There’s a particularly cold prickle of fear that pops up when work leaves you feeling overtired, overwhelmed and under siege. It might seep in during a meeting, when your left eyeball starts to throb, or it might hit you later, when it takes far too long to realize your work pass will not open the door to your house. It lurks in the back of your mind when you’re wondering where exactly your short-term memory went, and it most definitely trickles in during the loneliest moment of your third consecutive night of insomnia.
With this nagging sense of dread comes a question you don’t want to answer: What is your job actually doing to you?
Most likely, you brush it off and get back to work. A roiling gut, a racing heart, that weird knot of pain in your shoulder — aren’t they just the price of admission to being employed in this sluggish, recessionary economy? “People think that stress is a normal part of work and everybody experiences stress, so theyjust have to suck it up and get over it,” says Mark Henick, a program manager with the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), who works with supervisors and employees across the country.
But as new research suggests, concerns that the modern workplace may be harmful to our health are well-founded. As dramatic as it may sound, work and the chronic stress that can come with it may be slowly killing us.
In a meta-analysis done earlier this year of 228 workplace studies, researchers from Harvard and Stanford found that workplace stress can be as toxic to the body as second-hand smoke. High job demands increase your odds of being diagnosed with a medical condition by 35 percent, and if you consistently work more than 40 hours a week (perhaps to meet those high demands), you are almost 20 percent more likely to die a premature death. Constant worry about losing your job, the meta-analysis found, raises the risk of developing poor health by 50 percent.
That’s not all: A review published in the Lancet in August showed if you work more than 55 hours a week, you are 33 percent more likely to have a stroke, while several studies confirm that long hours put you at a heightened risk of cardiovascular problems. And here’s some disconcerting news for anyone who checks email during meetings: High levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which is created when we multi-task, can cause the dendrites in the brain’s nerve cells to atrophy, leading to memory problems. Then there are the proven elevated risks of diabetes, anxiety and depression. And let’s not even talk about the dangers of a sedentary workday.
Dr. David Posen, a physician based in Oakville, Ont., who began to specialize in stress management 30 years ago, has catalogued a list of more than 125 early warning signs of chronic stress. In addition to headaches and chest pain, they include cold hands, compulsive shopping, even excessive sarcasm. “We weren’t designed to have ongoing stress,” he says. “It’s like driving your car in fifth gear all the time — it’s just not going to be good for the motor.”
Illustration, iStockphoto.
It’s not that we’ve become lazier, less able to meet demands or more emotionally fragile than previous generations; workplace culture has changed, and when it comes to our health, not for the better. Posen has seen an uptick of stress in patients ever since the recession in the early ’90s, when, he says, “companies basically kept hiving off people and telling the so-called lucky survivors to do more with less, pick up the amount of work that other people had been doing.”
Demands have only increased since then, as companies try to keep up with the pace of technology and the pressures of globalization. And as more boomers retire, workplaces are experiencing catalyzing shifts in culture and values. A 2012 study from Carleton and Western Universities confirms that the feeling of work-hour creep is real, reporting that 60 percent of white-collar workers in Canada log more than 45 hours a week. (And 54 percent of them say they take home more work, amounting to another seven hours a week.) The study also found that 56 percent of respondents who work long hours at demanding jobs have partners who do the same. And if you’ve ever had to negotiate who will handle the daycare pickup or conjure up dinner, you know that two busy people means twice as much stress.
The very modern conveniences that were supposed to make our jobs easier have, of course, made it easier to work any time of day or night. It’s liberating to take care of some tasks from the cottage or send work emails while at the dog park — unless, that is, you’re no longer getting satisfaction from completing those extra tasks, and the stress is outweighing the benefits.
It’s easy to blame the boss, and it’s true that some could benefit from having a bit more compassion alongside their strategic vision and unrelenting drive. But we shoulder some of the responsibility too. Even in the absence of explicit expectations that you will check email or monitor social media on weekends, people will “fall into that because of their own desire,” says Dorothy Kudla, founder of a training and development company, Full Circle Connections, who has worked with hundreds of managers at companies from BlackBerry to Cineplex Odeon.
Human beings, by their very nature, want to be successful and add value, Kudla says. But in a workplace that is constantly changing and where the goalposts keep moving, resentment and burnout can easily set in. And that, in turn, can lead to anxiety, depression and, if employees have poor coping strategies, addiction issues. It may also increase employees’ risk of developing lifestyle-related illnesses such as diabetes or angina.
For employers, it’s a bit of a Catch-22. They want to drive innovation and productivity, but to do so, they may need to ask employees to do less or at least change the way they work, says Joel Goh, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and one of the co-authors of the second-hand smoke study. “We need to think very carefully [about] not just what employers can do, what programs they can offer to mitigate stress, but what employers are doing to their employees in terms of stress.”
So what do you do? We’re told to prioritize and delegate. Work efficiently. Set goals. These are the motivational slogans of an autocratic boss who is herself a workaholic. But the thing is, no flextime policy will alleviate your tension headaches if you don’t solve the underlying issues of how you work.
You have to learn to “control your controllables,” says the CMHA’s Henick. “You can’t control how other people think or what other people do or the workload that other people are putting on you, but that’s that. You are in absolute control of your reactions.” (Tellingly, several of the experts consulted for this story requested that the interviews happen during regular hours, and they have a policy of not checking their email after 5 p.m.)
