Transcript from the House:December 2, 2008

Ms. Cheri DiNovo: The statistics are awe-inspiring. They’re horrendous. They’re absolutely an assault on the senses. These are the statistics: 51% of our population are abused or assaulted; one in every two women in Ontario experiences abuse or assault. What does that mean? That means, for those viewing at home and watching this discussion, when they look at their daughters, if they have two daughters, that one of those little girls is going to be abused or assaulted in her lifetime. That means that, if you look at your mother and your grandmother, one of those women is going to be abused or assaulted in her lifetime. That means, as you look around this assembly, that 50% of the members of provincial Parliament who are women have been abused or assaulted at some point in their lifetime. So the question is, are we doing enough? The answer is always, absolutely not.How are we failing women in this province? That is the question before us, because we are failing women in this province. How are we failing them? Let me list the ways. First and foremost, there isn’t any daycare. Only one in 10 families can find daycare. Now you ask, how does that contribute to violence against women? Well, it’s very simple: If a woman can’t find adequate daycare, she can’t escape an abusive relationship. If she can’t find an adequate place to stay-transition housing, a shelter; and there are not enough beds in shelters and there’s not enough transition housing for women escaping abuse-then she can’t escape abuse. Then this province condemns her to that abuse.

We can look at the Congo, we can look at Darfur, we can look at the horrors of the world; here, it’s more guerrilla warfare; here it’s one man against one woman in the quiet of their own home where no one else can see it, away from prying eyes. I can tell you, and we all know this, that it’s not a question of policing and it’s not a question of law enforcement, because the police don’t want to go there and they can’t enforce it. This goes on and on again. Seventy one cents on the dollar is what women make to every dollar that men make. That’s economic violence and that prevents women from having enough money to leave abuse. That’s about our pay equity laws in this province.

Just to conclude: a woman in my riding whom we are all familiar with now, Bernice Sampson, and her little girl Katelynn Sampson-look at that case. Here is a mother who suffers from addiction who couldn’t find rehab, who couldn’t find treatment for her addiction, who out of love goes to the criminal justice system, goes to family court, goes to whoever she can find who will listen and asks for someone to look after her child, and finds some people she thinks are okay. The family court system fails her and passes her child over to people who have a criminal record, who then kill in the most horrific way this little girl. How did we fail this mother? We failed her because we didn’t have a bed for her. We failed her because we didn’t have a social worker for her.

How did we fail Katelynn? We failed Katelynn because when the school phoned to find out why she hadn’t been in class for a few months, guess what the abusive foster parents told them? They told them that she was up at the reserve. Normally the school would send out a social worker to check on her whereabouts. The school didn’t have the funds to send out a social worker to check on this child’s whereabouts. Might I say, the blood of the violence against women in this particular instance is on all of our hands here in this assembly. We could have saved a child, we could have saved a mother, we could have saved a family, and we failed. So let us not pat ourselves on the back; this is not a partisan issue.

We have all failed all women in the province of Ontario. Women continue to be subjected to violence. It continues to be a violent subject. It continues to be a violent province for women, for our children, for our grandchildren and on and on. We know it’s not only in developing countries where the test of justice, both economic and civil, is how well women are treated. It is also the test of our own justice, whether economic or civil, how our Ontario women are treated. And guess what? We fail. We fail, this government fails, we continue to fail women and, until that stat changes, which has not changed in my lifetime, 51% of the population will be abused or assaulted. We have nothing to applaud and nothing to celebrate. We have something, however, to do.