Hon. Michèle Audette: [Editor’s Note: Senator Audette spoke in Innu-aimun.]
Thank you very much to the Anishinaabe people. My dear friend, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, this is a message for you, but mostly I’m rising in this chamber to talk about a bill that is important to some, that scares others and that does all of that at the same time for me. My colleague Senator Senior did a great job of explaining that.
I come from an isolated community. We can only get in or out by plane. In the winter, we travel by skidoo, on the ice roads or by train. When a small initiative could help to save a woman or a man, I need to think carefully to ensure that this initiative will in fact support an individual or family.
For me, this bill is much more than a bill. It is a matter of justice, a matter of protecting children, families and communities. Every day, we realize that this type of violence often goes unseen. It is often hidden or invisible, even for me. It is thanks to you that I learned this word. Before that, I normalized this sort of behaviour or called it a form of harassment.
Where I come from, we like to take a holistic approach. We have to consider all aspects, all the parties involved, and our current context, in other words, our culture and our way of doing things. However, in my world, among the Innu, we’ve come to accept this repetitive behaviour, this form of manipulation, this harassment, this control, this humiliation. We tell ourselves that it’s part of life and wonder why we should report it, when that’s just the way it is. Thank you to the senators who explained it so well in their speeches so far.
Sometimes this violence will be physical, but we hear less about that. It’s more a form of coercive control, but it can really affect a family. When I say “physical,” it does has an effect on your self-esteem, on how you get up in the morning and say to yourself, “Do I deserve to live? Do I deserve everything that’s happening to me? Is this normal?” You’ll understand why I always say “normal.”
Many of you have shared personal experiences from your youth. It’s the same where I come from, when you see the person you love the most — for me, it was my mother — be controlled by someone from the outside who wants to change who she is and how she behaves with her own children and her environment, to the point where she ended up saying, “That’s life, my girl.” Yet I knew that deep down she was afraid. She was caught in a cycle of violence, but she knew it wasn’t normal.
The community saw it too. People saw it. Collectively, we normalized it all. However, people knew that she deserved better, and today, we still believe that she deserves better. As I said, she was noticed, and at one point, we felt powerless. I was young. I didn’t know that I could file a complaint, and even if I had, what response would there have been? We didn’t even have real police in our community. They were supernumeraries, people we tapped on the shoulder — because the band council had that authority — and who were told, “You, you’re a supernumerary.” They had no training to respond to spousal or family violence, much less the kind of violence we call “coercive violence.” The word didn’t exist in my world.
When I looked at Bill C-332, I said to myself, we have an opportunity here. The world isn’t perfect. People want to change the Criminal Code, not in bits and pieces, but with a major overhaul so that it is better adapted to who we are as women, as men, and as individuals in 2025. Alas, that is what we get as a society and as a democracy: precious little bits at a time.
Words are important to me. We need to give a voice to this invisible violence. That voice will protect my mother, these women, these girls, these little girls. It will break one form of the cycle of violence that I referred to as silent earlier. We have heard a man stand up, a brother, a colleague, a senator, who wants to join us in denouncing the many forms of violence that women and girls experience across Canada.
This feminism is seen in the Innu communities where the men are part of the problem, but also part of the solution. We carried them, we brought them into the world. We want these men to be our warriors, our protectors, for them to take care of us and to reclaim the place that they lost to colonialism. Remember that great National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and Call to Justice 5.3, which called on every government, including the federal government, to reexamine the issue and reform the legislation on sexual violence and intimate partner violence, utilizing feminist perspectives and the realities of indigenous women and girls.
I think I’m going to cry, but I’ll be strong. A year ago, I had to leave you because I received a call that no mother ever wants to get. My son was on the other end of the phone. He’d been stabbed with a knife, thinking he’d been in love with the right person. We saw him change, grow smaller, become crushed and then extinguished. We thought, this isn’t normal. “Stand up for yourself. You’ve got rights. There are organizations out there for you, there are things for you, you have the right to live.” No, he wouldn’t listen. He was stuck in a way of doing things. Again, I didn’t know the term “coercive control” back then, but friends here — lawyers, experts, feminists and people who had lived through the same thing — they told me, “Here is what you can do as a mother.” It was the same in my family. I kept my son on the other end of the line and I told him, “You’ll survive, you can do it.”
Today, he is holding together, standing tall and strong. He is healing, but it upset us a lot. At the same time, today, with his little daughter, we always say, “We’re going to learn these words, we’re going to change the laws together, we’re going to amend them, we’re going to shake them up and we’re going to speak out. We’re going to make sure of that, not just for you, Uapin, but for all the men and women who didn’t have the capacity, courage or strength to make it this far.” That’s because it’s tough to be courageous when you’re caught up in such violence.
I’m sharing all this with you from the bottom of my heart as a passionate mother — I think you’ve seen that before — but also as someone who’s convinced that we need to make every little bit of effort we can to save a life or several lives, to change mindsets. We could also give police officers the ability to say, “Yes, I can do something. Right now, I don’t have a framework that allows me to act, to be able to support victims and say that we had noticed the coercive control within the family, because this isn’t the first complaint to be made.” I’ve often heard police officers say in a major investigation that they didn’t have a legal framework, so they couldn’t do anything. Even if you try to give them gender-based training, as police officers, they can’t do anything because they don’t have a legal framework.
The fact is the police aren’t always welcome in Indigenous communities, and the justice system is definitely no better. The evidence is clear. There is overcrowding, incarceration. It’s unbelievable. We beat all the statistics.
Once again, for me, it’s zero tolerance. I say no to violence of any kind. I’m going to fight or motivate people to make sure that when we study this bill, we look for blind spots, places where we’ve been told to be careful, because if we head in that direction, it might have an impact on the larger community of women, of Indigenous women, and so on.
At the same time, we need to ensure that we’re doing it all for the right reasons, and that we’re going to talk about awareness, training and education; we can’t just accept it like that. This bill requires a holistic approach.
As a mother and grandmother, I want to be part of this change. I therefore hope that we will study this bill in committee. Thank you.