Posen exercises every day, and while he doesn’t expect his patients to adhere to his fitness routine, he does advise them to take better care of themselves. “When people are stressed out, they reach for something that will comfort them. The first things that they can think of are things like smoking, drinking, drugs and foods that are high in fat and sugar,” he says.
Dr. David Posen’s tips for reducing job stress
1. Leave work an hour earlier. “Never in 30 years have I had a patient who couldn’t get the same amount of work done in less time when they took better care of themselves.”
2. Spend that extra hour after work wisely. Book time for exercise, seeing friends, napping or even just sitting near something you find beautiful.
3. Take a micro-break every 90 minutes. Research shows that’s the longest we can concentrate intensely on something. “The best thing you can do is get up and walk away.”
4. Get a better night’s rest. To do this, Posen advises patients to slowly wean themselves off caffeine.
5. Work out. Every bit helps. Exercise drains off excess stress energy, so it lowers cortisol in the body, which can help reduce anxiety.
6. Change the way you think. Modify unrealistic expectations and try to identify problematic patterns. “Type A people need to slow down, and people pleasers need to learn how to say no occasionally.”
There is a big difference, however, between knowing your behaviour isn’t healthy and adopting better habits. Corporations have been trying to bridge that gap more aggressively in recent years by implementing wellness programs. While they are a positive step, these programs don’t address the root problems, Goh says. “With wellness programs, we are shifting everything to the employees. It’s like, ‘Well, if you are stressed, we’ll offer you counselling classes, we’ll give you free gym memberships and yoga classes so that you can deal with your stress and your unhealthy lifestyle on your own.’ ”
Despite the seemingly intractable problems in balancing what is good for business with what is good for our health, there is cause for optimism for the next generation. Workplaces are on the cusp of a major shift as boomers retire, and Kudla says she’s already seeing major changes in workplaces with younger staff. Unlike boomers, who tend to respect hierarchy and crave prestige, millennials prefer collaboration and seek out valuable experiences. And in the next few years, they will make up the majority of the workforce. Whereas boomers “were not necessarily willing to sacrifice promotion, millennials are not willing to sacrifice fulfillment,” Kudla says.
This quest for fulfillment may be the key. As Posen says, “When people are stressed, they don’t create as well, they don’t feel as engaged, they are distractible, they’re tired, and it’s costing the bottom line.” And the inverse is also true. If we are motivated, challenged and supported, not only will we be more productive — we’ll be healthier too.
Two years ago, a business-sized envelope arrived at my home in Canmore, Alta., from the maximum-security Edmonton Institution prison. It was from Omar Khadr.
I curiously pulled out three lined pages, his neat scrawl covering them front and back. He wrote that he had initially been afraid to read about my experiences as a hostage in my memoir, A House in the Sky, but that he was glad he did, because my fight to survive had resonated with him. He ended the letter, “Your friend, Omar. I hope it’s OK to call you a friend.”
Captured in 2002 by American forces in Afghanistan and charged with war crimes, Omar spent nearly 10 years imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. Omar was 15 when he was captured, severely wounded and partially blinded during the battle. His punishment has always been controversial, with many arguing that, guilty or not of the crimes, he was a child and should have been charged and treated as such.
Despite our differences, somehow, impossibly, unexpectedly and delightfully, we have become friends.
Omar and I have both received long-term psychological care from the same clinical psychologist, Katherine Porterfield. Porterfield is on staff at the Bellevue program for survivors of torture in New York City. She is one of the most renowned experts in North America on the effects and treatment of PTSD. Over the last three years, her expertise has shaped my recovery, as we Skype each week and visit when we can in
person. So profound is my gratitude that I dedicated my book to her, together with my parents. She has worked with Omar for almost a decade, including much of the time he spent in Guantánamo Bay, mostly over the phone. It was through this connection that he received my book.
Last June, Omar and I met in person for the first time, finding each other in the lobby of the West Edmonton Mall hotel. He’d just been released on bail as part of an appeal. By this point, we had exchanged dozens of long letters, written on everything from scrap pieces of paper to fancy stationery he was able to purchase at the prison store. Our plan was to have breakfast, some eggs and potatoes, and do a little shopping. Omar needed new clothes and I had appointed myself his fashion stylist. He said he was ready to wear some colourful threads after the monotony of prison uniforms. We picked out several button-up dress shirts, one blue-and-white checks, the other bright Guantánamo orange.
For the next year-and-a-half, Omar and I exchanged letters. I sent him postcards from my many travels on book and speaking tours around the world. (As I write this piece, I am in Singapore as part of a two-week work trip to Asia.) Much of our correspondence has been lighthearted, but we’ve also grown to trust each other. There were immediate parallels between our experiences, including the search to make sense of what had happened to us. Until Omar came into my life, I’d never had such explicit conversations about the pain that continued after release. I would often weep as I wrote my letters to him. Some of these never reached him, sent back to me because I’d added stickers which, I later learned, were forbidden in prison. In one undelivered letter, I wrote: “You have to keep going, even when the sun is hidden, because the time we spend in darkness makes the light much brighter when the pain is done. I’ve been there. I’m still here. I know how you feel.” Omar, who was at the time living in a small cell by himself, was articulate in a way that can sometimes read like poetry. His words— he is such a private person, I cannot in good conscience reveal them here—echoed so many things I had felt only a few years earlier in a dark, hopeless place.
