At Olivia Chow’s first city council meeting as mayor yesterday, she put forward a motion to help deal with the on-going issue of gender-based and intimate partner violence by wanting to declare it an epidemic.
If accepted, Toronto will be part of the 30 municipalities and regions in Canada that have declared this as an epidemic, joining the City of Ottawa, the Region of Peel and Renfrew County in the edict.
In a report from the Ontario Association of Interval & Transition Houses (OAITH), they found that in 2021 to 2022 there were 52 murders of women, or "femicide," in the province.
The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability (CFOJA) describes femicide as “the killing of all women and girls primarily by, but not exclusively, men.” From 2018 to 2022, they found that 850 women across Canada were killed from gender-based discrimination; that adds up to “at least one woman murdered every 48 hours.”
“We say ‘at least’ because not all accused are brought to justice. For many women and girls, no accused has yet to be identified and, for some, never will be. For other women and girls, their deaths – although likely a homicide – may never be officially designated as such,” says the CFOJA in their yearly report.
With the passing of this motion, city council is hoping to “urge provincial and federal governments to rightfully declare intimate partner and gender-based violence an epidemic,” they state in the mayor's first agenda item. They are also advocating for the term femicide to be added into the Criminal Code of Canada.
“Every 48 hours, a woman died because of intimate partner violence. That's just about the duration of council meetings,” says Chow in the council meeting.
With this item, Chow and city council urge the provincial and federal government to enact 85 recommendations for the inquest of the 2015 triple homicide in Renfrew County. The victims Carol Culleton, Anastasia Kuzyk and Nathalie Warmerdam all knew the perpetrator Basil Borutski. In the agenda, Chow writes that the inquest “[would] provide a roadmap to preventing intimate partner violence from escalating to femicide.”
The impact of intimate partner violence has already been acknowledged by the city in 2021 through Toronto Public Health the Intimate Partner Action Plan, which was done to address the issue.
“When you go through the violence in a marriage it is very difficult. I can tell you it was difficult because you felt ashamed and you felt like it was your fault. You didn’t talk about it but you lived it everyday,” says Coun. Julia Nunziata. “Women are coming forward now. They are not ashamed.”
The agenda item is currently amended and will need to go through at the next city council meeting.
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