Justice committee  I'll be brief because I think everything has been said. My name is Suzanne Zaccour, and I'm the Director of Legal Affairs for the National Association of Women and the Law. NAWL is a not-for-profit organization that works to advance women's rights in Canada, including in the l

Public Safety committee  I appreciate the question. I want to add a little pre-answer: Every time we take a position on anything, we're always asked, “Is there not another, better way, and is that going to be sufficient?” Every time, we say we want to reach full equality and will take every necessary st

Public Safety committee  I'm not able to take a position on that on behalf of the coalition because that's not the viewpoint that we're here to represent. If guns are identified as not reasonably used for hunting, then they're not reasonably used for hunting. However, whether there should be an exempti

Public Safety committee  Thank you for the opportunity to speak. There are a lot of stakeholders in this debate and everyone recognizes that indigenous people should be consulted in this debate, and I might add indigenous women and indigenous women's associations. There's been a divide between the hunte

Public Safety committee  I certainly echo the comments we just heard. Safety is paramount and the risks must not be a secondary consideration. This proposal is in keeping with that idea.

Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to answer the question. It's important to know that intimate partner violence is often not reported. It's often invisible. Coercive control is not necessarily even criminalized. It's not that simple to say that it's only where there is i

Justice committee  We believe it is still worth taking the time, now that perhaps the dust has settled. I know that misinformation was a concern for Parliament. We believe there's still good reason to amend the law and to close a gap, but also to clarify and make the law easier to apply.

Justice committee  We certainly hope so.

Justice committee  Certainly the argument can be made that if it's foreseeable that you're going to lose control.... If we believe the necessity of this defence, and the whole premise is that when you lose control, you lose control and there is no telling what you're going to do, then it seems suff

Justice committee  Professor Grant talked about getting rid of it, which is certainly a worthwhile suggestion. Assuming that the provision was here to stay, I would say that the risk of an individual becoming violent and the risk of them losing control over their behaviour are each sufficient, on

Justice committee  One of the problems is that a good many people become intoxicated but don't necessarily know what they are consuming or how much. How many beers does it take for extreme intoxication to become foreseeable? Is it five, 10, 15, 20, 25 or 30 beers? I don't know. That's why the peopl

Justice committee  Thank you. If I could, I will just maybe react to the preamble to your question. It had a preamble, contrary to the law—we advocated for it to have a preamble. I guess the question I can send back to you is, were we useful today? How useful were we? I say “we” meaning NAWL an

Justice committee  Yes. As a sexual assault law scholar, I can say that application is always our biggest concern. I wouldn't say that the law is perfect and the problem is application. We have concerns with the law. We believe that the law is feeding and giving possibilities for the application to

Justice committee  Can I answer?

Justice committee  It's not a standard. As Professor Grant explained, the standard is “marked departure”. What is given in the subsection we're criticizing is factors. It's always the question, why these two factors? What were all of the other factors that you decided not to include in the law, and