I admit I was a little nervous to meet him, because I didn’t know what to expect. But Omar is immediately likeable. He has a great sense of humour and peppers his stories with jokes, often poking fun at himself. When I asked him what he was most excited about, now that he is free, he told me: “experiences.” He loves taking long bike rides and being outside. In public, as I witnessed, people recognize and approach him. He is kind to each one. A young couple at the restaurant came to our table on that first morning. “Omar? Sorry to bother you. We just want to say how happy we are that you are finally free and we wish you all the best.” The woman’s eyes welled up. They, like me, seemed to be moved by his very presence back in the world. Mostly, people just want to shake his hand.
In 2009, I returned to Canada after having been held hostage for 460 days in Somalia. I’d been abducted by a group of criminals while trying to land a story as a freelance journalist. The experience of returning was surreal. It was disorienting, difficult to reconnect with friends and to feel a part of the world after having been in captivity. During those first months of recovery, the flashbacks were so intense, I often couldn’t stand. I could see my captors circling me, weapons in their hands. I could smell the musty, dark room; feel the chains on my ankles. These intrusive thoughts bombarded me many times a day. They exhausted me emotionally and physically. I was free, but I wasn’t truly free in my mind. It would only be years later, as a result of therapy, that I would come to understand PTSD and the myriad symptoms I have.
The loneliness of PTSD can’t be overstated. The smell of a banana can remind me of the days I spent starving, sometimes eating the peel in order to stay alive. The sight of a room full of men, a situation that, in my former life, I would have considered mundane, can be such a powerful trigger, I’ve had to flee such events more then once. When you have PTSD, you learn to live with the weight of the experience. In the nearly six years since I was released, the severity of my symptoms has lessened somewhat, if only because I better understand them and don’t allow myself to get lost in the confusion. I’m blessed to have great friends and a supportive family, but even those closest to me will never fully know how many dark moments I face in a day.
Because I chose to be public about my story, many people have reached out with stories of their own. A young woman from the United States wrote me last week to disclose, for the first time, decades of abuse. A man from Cornwall, Ont., recently approached me to say that my story inspired him to forgive the men who tormented him for years in high school. With the connection, we survivors feel less lonely. We try to learn from each other.
I’ve become intensely sensitive to the pain of others as a result of my own. I find myself in an unlikely and unusual role, becoming a source of information, a confidante, an advocate for those who have survived extreme situations. And a friend, as it turns out.
I read Rinelle Harper’s story on the front page of the newspaper one day in November 2014 while sitting in a Toronto hotel room on a book tour. The then-16-year-old had been walking along the Assiniboine River in Winnipeg one evening after celebrating the end of midterms with friends. Separated from them, she was approached by two young men who quickly turned on her. Beaten and sexually assaulted, she was thrown into the icy waters. Downstream and severely injured, she managed to pull herself ashore. The attackers found her, tried to kill her with a baseball bat and left her for dead. When a jogger discovered her the next morning, she was brought to a hospital, where they found no pulse. As Rinelle hovered between life and death, her family members gathered, holding their breath. Miraculously, she survived.
I was overcome by emotion when I read her story, even needing to call Porterfield to discuss how deeply Rinelle’s story had rocked me. In tears, I confided in her that such cruelty made me afraid of the world. The level of sexual violence, the viciousness of the young men involved, reminded me in some dark ways of my own experiences in Somalia. And my heart broke for her. How does a 16-year-old recover from something so devastating?
I thought about this when, in the months following the attack, Rinelle’s mother, Julie, reached out to me on Facebook, saying Rinelle was familiar with my story. Rinelle is painfully shy, and when we spoke over the phone she gave me short answers to my questions about her well-being. It was only when we met that she opened up, wanting to know about my story, slowly talking about hers. The soft-spoken teenager and I became friends.
Over the last year, I have come to know the entire Harper family. I’ve written about their recent struggles, from the family home in northern Manitoba burning to the ground, to Rinelle’s challenge of finding a new high school when her previous school deemed her ineligible for enrolment. In the face of so many devastating events, their tenacity is surprising and inspiring.
In a number of get-togethers, we have talked about our experiences, the possibility of forgiveness, and fears about the upcoming trials against our respective victimizers. (In Rinelle’s case, two suspects, who were 20 and 17 at the time of the attack, face several charges, including attempted murder, aggravated sexual assault, and sexual assault with a weapon. In June, after years of police work, the RCMP announced it had arrested one of the men allegedly involved in my kidnapping, a Somali citizen named Ali Omar Ader. Arrested in Ottawa after he travelled to Canada believing he had a book deal, he now faces trial for the charge of hostage-taking.)
Rinelle told me recently that among the most difficult experiences after the assault was the language the media used to describe it. “I hated when they used the word ‘rape,’ ” she said.
She was also initially uncomfortable that her parents made the choice to identify her by name as a victim while she was in critical care, which thrust her, unprepared, into the national spotlight. Like me, Rinelle is now someone who will likely forever be yoked to the narrative of her suffering, discoverable with a simple Google search and subjected to the often-harsh commentary that comes with having an online persona over which you have little control.
