Senator Pate: Thank you for the question. It’s the same thing that I have been saying here. In fact, I have spoken to those women. That was the most they felt they could get. They saw it as a way that the government could posit some support and appear to be dealing with violence against women. Some of them are from the same group who have now come forward in the CBC report that I mentioned in my comments. Those same groups are saying that this money could have been devoted to more bed spaces and might have had more effective use, because those in remote and rural communities were not being served by this.

So it goes back to the very point that I hope I have made clearly — but perhaps I haven’t, and thank you for the opportunity to rearticulate it — which is that it is not that women do not say they want this, but they say they want it when it is the only thing offered. That is the issue that I think we have to grapple with as a Senate.

Senator Pate: I do not disagree with you. There were some people who came before us, and as I mentioned at committee, there were many women who called who did not want to come and talk about their personal situation in front of our committee, some of whom we are meeting with to talk about, for instance, Senator Manning’s framework discussions and the legislation that he is promoting, because they very much saw the same issues that were being discussed.

The least comfortable thing about this for me is that I don’t doubt for one minute the objectives that Senator Boisvenu has. I hope you don’t doubt that I have the same objectives. The fact is that the current provisions are not used, that provisions that have been brought in place to protect women, like mandatory charging practices, have been used mostly against women, especially Indigenous and other racialized women, and have resulted in them being criminalized in the context of them trying to escape violence. But when the police come or the Crown hears a story and — you heard Senator Simons talk about Justice Sheila Greckol, and but for Justice Sheila Greckol’s decision, Helen Naslund would still be serving time in prison — 18 years — because everybody believed that she was the problem, not the man who kept her imprisoned in her home and raped her and shot at her and shot at her children for 37 years.

That is the crux of the problem. We’re not addressing it. Each time we add a new measure that heaps on more legal provisions, we increase the cost without increasing the effectiveness. That is where I think we have a responsibility in our role as senators to take this seriously.

It is with heavy heart that I stand up and talk about these things because I have no doubt that every one of us wants to stop this. However, will we have the wherewithal to actually do the hard work necessary to make this happen?

Thank you.

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