44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 10, 2023 10:00AM
- Mar/10/23 11:47:52 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, in July 2020, Katie Telford, the Prime Minister's chief of staff, testified before a House of Commons committee on the We Charity scandal. In May 2021, she testified before a House of Commons committee with regard to sexual misconduct. Now the Liberal government is preventing her from again testifying under oath before a House of Commons committee.
When will the Liberal government end its filibuster, and allow the Prime Minister's chief of staff to testify on Beijing's foreign interference?
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- Mar/10/23 12:26:19 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise on behalf of the people from Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo. I want to thank my colleague on the justice committee and in the House from Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke. This is an area that is close to my heart, and I anticipate speaking to this issue in a few minutes. It is certainly something that causes great concern.
I am curious what my colleague thinks about the penalties we should be ascribing to this behaviour. It should obviously be looked at as criminal behaviour, based on the report. That is fairly clear. Would he see this as being something where we should be looking at having a deterrent effect in sentencing? I am curious to have his thoughts on that.
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- Mar/10/23 12:29:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise on behalf of the people of Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo.
I listened to my colleague's intervention on this issue, and what struck me was when he talked about recognizing the pattern of behaviour as itself violence. All too often, it seems as though we have looked at what we often call a “crime cycle” or a “cycle of violence”, and we do not look at the antecedents themselves as violence even though those things are really part of what makes up the offence.
I am very proud of my wife. I am going to give her a shout-out here as I stand up. She runs two free legal clinics that often deal with people who have been abused, particularly in the intimate partner violence setting, and people who are struggling to get away from their abusers. One of the things she reports to me that really captivates my interest, if you will, and really beckons to my concern on this point is the fact it is incredibly difficult to get police resources devoted to these types of things. I am wondering if my colleague might be prepared to comment on that.
I know that the NDP might have different views on police resources and things like that, but at this point, the police are stretched very thin and sometimes it is difficult to have the resources to police this matter. This is incredibly important, and we know that so many intimate partners end up the victims of homicide. I wonder what my colleague's thoughts are on that.
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- Mar/10/23 12:35:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise on behalf of the people of Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo. I will offer a comment to my colleague, especially based on what he just said.
It is very important, as he mentioned, to recognize victims. If we look at the Criminal Code, “victim” is actually defined very broadly. Anybody who is impacted by an offence can submit a victim impact statement, for instance. I commend my colleague for recognizing that because far too often, children are, themselves, victims by virtue of seeing this type of violence or seeing any violence, for that matter, and part of stopping the cycle of violence within a relationship is stopping it so children do not see it any further.
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- Mar/10/23 12:42:13 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise on behalf of the people of Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo.
I am going to follow up on the last point my friend and colleague just made, which was in regard to sentencing.
I know he mentioned Bill C-5, and we may have some disagreement on minimum penalties. For instance, if memory serves, the maximum penalty for assault is five years when proceeded by an indictment and two years less a day when proceeded summarily.
Does my colleague believe or agree that perhaps we need to elevate the maximum sentences when it comes to intimate partner violence?
I would point out a couple of things. One is the fact that the Criminal Code talks about people who are vulnerable, and when we talk about the cycle of violence, we are in fact talking about people who are vulnerable. The second is that the Criminal Code mentions that it is an aggravating feature to abuse one's intimate partner.
Given those factors, would he propose raising the maximum sentences for people who abuse their intimate partners?
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- Mar/10/23 12:47:20 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise on behalf of the people from Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo. This is questions and comments, so this is a comment to my colleague and friend on the other side of the floor.
What we are talking about here really is victims, who are vulnerable. One of the things I found quite dismaying is that when it came to the ombud for victims, that position was left unfilled for months and perhaps even years. I cannot recall off the top of my head.