For years after my release, I would only participate in media interviews if the outlet agreed in advance not to use the words “brutal,” “torture,” and “rape,” preferring the more vague term “sexual assault.” I was so sensitive that the mere mention of these words would trigger my PTSD, leaving me paralyzed and tearful. Most journalists showed sensitivity and compassion in their interviews. Occasionally, though, an overly curious interviewer would push for the salacious details, the very things I was struggling to get through privately with Porterfield. When I first disclosed that I had been sexually abused in captivity, at a rally for ending violence against women (Eve Ensler’s One Billion Rising), a number of media outlets screamed about the abuse in their headlines. “Chained, raped, tortured,” read one of them. I felt exposed and re-victimized. I never expected I’d be fielding calls from Asian and European media, asking for more details.
Whether we like it or not, Omar, Rinelle and I all have a public stage—an opportunity, that is, for people to hear us. Is it a responsibility? To speak a message that can help people somehow, and potentially help us to derive meaning from our tragedy? Publishers, like movie directors, find us. It’s an old, tired game. The great temptation is to try to put our trauma behind us and live a “normal” life, but all three of us know there is little normal in what has happened so far. Why should the future be normal, either?
Narrative runs through the heart of nearly any recovery. It’s a deep human impulse to share one’s story, to take a challenging experience and make meaning of it, to own it by putting words in it. There is solace in the idea that others want to hear what we’ve been through, to know what we’ve learned. In September, Omar stood on a stage at King’s College, speaking about vulnerability and power in front of 500 students. “To be strong does not mean to be hard and harsh,” he told them, “but it is about opening yourself and being honest.” He said these themes felt important to him, and he spoke about the power we have inside of us to heal.
As I’ve watched Omar test the new waters of his life, I’ve felt inspired by his outlook. “I can’t change the past . . . I can only work on the future,” he said following his release, and I have seen him live this. He is a student at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and King’s University College, finishing up the high school courses he started in prison, working part-time in the cafeteria at King’s. He wants someday to be an emergency medical technician. He lives with a wide-eyed wonder of the world around him, not unlike the way I felt when the chains were finally cut off my ankles and I returned home to re-experience a world I had lost for so long. We have spent time walking together in the Rocky Mountains, both of us in awe of the beauty around us, feeling a sense of profound gratitude that stems from our losses.
I’ve endeavoured to use my platform to spread messages about forgiveness and cultivating peace. I’ve travelled all over the world and written extensively about my struggles with PTSD and recovery.
Rinelle says she wants to be a “voice for the voiceless.” She is writing a book with Vancouver author Maggie de Vries for HarperCollins, to be published next spring. She has already addressed thousands of people at two events in Edmonton and Winnipeg, delivering words about ending violence against Aboriginal women, to standing ovations.
A girl of very few words, Rinelle asked me to help with a speech we will present at We Day in Winnipeg later this month. Hunched over my computer, sitting beside her, I took notes, as she told me she wants to speak about the importance of education and how school has been a cornerstone of her recovery. Later this month, Rinelle and I will stand together on a stage in front of 17,000 people and deliver her message about hope and recovery.
I have learned much about my own journey from my friendships with survivors. We have different stories, but many of the same struggles. I am inspired that Rinelle, whose body still has not healed from her attack, and has another surgery in store, still goes to school every day, pushing aside the pain. Omar is overcoming years spent fighting a system that was determined to keep him behind bars, and is now faced with a world that has varied opinions of him. Yet he lives his life with his head high, knowing he can only change the future and not the past. As for me, I strive to understand the effects of trauma and the benefits of gratitude and forgiveness, to share this, with the hope it may be of use to others.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to be Rinelle Harper, or to go through what Omar Khadr has gone through. I only know my own experiences. And even surrounded by kindness and support from my family and community, I still sometimes feel misunderstood and deeply alone. For any survivor, the real struggles are, for the most part, painfully private.
These friendships may be unlikely, but it’s been one of my life’s great blessings for me to find these two. In October, Omar and I walked around a gleaming glacial lake in Alberta. The turquoise green seemed artificial, too good to be true. “Do you worry that this is all a dream?” I asked him. He looked out at the water and said, “These are the moments that I waited for. Now I am here, and I want to take it all in.”
Collectively, we have suffered more than most. We are bruised, but we are still standing. We lean on one another. And, should any of us need it, I have no doubt we’ll carry each other, too.
Lucy DeCoutere photographed recently in Halifax. Photo, North X North.
When Lucy DeCoutere first went to police on October 31, 2014, with allegations that Jian Ghomeshi had sexually assaulted and choked her more than a decade earlier, she didn’t anticipate that her complaint would result in criminal charges, let alone a trial. But in February of this year, the Halifax-based Air Force captain and Trailer Park Boys actress found herself — along with two other unnamed witnesses — at the centre of dramatic court proceedings in Regina v. Ghomeshi, in which the accused was tried on four counts of sexual assault and one of overcome resistance by choking. On Thursday, Ghomeshi was found not guilty of all the charges.
Weeks after the trial wrapped, before the verdict came down, DeCoutere was still processing her two days of testimony — being “shamed” by defence attorney Marie Henein and the revelation of damning emails and an intimate letter DeCoutere sent to Ghomeshi after the alleged assault. She sat down with senior writer Sarah Boesveld, who covered the trial from inside the courtroom for Chatelaine.
