On October 28th, less than a year after the federal government passed Bill C-48, which tightened up the Criminal Code provisions dealing with bail, Ontario’s government issued a media release calling on the feds to make “concrete changes that will tighten bail legislation to protect public safety and keep repeat and violent offenders off the streets.”
Talk about politicking. With both federal and provincial elections on the horizon for Ontarians, Doug Ford and his cronies have tossed some breadcrumbs to their far-right supporters while also making a strike against the federal “soft on crime” Liberals.
The measures Ford’s government is calling on Trudeau’s government to implement can sound reasonable. With regular media stories about crimes committed by people while they are on bail, it’s not hard to see why many people are frightened and want to see all those bad guys locked up somewhere to keep them off the street.
However, what Ford wants to see the federal government do would not do much to keep our communities safer. In fact, these changes have to potential to make some bad situations worse and to significantly infringe on people’s Charter and human rights.
With respect to intimate partner violence specifically, as I wrote last fall in response to Bill C-48, tightening up bail will have a number of negative consequences for survivors of IPV and their families. These will only be exacerbated by this most recent call for further restrictions.
We know what we need to do
We do need improved systemic responses to IPV. We know what needs to be done, and it’s not this.
Thanks to the verdict in 2022’s CKW inquest in Renfrew County, the final report of the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission, the recommendations of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and the Roadmap for the National Action Plan on Violence Against Women and Gender-Based Violence, we have an impressive list of what needs to change and suggestions for how to make those changes.
So let’s do it
I spent just a few minutes looking at the CKW inquest recommendations and came up with some suggestions for what the provincial government could and should be doing to address intimate partner violence and keep survivors, their children and communities safe. None of it is rocket science. All of it has been talked about before – many times before – and is reinforced by the annual reports of Ontario’s Domestic Violence Death Review Committee, academic and community-based research and, sometimes, plain old common sense.
- Create an advisory and accountability council consisting of community and government experts to discuss ways to address IPV in Ontario. This could be a bigger and better version of the violence against women roundtable that was implemented during Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government and shut down within months of Doug Ford being elected. (Recommendation 2 calls for an independent IPV commission.)
- Pass Bill 173 to declare IPV an epidemic in Ontario. The government’s insistence that further study is needed (it’s not) almost guarantees this Bill won’t pass before the next election. (Recommendation 1 calls for this declaration, which has been made by close to 100 municipalities across the province.)
- Review Ontario’s mandatory charging policy, which has led to inappropriate charging and criminalization of survivors. Let’s learn from the past to prevent making the same mistakes in the future. (Recommendation 58 calls for a comprehensive, independent and evidence-based review, with particular attention to the unintended negative consequences of mandatory charging.)
- Meaningfully explore restorative/transformative justice responses to IPV. (Recommendation 9 suggests that incorporating restorative justice and community-based approaches to IPV be explored to ensure safety and best outcomes for survivors.)
- Support municipalities to incorporate IPV in their community safety and well-being plans. (Recommendation 10 calls on the province to encourage this. While the provincial government cannot tell municipalities what to include in these plans, it could fund the development of a toolkit to assist those municipalities seeking guidance.)
- Adequately fund community-based services for those affected by IPV. (Recommendations 18 – 22 propose a variety of funding possibilities, including ensuring that funding for services is stable and recurring and that funding formulas recognize the unique needs of rural communities.)
- Expand public education about IPV. (Recommendation 23 proposes a new approach that would promote awareness as well as increase people’s ability to identify warning signs and know what to do.)
- Provide meaningful programming for IPV perpetrators rather than one standard curriculum for everyone from first to repeat offenders and fund those programs so all those who need them can participate. (Recommendation 33 calls for partner assault response programs that are “not one size fits all.)
- Support probation services to monitor offenders properly and ensure there are consequences for non-compliance. (Recommendations 64 – 67 speak to a variety of changes to increase survivor safety while also supporting offenders to be accountable for their actions.)
We can’t sit back and trust that government will do what it should. It’s going in circles while women and children die. The recent call for tightened up bail rules is proof of that. It’s up to us.
I write about this in my book, And Sometimes They Kill You; to be released later this month:
“Responding to an all-of-society problem like the war on women requires an all-of-society approach. So far, most attempts to change our responses to intimate partner violence have been piecemeal . . . Excellent ideas that surface in reports, inquest recommendations and the like too often sit on shelves where they gather dust as the violence continues. . . . It really doesn’t matter where your passion lies, because change is needed everywhere. There’s room for everyone in this work, and there are lots of ways we can each do it. . . . With people bringing a range of perspectives and lived realities to the work, our analysis will be broader and more inclusive, and we’ll move closer to the ultimate goal of eradicating gender-based violence.”