Far too many people, especially racialized women and non-binary, trans and gender-diverse folks, experience sexual harassment and sexual violence. It’s common and it’s a brutal feature of the university experience, but I would like to say it is also an everyday experience.

I want to talk a little bit about—I support the bill, I think it’s useful, but I don’t think it addresses some very key aspects of why sexual violence and other forms of violence, particularly against racialized or somehow lower-on-the-gender-hierarchy people, who are subject to violence.

I’m just going to give a little bit of a story. I know we don’t have a lot of time, so I’m skipping through what I have to say, but let me tell you how often this happens in graduate school, where there is close one-on-one contact and where a student is utterly dependent on the support of their advisers for their future careers and for their future lives. These relationships are of necessity close, and they’re relationships of power.

What is missing for me in this bill is an understanding that we’re actually dealing with relationships of power and a culture of entitlement. I want to tie this also to what the member from Kiiwetinoong had to say about the violence of colonization experienced by Indigenous peoples, because it’s a violence that’s borne out of entitlement, the entitlement to dominate somebody else.

If you look at court cases about where Indigenous women have been raped and killed, you’ll be horrified, because so often, right up until today, the perpetrators are never punished. Those women are understood to be deserving of what they got. Part of what is taking place is that the perpetrators are reinforcing their sense of entitlement as male, as white and having the entitlement to act out their superiority over somebody with less power.

Now we see this with gender-non-conforming people; you see it with women, with people deciding to teach them a lesson. So we’re not talking just about sexual interest, sexual tension. We’re talking about sexual acts as an acting-out of a relationship of power, of proving oneself to be higher up in that hierarchy of who counts and who’s entitled to be dominant.

What I see as being completely necessary is a very big education piece. We need to understand what is meant by consent. I would like to see this government accept the bill that brings consent to younger people, so that people are actually learning and thinking about this at a young age. But I would also like to see all of us make the connection between something like Bill 28, which assumes an entitlement to exploit the lowest-paid workers to death—“They’re mostly women and they’re low down on the hierarchy. Who cares if they don’t get a living wage?” There is a sense of entitlement, that it is okay to pay people nothing—hardly anything—and expect them to work themselves to death. I connect this to this culture of domination, this culture of entitlement that is also connected to sexual violence, and the acting out of putting yourself in a pecking order and having somebody you can look down on to prove your superiority.

I want to say that yes, this bill is important for students, but it’s only one piece, and it’s not really going to change the culture of universities. It’s going to add a punitive element—excellent; if some people start to realize that they have to be accountable, excellent—but it is not going to change the culture until we really dig deep and start to look at what the formation of Canada is. On what basis was a whole group of people dismissed, raped, slaughtered, pillaged, whatever, and a whole new population brought in to replace them? On what basis? What kind of thinking does that reflect? That is the thinking of entitlement and the entitlement to dominate others. That’s got to be part of what goes into any program—