It is difficult because when we are talking about intimate partner violence, the victims we are dealing with are some of the most vulnerable and marginalized. This ombud would be the type of person who would presumably help those victims, so I just wanted to express that here we are talking about victims, particularly in the most vulnerable of settings, but that position was left unfilled for a significant period of time. It is just an inconsistency. I would have liked to have seen the government fill it earlier.
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- Mar/10/23 12:50:40 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to rise on behalf of the people of Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo. I did not anticipate speaking today. I know I have 20 minutes, so if the Chair would indulge me, I would like to do a couple of quick shout-outs.
One shout-out is to my niece, Juliana Bradley. She came into this world 23 years ago. I was a criminology student with a lot of hair back then. I still remember going to the hospital from Simon Fraser University, travelling to Kamloops that night on a Greyhound bus and holding her in my arms. We cannot travel by Greyhound anymore. Juliana is 23 today, and we are proud of the young woman she has become. She is a force, and I am proud to be her uncle. Through you, Mr. Speaker, I say happy birthday to Juliana.
The second shout-out I want to give goes back to my being trapped in the airport in Toronto early Monday morning. My wife and I did not have a flight. We missed our flight to Ottawa. Julie and Bernard Caravelles rented a minivan and gave us a ride to Ottawa here in the middle of the night. We got here at about 5:30 or 6 a.m. They are actually both retired civil servants. Both worked for the Canadian government. It turned out that Julie and I had a mutual contact because we were both parole officers a number of years ago. They did not know anything about us, but they were generous enough to open themselves up to us, as perfect strangers, and give us a ride in their vehicle. This is the type of generosity that, in my view, defines Canada. I wanted to take a minute or two to recognize that. My thanks to them, Julie and Bernard, who are now in Hansard.
I am going to speak mostly from the heart here today. I did not know that I was going to be giving a speech on this issue when I first arrived today, so much of what colleagues are going to hear is essentially from the heart. I have a few notes jotted down. I want to speak about the broader issue of intimate partner violence that is specifically addressed in this report. I was not a member of Parliament here during the 43rd Parliament, but obviously, I am now here. It is a pleasure and an honour, as of late, to be on the justice committee.
We are talking about the reports that my colleague has tabled here. We are looking at intimate partner violence, and within that, we are specifically addressing the discussion around controlling and coercive behaviour. When we look at this, in my view, we have to recognize that this type of conduct straddles every single socio-economic group. This is not something that happens behind closed doors for people who are poor or only people who are rich. This is something that happens and impacts every group. It may go unsaid more often in upper-class settings, but that does not mean it is not happening. It is perhaps under-reported in those instances. That is what makes intimate partner violence a unique subset of offences. Impaired driving is another one, but there are not a lot of offences that really straddle all groups and that impact so many socio-economic groups as intimate partner violence does.
This is something that the House has to get serious about. I may have even raised it in my maiden speech, my first speech in the House of Commons. When we talk about this, I often refer to my wife. She is my better half. She is much smarter.
Mr. Kevin Lamoureux: No argument from this side.
Mr. Frank Caputo: Mr. Speaker, yes, my much better half, as my colleague from behind me said, and there is no argument from my colleague from Winnipeg. She is much better looking. I do not know if there would be an argument on that either. He just threw up his hands, for the record. She is much smarter, much wiser and much more charming, and I am indebted to her for the work she does. She has told me stories about women who come to her terrified in this setting.
If we look at the Criminal Code, section 810, which I believe the intimate-partner violence report references with regard to peace bonds, was dealt with historically through a peace bond. For people out there watching, a peace bond means that a person has a reasonable ground to fear another person. It does not even need to be in an intimate-partner setting. It can be in any setting.
Peace bonds are often used as part of a plea bargaining process when the original charge is assault. However, the peace bond process is like a trial. The police have to submit a report to Crown counsel, and Crown counsel, in British Columbia anyway, will approve that charge. When I say “charge” I mean counsel will approve the allegation. Then there is disclosure. It is essentially a full-blown trial for this hearing about whether or not a person has reasonable grounds to fear someone. However, let us say something happens January 1, 2021. That matter may not get to trial until January 31, 2022, for instance, which is a full 13 months. I believe the maximum duration or the typical duration of a peace bond is 12 months. This is generally quite inadequate.
