This week’s brutal, broad-daylight murder of a Calgary woman by her estranged spouse at her workplace should never have happened.
This egregious crime has gutted the entire Calgary community. On behalf of all of my constituents I send my love and shared grief with the victim’s family, for whom this incredible tragedy has impacted the most.
At the time of the murder, the perpetrator was already facing domestic violence charges, and was subject to a no-contact order.
But also, notably and significantly, he had warrants out for his arrest for charges of harassment and stalking.
As Calgary Sun columnist Rick Bell outlined today, this murder was an obvious failure of the justice system. The murderer had been previously arrested and despite violating his bail conditions not once but twice, and was allowed to continue roaming the streets. Had the system worked he would have been returned to jail after violating his bail conditions and this murder could have been prevented.
But there is another failing in this case that demands action: the murderer had also been charged with stalking and harassment.
These are crimes that all too many Canadians fall victim to while simultaneously discovering there is little effective recourse available to them to make it stop. This phenomenon happens even though there are well-documented statistics which show that stalking and harassment often escalate into physical violence, especially when it involves an intimate partner.
In Canada, stalking is primarily codified in the federal Criminal Code under a term called criminal harassment, with other provisions related to uttering threats and intimidation. However, the existence of these laws and their useful application are two different matters entirely. The reality is that in Canada, many victims of these crimes experience barriers in reporting, difficulty being believed that the crime is happening, and - sometimes deadly - delays and hurdles in seeing their harasser brought to justice.
When these hurdles are contextualized in the motivations behind stalking and harassment, the magnitude of the problem becomes more apparent. Stalking and harassment are meant to exert power and control over another person without their consent. Intimate partner stalking and harassment will often overlap with a history of sexual violence and coercive control, with a high risk of escalating into further physical violence.
However, if you talk to any attorney worth their salt with a background in the area, you’ll find that in Canada, victims of stalking and harassment rarely are met with adequate responses from police. A high-profile case of Toronto police ignoring a woman’s pleas for help after receiving threatening messages from an ex-boyfriend - who later murdered her - is but one example in an ocean of incidents where victims haven’t been taken seriously or were dismissed outright. This lack of support means victims are left in highly vulnerable situations, lessens the likelihood of victims coming forward in time to prevent these behaviours from escalating into physical violence, and leads to anxiety, mental health issues, and familial and or workplace stress.
And even when police do act, Canada’s justice system is so backlogged and overburdened that long delays in getting any action result in the same net effect. Stalking and harassment, particularly from an ex-intimate partner, are so often linked to escalation to physical violence that time is of the essence. A long, mentally exhausting process to obtain something like a peace bond, a backlogged court system, and a catch-and-release bail system means the laws in place are often ineffectual.
Additionally, even when criminal harassment charges are eventually brought to court, the structure of current laws means victims are often subject to lines of questioning which are designed to prove things like whether or not they were “actually afraid.” These entire, lengthy, experiences often retraumatize victims.
For their part, there has been little acknowledgement of these issues by the federal government and much less in the way of formal action to rectify them. That doesn’t mean that the solutions aren’t out there. Here are some of them.
In addition to our existing laws needing to be strengthened and augmented (with direct input from victims advocacy groups), Canada needs much better and publicly accessible data on incidents of stalking and harassment. For example, lawmakers are hard-pressed to find statistics regarding metrics like how many reports are made vs. dismissed by police vs. investigated. Designing interventions that work and measuring if they work over the long term requires data showing the depth of the problem.
And the time it takes for a victim to obtain tools like a peace bond, no-contact order, or restraining order needs to be reduced. The justice process doesn’t need to be circumvented to achieve this; rather, the chronic system failures, such as the lack of judicial staff, must be addressed. The same principle should be applied to police. While awareness training for police would probably be helpful, law enforcement needs more human resources, including complementary social human resources, not less.
And, offenders who repeatedly violate the terms of tools like no-contact orders must be punished, not just repeatedly released to revictimize their targets.
When doctors find evidence of a cancerous growth, they won’t hesitate to remove it from a patient if it will prevent it from killing them.
It’s about time that the federal government and the judicial system started treating stalkers the same way.