detention of seized evidence, forcing those convicted of domestic violence to be released only by a judge and treating the murder of an intimate partner as first-degree murder.
Creating specific offences matters, such as the specific offences of the assault of an intimate partner and criminal harassment of an intimate partner, and these could have helped in the tragic story of Keira. The legislation would allow the courts to detain the accused of intimate partner violence at any time for a risk assessment, the kind of assessment that would be done before, not after, things go wrong. That kind of assessment could have saved Keira's life. We cannot and should not be complacent in fighting this scourge in the House.
In just 10 years, intimate partner physical assault has increased by 14%, harassment is up 38% and intimate partner sexual assault is up a whopping 163%. We could talk all day about the reasons this is happening, but nobody can deny that the lack of accountability in our justice system is a major reason intimate partner violence and crimes of all types are running rampant and are out of control in this country.
Let us take another case of somebody we have talked about in the House. Her name was Bailey McCourt. Bailey's partner, James Plover, was convicted of three counts of uttering threats and one count of assault by strangling in the case of intimate partner violence. He was released on bail, and he killed Bailey that very same day. She died in a parking lot, after being beaten with a hammer. If our bail laws had been fixed, James Plover would not have been allowed out on bail and Bailey would be alive today, to be the mother to her children.
Her family is watching right now. I spoke to her aunt in the lobby just a few minutes ago, and she is absolutely disgusted that this bill will not be supported by the other side. She is disgusted at the comments coming from the other side. The same could be said for the over 120,000 victims of intimate partner violence in 2023 alone.
Every case of this is not just a statistic that we talk about in Parliament as a number. It is not an excuse for the government to tell Canadians, when they ask serious questions about the government doing something on bail, that it is coming tomorrow, next week, next month or someday. Even one case of intimate partner violence should be enough to make this place act.
Every preventable act should be a wake-up call to get people in the chairs in this place to do something about it. Instead, the changes Conservatives propose in this place on the bail system or on sentencing requirements to the Criminal Code are voted down time and time again, only to again be told that it is coming tomorrow. However, for Bailey, Keira and countless others, tomorrow never comes. Every day that we delay is another day for serial abusers to harass their victims without consequences, for more men and women to suffer physical and emotional trauma and for innocent lives to be put in danger.
Taking action someday, frankly, just is not enough. Someday will not put the bad guys in jail. The message now to anyone watching and everyone on the other side is this: They should act now before more preventable tragedies happen, because the only thing worse than a case of intimate partner violence is a case that we had the ability to stop.
This piece of legislation would save lives. It would prevent escalation of intimate partner violence. It would stop the warning signs when they first occur, and it would keep those with a track record of violence behind bars. Police unions have told us we need this. Advocacy groups, frontline workers, women and victim survivors have all told us they need this. They all told us to strengthen the penalties of intimate partner violence, to automatically make murder of an intimate partner first-degree murder, regardless of why or how it happened. They told us, most importantly, to put victims first, and that is exactly what my colleague's bill would do.
I can only hope that everybody in this place reconsiders, stands up, does the right thing, remembers exactly why we came here and supports this piece of legislation.