I do not know if other jurisdictions have this, but in British Columbia, a person who has grounds to fear someone can, on sworn evidence or on affidavit evidence, go to the full court under provincial legislation and get a court order prohibiting contact. I did not practise law in this area so I am just paraphrasing here, but that is my understanding. This court order is done ex parte, which means there is no notice to the person who is the subject of the order.
For anybody who may be watching on CPAC or anywhere else, be aware that some provincial legislation may allow a person to go to court, literally today or tomorrow, to sign an affidavit, which is a sworn document, and have their lawyer present it to a judge. Once that document is served on the person whom there is a reasonable ground to fear, that person can no longer have any contact with the person who signed the affidavit. If they do, they will be subject to a Criminal Code offence.
Coercive behaviour is, in my view, part of what sometimes in justice circles we call the “cycle of violence”. Members may have heard me say there is an “offence cycle”, as people do not just go from zero to 60 such that one second they are not offending and the next second they are. There are often antecedents, and one of those antecedents or precursors, if you will, might be drinking too much. It might be dysfunction in the relationship. It might be manipulation itself. Those things will almost always, from what I have seen, precede an offence, such as uttering a threat, or assaultive behaviour, which is the laying on of hands without consent, sexual assault or anything like that when it comes to the intimate-partner violence.
When we are talking about an offence cycle, it is my view that controlling and coercive behaviour really is the offence cycle. What we are trying to do here, as the report addresses, is ensure that the offence cycle itself is criminalized based on the report. We can never forget that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.
I hope the House will indulge me as I share some anecdotes from my experience. They really go back to the cycle of violence. They play into this notion of controlling and coercive behaviour. Up to this point, we have been talking about coercive and controlling behaviour in the context of what precedes the offence, but controlling and coercive behaviour occurs after the offence as well.
Typically when there is an allegation of assault or of uttering threats, an accused person will be put on conditions under the Criminal Code. However, those conditions get enforced variably. Some people in law enforcement take them more seriously than others, and frankly, some accused persons take them more seriously than others.
Let us say we have somebody on a condition to stay away from their intimate partner, who is the victim in this instance. Then, regardless of that condition, the accused person gets to that intimate partner, either directly or indirectly. When I worked at the prosecutorial office, we would see about one person a day, in a relatively small community, walk up to our counter and say they want to drop the charges. It was almost always an intimate partner who would say that. I do not think I am really stretching to say that it was one intimate partner a day. We would often have to explain that it is not their decision to drop the charges. This is not the United States, where someone can say they want charges or they do not. The Crown, His Majesty in this case, makes that decision.
I was always really bothered by that, as people were clearly victimized. Sometimes, if it was my case, I would bring them in and talk to them, and they would say they want to drop the charges. Sometimes we would actually have to play their 911 call. For those who have not listened to a lot of 911 calls, they are pretty harrowing. If someone is calling 911, they are calling for a reason. They are scared because there is an emergency.
We would see somebody who had clearly been victimized and had been part of this coercive behaviour over the course of months listen to their 911 call from six months earlier, when they said they were petrified or they had just been abused by their partner. Then they would say they want to drop the charges because they love this person, they do not want to see them punished or they are fearful. These are the things the report gets to. I am mindful of the fact that these are underlying problems. As it has often been asked, how do we deal with these underlying issues? I am not going to say that this is not a huge issue.
Another thing I would often ask an intimate partner in this setting is if they had children. Let us say their daughter is the one who made the 911 call. Would they be giving them advice to take the action they are taking? A number of them would be taken aback by that, and that was the point.