I’m just going to put my tape recorder down here between us. I don’t want it to freak you out.
Oh, it doesn’t freak me out. You know what freaks me out? Having your personal life live-tweeted so that everyone can make fun of you forever.
I’m guilty of that.
Oh no, [reporters] have to do that. I understand.
Let’s go through your experience of the trial. You were called to testify on Thursday, February 4, 2016. Going into the courtroom for the first time, were you scared?
I’ve never been more scared of anything in my life. Before I walked in, I was like, “Can somebody please find me a wobbly stool and a piece of rope and I’ll be good.” But that waned as soon as I got in and looked at everybody and thought, “It doesn’t matter how I feel.”
And how did you feel right before Marie Henein began her cross-examination? [Henein, Ghomeshi’s high-profile Toronto defence attorney, is known for her pointed style of questioning.]
I thought beforehand, if Henein is going to be a shark, I’m going to be a jellyfish, because you can’t catch a jellyfish. Not that I didn’t want to be caught, I just wanted to present solid. I don’t know if you noticed, but there were a lot of press there. The reactions were being tracked. When people weren’t talking, all you could hear was typing.
Oh, I know.
It was nuts. I hadn’t understood how thoroughly you and a couple of other people were offering very detailed transcriptions in real time. It allowed people to see how things were going and watch things spectacularly fall apart.
You feel they spectacularly fell apart?
There is no “feel.” You were there.
You’re in it and I’m on the bench in the public gallery. It’s different.
I’m clearly not objective about it. But I don’t know if I blew my testimony, I honestly don’t know. I’d like to think I didn’t.
The Crown called you to Toronto from Halifax to testify three days earlier than planned. How did that impact your readiness?
The schedule change was problematic. I landed in Toronto around 9 p.m. on Wednesday night. Gillian [Hnatiw, DeCoutere’s lawyer] picked me up and we went to an Italian restaurant. On our table was a wax pencil and a piece of craft paper. Gillian drew out the courtroom. She let me know where Jian would be sitting and that mattered because, in my imagination, he was sitting right in front of me. And I was glad to know that he was slightly off to the left, so if I looked directly at him, that was my choice. But because I was brought in early, the Crown never sat with me and said, “This is how you answer the freaking questions.”
Gillian didn’t prep you on Henein’s strategies?
No, because I don’t think she’d seen them. I was told that [Henein] would pace around.
You could hear her shoes in court, amidst all the typing.
I couldn’t hear them — I could feel them. On my heart. I was surprised she was huffy.
Like she was annoyed?
I don’t think she was legit annoyed. But she feigned incredulity. The whole looking over her glasses thing. I feel like a lot of that was performance.
[On day one of her testimony, DeCoutere told the Crown that during a weekend visit to Toronto in 2003, she had gone out for dinner with Ghomeshi and then back to his home where he pushed her against a wall, choked her and hit her three times with an open hand. Henein, in her cross-examination produced photos of DeCoutere and Ghomeshi “cuddling,” after brunch in Riverdale Park the weekend of the assault. She suggested DeCoutere conspired to take down Ghomeshi with another witness, insinuated an unrequited infatuation on DeCoutere’s part and hinted at questionable correspondence that would be produced the next day.]
Henein ended that first day in court with a cliffhanger, alluding to a conversation you’d kept secret. Did you worry all night?
Oh my god, no. I went and had a huge Chinese meal with friends, took a Zopiclone smoothie and went to sleep.
You weren’t worried that she was going to make you look like a liar in court?
It didn’t actually cross my mind because I wasn’t lying. I knew she had something and she was going to come at me swinging in the morning.
What she had were emails from after the reported assault — your “post incident conduct.” [DeCoutere continued emailing Ghomeshi after the alleged assault — including a note the next day that said, “I want to fuck your brains out. Tonight.” She also sent him flowers and a hand-written letter in the weeks after the incident, which she signed off, “I love your hands.”]
Post-incident conduct — that term has come to haunt me. When I was concerned about emails with Jian, they were emails from before [the assault]. I wasn’t even thinking about after because I didn’t think it mattered — because it shouldn’t matter. Now I understand that it matters because it measures your memory. I didn’t know my memory was on trial.
Speaking of memory, you really didn’t remember sending the “I want to fuck your brains out” email?
You were there, what do you think? Like when I was going through it, did you think I remembered it?
I didn’t, personally, but others did…
I thought my biggest problem was sending flowers to Jian after the assault, because I remembered the flowers. That “I want to fuck your brains out” thing is really out of character. That email was aggressive and pointed. All I can guess is [that I was thinking] “OK, he upped the ante the night before by choking me, and before that he mocked me for not being very cosmopolitan.” So maybe I was like, “Alright — let’s dance.” I don’t know. I’m doing pop psychology on myself, because I have to defend myself.
Where was your head at that weekend you visited Jian Ghomeshi in 2003?
With that email? I don’t know. Which is interesting because I remembered all the other ones. And then, I came back to Halifax and wrote this [hand-written] letter.
You don’t remember writing that either?
No.
You said in the letter it was really late — were you drunk?
I don’t drink.
You didn’t back then either?
No. There are a couple of photos of me at the party that weekend where I look like I’m [drunk]. I’m just not photogenic.