Again, we do not want the cycle of violence to continue. However, if we look at justice system participants, look at statistics or just sit in court, it is really difficult to see that oftentimes, it is the same people, the same abuser and the same complainant. If there are three sets of charges, one from January, another one in April and another one in July, we are fooling ourselves to think that this conduct was only about the assaultive behaviour that occurred in January, April and July. There were intervening events typically marked by what the report calls “coercive behaviour”, so there is certainly a reason to address this.
Criminal law does not capture this issue. This is something my colleague from the NDP stated. I believe he has a private member's bill on this point, and I look forward to discussing and debating it, because criminal law does not really capture this.
It does not capture another thing. I am probably not letting the cat out of the bag her too much, but it is something I am looking at for a private member's bill as well. Right now, if a person assaults their intimate partner, they get the exact same charge as a person who assaults somebody at a bar, at a pub or on the street. It is in section 266 of the Criminal Code. It just goes down as an assault. Our Criminal Code, in its charging section, does not distinguish between assaulting an intimate partner and assaulting a stranger, assaulting a best friend or assaulting anybody else. There is no distinction.
It is the same with uttering threats. The person who is most likely to get threatened, in my view, anecdotally, is an intimate partner. Again, the Criminal Code does not distinguish between uttering a threat against an intimate partner and uttering a threat against a person on the street or something like that.
What troubles me about that is the sentence, therefore, is the same. If we are going to say that this is an insidious event that occurs far too frequently across all sorts of socio-economic groups and that we are going to come down on it, why do we treat assaulting one's partner the same way as we treat assaulting somebody at the pub? It makes sense that we should be treating it more seriously, and we would be treating it more seriously by making the penalty more serious.
It is great to say this is more serious, but if the penalty is identical, Parliament is communicating that it is not, itself, any different. We can talk about it, but when the rubber hits the road, what is the law on the books? We can have aggravating features in the Criminal Code, but I call on the House to make that change, particularly to the assault section under section 266, the uttering threats section under section 264.1, the assault causing sections and the aggravated assault section.
If anyone wants a parallel, simply look at the peace officer domain. There is a discrete section regarding assaulting a peace officer. Anyone who assaults a peace officer has committed an assault, but Parliament has chosen to say that, if anyone assaults a peace officer, it will be a discrete offence. We do not do that when it comes to intimate partners. Given what this report tells us, it is something that I believe the House should do. When we look at intimate partner violence as a leading element of homicides, which I believe from my criminology days was about 50%, that is something we should be addressing.
I will now get to some of the recommendations in this report. Recommendation 1 talks about acknowledging the significant harms and that these harms are not captured in the code itself. Recommendation 2 makes a further statements to that. Recommendation 3 talks about calling on “the federal government, the provinces and territories to implement measures to combat the challenges presented by the justice system for victims of coercive and controlling behaviour and intimate partner violence”.
What we often see is the cycle of violence continuing through what is often called secondary victimization. The primary victimization is the offence itself. The secondary victimization occurs based on that person walking through the justice system. Far too often, victims of intimate partner violence are having to navigate the justice system on their own.
I want to recognize victim services workers. They are often volunteers, some of them paid and paid far too little, who work for police organizations, especially in small towns. Those victim services workers are invaluable. They are so helpful to people in these settings, by attending courts. The amount of work they do and the quality of work they do has to be recognized. They are often the unsung heroes, when it comes to victims getting to court. They are often there for marginalized people, for vulnerable people and for people who are experiencing coercive control on a daily basis.
At the end of the day, we all have a role to play. My view was that when an intimate partner violence file came across my desk, I would try call the victim as early as I could, because this is simply a different type of offence. The victims are incredibly vulnerable. They are most vulnerable after a breakup, and when there is a no-contact condition, that could lead to significant violence between them.
Recommendation 4 talks about increasing funding and adequate levels of support and counselling.
I am not sure if my colleague from Cumberland—Colchester has already tabled his bill but, if not, I believe he will have a forthcoming bill about whether we should be taxing counselling services.