I was thinking that maybe you weren’t drunk, but you might’ve been high.
No. None of those things. I don’t know what my motivation was, except to be as openhearted as possible. And to have that used as a way of proving that I’m lying 13 years later, while the document is being live-tweeted and I’m trying to figure out what I was thinking… I’ll never know why I wrote that letter.
Have you read it over or do you feel like, “I’m never going to look at that again?”
I read it once or twice, maybe. It hurts me to read it, because now the context has totally changed and it paints me like a crazy person in some people’s eyes — because they don’t understand how this stuff goes.
You said on the stand that by writing “I love your hands,” you were trying to put a magnifying glass on the tools he used to hurt you. Can you elaborate?
I didn’t say that I loved his eyes. This is all a wild guess, right? Sort of. But it’s me guessing on my own psyche then. I think that was an acknowledgment of what had happened and [letting him know] “I’ll just overlook it.”
The letter, to me, spoke very much to the complex feelings women can have about men who mistreat them.
The way that it was waved around, casting doubt on my intentions, was so damning that I’m still pulling it together. I don’t think the letter in and of itself is a very big deal. But the way it was presented was designed to shame me. [Henein] was trying to break me down.*
That’s her job, right?
No it’s not. She could just present the evidence. On the stand, I didn’t fall apart. So she didn’t do her job, if that’s what she was hoping to do. That said, I haven’t slept. After the trial, I was afraid to go home. I was afraid to see anybody. I couldn’t face going to work with all of the dudes I work with [in the Air Force.] I don’t think you need to interrogate somebody in such a fashion that it takes them weeks to recover from a reasonably brief chat.
How did you feel when Henein had you read those damning lines from the email and the letter aloud?
After I read, “I want to fuck your brains out,” there was an audible gasp, and it was like “Okay, take it easy people. I’m aware of how [badly] this is going.” I’m not as random as I sometimes present. I wrote that for a reason. But I don’t remember [what it was].
Did she succeed in making you feel shame?
One hundred percent. I’ve never felt so bad about being myself than I do now.
As the face of this trial and an advocate for coming forward about sexual assault, did you feel added pressure?
Not pressure — responsibility. After I testified, I felt like I had to go up to every person in the world and apologize for ruining the case.
How do you feel about Ghomeshi now?
I don’t see Jian as an enemy. What [Henein] was saying about how I hate him — I’m like, that’s not accurate. I did have a couple of moments of weakness when I was hearing story after story after story of him really causing damage, allegedly, to women across North America: People are not allowed to cast that wide of a net of unkindness [and get away with it]. No.
What made you waive a publication ban on your name and become the public face of this trial?
I was hoping that by very publicly going to the police, other people would follow suit. Around this time was the whole Rehtaeh Parsons publication ban bullshit[Parsons was a 17-year-old Nova Scotia girl who killed herself after being sexually assaulted at a party and then bullied about it at her high school. Her name was posthumously covered by a publication ban when the two men pleaded guilty to distributing photos of her assault, as is customary in sexual assault cases and in cases involving a minor.] She was dead. She died because she couldn’t handle the stress of having been assaulted and ridiculed for having been raped. And I was like, “I’m not going to turn into Rehtaeh Parsons for this. I will remain public.”
You said you’ve had trouble sleeping since the trial wrapped. What’s bothering you?
Marie [Henein]’s adeptness at evisceration — I’m damp with it. She was able to instill in me a feeling of self-loathing. And, um, I guess I gave her that power. But I have to find a way to not feel this bad about something that, in the end, was a moment.
Would you do it all again?
I didn’t know what I was in for. If anyone really thinks that I’ve ruined [sexual assault] reporting for women, I’m terribly sorry. And if anybody really thinks I’m clamouring for fame on the back of women who were assaulted, that’s terrible. Would I do it again? I will never have to know that answer. Do I regret it? No. Was it too expensive? Yes.
Expensive?
Personally, emotionally, psychically. I’ve lost a lot of my sunshine, although my sense of humour is on fleek for sure. I’m definitely funnier now. And if anyone crosses me I correct them much more sharply and compassionately.
You have more confidence to do that?
I’m not confident, I’m totally cracked in half.
So what now?
I can’t live with this the way it is right now. There has to be something positive which comes from this. When I first went into this experience, it was like “Get Jian to stop hurting people.” Then my focus changed. Instead of dwelling — as I will do, on what happened personally — there’s got to be a better way to fix the system. Maybe we can use this awful opportunity to make a bit more of an even playing field.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
* Ms. Henein did not directly respond to a request for comment, but a partner in her firm, Scott Hutchison, said the complainant’s characterizations of her courtroom behaviour “are false. It would be wrong for you to repeat them.”
When I was five, I watched a neighbourhood boy tear Lanette Ariana limb from limb. I didn’t scream or stop him. I just wept over my beloved, dismembered Cabbage Patch Kid. Once I calmed down, my dad told me not to take shit from any man and toughen up, lest I be eaten alive by the doll-murdering vultures of the world.
Two decades later, I’m failing miserably at heeding this life lesson as I stare at the blue-lit stage below. My petrified body is betraying me. The bandleader sings, “Thought I made a stand, only made a scene,” and I clench my fists to keep them from shaking. When I open them, the bloody half moons on my palms remind me nails can be weapons, but I’m using them wrong.
The man beside me gropes my waist like a stress ball. He’s Jian Ghomeshi, a famous, well-respected Canadian radio host. I’m a writer for a little-known show on Country Music Television Canada. This is our first outing. I say stop. He doesn’t. I escort his hands off my waist. He takes this as an invitation to hold hands. He presses his body into mine. I step aside. He follows. I want to scream and push him off, but his friends are standing around like bodyguards — his. He grabs my ass. I feel sick. I’m afraid and I can’t make him stop, so I tell him my head hurts and leave. He follows. He’s driving me home, no questions asked. I start crying. I blame my headache. I’m worried about hurting his feelings. I’m worried about pissing him off.
Like the villain in a Batman movie, he seems amused by my distress. I stare out the window, bolt out of his car when I can, and never see him again.
“I should warn women about him,” I tell a friend days later. She eyes me like I’m a newborn puppy and matches my Ghomeshi story with one worse that happened to her friend. Over the next few months, I learn — from celebrities, interns and everyone in between — that most Canadian media “insiders” are well aware of his reputation. Beyond gossiping, nobody’s saying or doing anything about it. We’re all cowards.
I try to push this experience down into the deadest part of me and forget it, but his smug face, plastered on ads all over Toronto, reminds me how he felt entitled to touch my body, uninvited. Incidentally, I move to New York a short while later.
I’m animated when retelling the story. If I become Lucille Ball on a bad date, I can dissociate. This is the approach when I type it out for the online magazine xoJane. It will soon become the bad-date story that upends my life, but I don’t know this as it spews out of me like stomach bile. I don’t care that the writing’s not good; I just want other women to stay away from him.
Hours after it’s posted, the article goes viral, and the faithful rush to Ghomeshi’s defence.
As I watch the vitriolic comments pile up, my editor checks in. I beg her to change the title they gave it, which is an extraordinary 23 words long. (“IT HAPPENED TO ME: I Accidentally Went On A Date With A Presumed-Gay Canadian C-List Celebrity Who Creepily Proved He Isn’t Gay.”) I didn’t write those words. They make me sound like a homophobic asshole. The editor says she’ll see what she can do and advises me to “ignore the haters.” She doesn’t change the title.
I regret writing that I stupidly thought Ghomeshi was gay before meeting him. I had let that assumption conjure a false sense of safety. I’m a naive fool. The Internet notices. I get upset messages from the LGBT community. My heart breaks. I absorb their pain and field their comments. I’m sorry.
An ocean of people crashes through the Internet to call me a bitch, a slut and an opportunistic whore trying to ruin a good man’s name. They call for the end of my career, my love life, my life life.
But I needed to warn other women, I whisper to no one.
The Canadian media picks up the story.
They write about me. They talk about me on air. They defend Ghomeshi. They call my article a desperate plea for attention. They shame me, the bad-date shamer. They say, “Can’t a guy take a girl out anymore?”
My mom calls me upset. She watched a morning show host speak negatively about me on live TV. I made my mom cry. I can deal with garbage Internet people. I can’t deal with my mom crying.
The cyber hate proliferates. I’m swimming in a sewer of it, but even worse are the unexpected remarks from people in my life.
“Not cool, I love that guy,” one male friend texts. Another sends: “HARSH, Ciccone. Why’d you do that?”
“I wanted to warn other women,” I tell him.
“Right,” he says.
I dedicate myself to drinking — daytime, nighttime, anytime. At 1 p.m. on a Sunday, I break down and tell a friend what I’m going through. “Fuck those assholes,” she says. We do shots. By 3 p.m., I’m stumbling up to strangers, “I made my mom cry.”
A few people reach out to make sure I’m okay, but most of the support I get is hushed. No one’s defending me. I understand. I’m not defending myself.
I tell myself I’m Teflon, but I absorb the Internet punches like a heavyweight boxer.
A man who looks like Santa asks me to do the world a favour and commit suicide. An older woman lets me know I’ll never work in media again. A young woman messages to say evil Eve bitches like me are the reason God invented menstrual pain.
I’m Rocky Balboa in the 15th round.
An anonymous man makes a video about me in which he dubs me a “scumbag of the Internet.” He picks apart my article and concludes that I’m an opportunistic hack trying to take down a good and powerful man.
I’m a heavy metal music video on mute.
Many people, mostly young men, send me the link to this video. They point to it as evidence that I’m a piece of shit, in case I didn’t know. I block them. I consider cutting my wrists like I did when I was a bullied 13-year-old. I cut my hair off instead.
I’m Lanette Ariana, torn limb from limb.
I don’t tell people in my real life what’s happening online because ignoring my pain might dull it. It doesn’t.
My roommate introduces me to anti-anxiety pills. They numb my constant, gnawing panic. They’re instant, magic and too temporary.
Canadian writers contact me to do interviews for articles they’re writing about Ghomeshi’s dating life. I don’t trust them. I ignore them.
I return to Toronto and go on job interviews. They all want to know about Ghomeshi, but none of them will hire me. I’ve been blacklisted.
A Canadian journalist reaches out letting me know that he’s talked to a few women who say Ghomeshi assaulted them. I tremble.