To me, counselling services are already expensive. I imagine people pay anywhere between $100 and $300 an hour for a counsellor. If we are going to address trauma at its root, that addressing should be done in a manner that is affordable. The government should not be getting in the way of that by adding costs to it. These events themselves can often be traumatic, not only traumatic at the time but also, as I said, in the process that a person goes through.
This leads me to recommendation 5, which talks about training, and that training being trauma-informed. We have the provincial legislation I referred to, but we do need to talk about this when it comes to training. Judges must be trained.
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- Mar/10/23 1:13:45 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I obviously have not referred to the report, but my colleague is often an expert on this. At the end of the day, we have to recognize that this type of offence is not going away. During the pandemic, it escalated. Any sort of mentality that we are instantly going to bring down the occurrence of offences, in my view, is not backed by anything I have seen at this point. I know that people often bring up sentencing and there are divergent viewpoints about that.
I can say this much. It really is disheartening for an outsider to see somebody who has been victimized as an intimate partner and see an unjust sentence levied when that intimate partner has so clearly been victimized.
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- Mar/10/23 1:15:53 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his work on the justice committee.
The Criminal Code is really quite convoluted when it comes to sexual assault of intimate partners. In Canada, we have a rule against the twin myths, although I do not have time to get into that. It certainly does not make it any easier on victims. I have had victims literally crying on the phone, asking “Can't you just deal with this so I don't have to go to court?” or “Can't you just get a peace bond?”, anything to avoid it, because they fear the system so much.
We have to find a balance that recognizes the presumption of innocence but also takes a trauma-informed approach to victims of sexual assault. In the past, it was so frequent that we thought about sexual assault as happening perhaps in relationships that were very new or when people were not married. We are in fact seeing more and more reports of sexual assault in long-term relationships. One of the most horrific sexual assaults I ever prosecuted involved an intimate relationship of some time. Seeing what that victim had to go through, and I believe she had to testify twice in the trial because of pretrial applications made by the defence, I believe this is an area that we, as a Conservative government, would address.
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- Mar/10/23 1:18:02 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the member asked about bail and firearms. I probably only have time to deal with one, so I am going to pick bail because that is a really significant issue.
In that case, it is actually a lack of action by the government. There was one action, which was to create a reverse onus. I believe it was if a person had a previous intimate partner violence offence; I would have to check that. What I am being told by people on the ground, including my wife, is that these no-contact offences are not being treated seriously. By no-contact, I mean that a person is released on a release order or their promise, perhaps at the scene, not to have any contact with the victim. The penalties that often accompany those types of offences are minimal.
If we want to stop intimate partner violence, and we talk about the cycle of violence, what are we communicating when we go easy on breaches of bail? The cycle of violence is perpetuated. If we say “Don't contact the victim” and they contact the victim, there is no meaningful consequence. That must end.
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- Mar/10/23 1:20:18 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, this is an excellent question.
In my experience, one of the reasons why people go back to their abuser is economics. That is what it is. The partner was the person who brought home most of the money, or they simply cannot afford to live apart in two residences. What does that do? It brings two people together, back into what was an otherwise toxic relationship.
I could not agree more. There need to be more services for people, particularly women, particularly marginalized and indigenous women who are themselves the victims of intimate partner violence. Far too often we see, to borrow the member's term, an ecosystem set up that does not prevent future offences but actually fosters future offences because the two parties invariably get back together, whether it be for emotional reasons, economic reasons or geography. That is something we need to address. I thank the member for raising that very salient point.
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- Mar/10/23 1:21:56 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, before I begin, our condolences go to Constable Pierzchala's family and anybody who has suffered from his passing.
It is not uncommon to see intimate partner violence joined by other offences. That is one thing that makes it so difficult. It can be a stand-alone defence. There could be a doctor who is alleged to have done this, or a lawyer, like me, or anybody. It spans all different socio-economic circumstances.
When I say “like me”, I mean I am a lawyer, not that I do these things. That is what I mean by that, because my colleague—
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