I move across the country for a job. I watch Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday. I meditate. I pray. I develop a low threshold for bullshit while simultaneously forgiving everyone that hurt me. I toughen up.
I’m doing yoga in my living room when the story that flips my script breaks. Some of the women accusing Ghomeshi of assaulting them are about to come forward. He gets ahead of them by admitting in a Facebook post he’s into BDSM. Don’t judge a guy because he’s kinky, eh? Nobody does, but they do start sharing my xoJane article and messaging me again. Am I the freelance writer he mentions in his post? No.
The Toronto Star runs a story about the women alleging he assaulted them.
At my job, a coworker announces to a table full of women: “He didn’t do it. They just want attention.” His tablemates agree. I shake with rage.
The sole male on our copywriting team says, “poor fucking guy,” in a meeting. I tear up and leave the room. “You’re too sensitive,” a coworker tells me.
I walk home in the rain listening to Hole’s “Gutless” — I’m so goddamn angry.
The New York Times writes that the backlash I received was why Ghomeshi’s accusers were too scared to come forward. I feel like shit.
Coworkers who have never spoken to me before approach me: “Omigod your name is all over the news!” “So…do you think he did it?” I leave soon after.
Women apologize on the Internet’s behalf for what happened to me.
Men write messages like: “I misjudged you,” “guess you were right,” and, “good on you for speaking up.”
The anonymous man who made the Internet scumbag video refuses to take it down. It’s been viewed some 545,000 times. Still a scumbag.
During his sexual assault trial, Ghomeshi and his legal team look like day-walking vampires set on sucking the life and the hope out of the complainants and their supporters.
The witnesses are torn apart by the defence and, later, when the verdict comes down, by the judge, too. He acquits Ghomeshi and mansplains to the rest of us that we need to be vigilant because complainants sometimes lie. Every flaw about the way our system tries sexual assault cases is highlighted. It’s like we’ve just watched an episode of Law & Order: SVU called The Patriarchy Always Wins.
It’s heartbreaking. It’s enraging. It’s not surprising.
“That article must’ve really helped your career,” an acquaintance says to me over coffee.
I laugh, but he’s not joking.
“The opposite,” I say. “It nearly ruined my life.”
Sugar had it good for a while. While butter and saturated fat were being vilified in the 1980s and ’90s, cereals like Count Chocula rattled into breakfast bowls, and soft drink vending machines beckoned from school hallways. By the mid-2000s, health experts were wringing their hands over salt.
Its insidious presence in so many prepared foods (bread, canned sauces, you name it) made it public health enemy number 1. Even then, the other white stuff stayed largely under the radar.
Now, added sugar (the kind added to food when it is processed or prepared) is officially on trial , implicated in all manner of health concerns, including increased risk of cancer, heart attack, stroke and diabetes. In his 2009 YouTube lecture that went viral, California endocrinologist Robert Lustig called fructose out as the “poison” responsible for rising rates of disease and obesity. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg sprang into action, supporting a soda ban that would eventually limit the size of sugary drinks sold in the Big Apple (one can of Coca-Cola boasts 40 grams, or 10 teaspoons, of sugar). High-profile documentaries like Katie Couric’s Fed Up (2014) and Australia’s That Sugar Film (2015) linked a diet rife with hidden sugars to the expanding waistlines of the Western world. And the story continues to gain momentum, with headlines declaring us a nation of addicts, even positing that sugar is more addictive than cocaine. Last fall, Canada’s health minister, Jane Philpott, was given a mandate to improve nutrition labels so Canadians can know more about the added sugars lurking in processed foods.
While it’s clear a diet laden with sugar is bad for you, some experts do take issue with the widely accepted notion that refined sugar is as addictive as alcohol or drugs, and with the tendency to single it out as the only ingredient wreaking havoc on our health. We asked them to parse the research around these notions to see whether the case against sugar is as strong as it looks.
Addiction is defined by the American Society of Addictive Medicine as “a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry.” Drugs like cocaine light up the part of the brain that craves reward and motivates addicts to seek out more. According to a growing body of research, sugar does that too.
“Sugar causes the release of dopamine in the brain . . . much like cocaine would,” says Dr. Pamela Kent of the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, who is researching the effect of junk food on mental health.
Substance addiction can form when two or three symptoms from a list of 11 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders are present. Animal studies have shown that sugar has three effects “consistent with substance abuse and dependence: cravings, tolerance and withdrawal,” American medical researchers James DiNicolantonio and Sean C. Lucan wrote in a 2014 New York Times op-ed. Sugar also has been shown to exhibit other drug-like properties, including opioid effects (a morphine-like effect) and other neurochemicalchanges in the brain, they contend. When Princeton researchers fed mice huge amounts of sugar and then stopped, the mice worked much harder to get the sugar when it was reintroduced. The mice also drank increased amounts of alcohol after their sugar supply was cut off, which suggests a developed dependency. One study even found that rats chose sugar water over cocaine, finding the reward to be more pleasurable. And an Australian study published in April found that rats that consumed excessive amounts of sugar over a long period saw their overall dopamine levels drop — meaning they needed to eat more sugar to get the same reward.
All this evidence points to sugar being addictive, but it’s not enough to be conclusive. The strongest studies have all been done on rats and mice — and the results of studies done on rodents may not be the same for humans. So far, the research conducted on humans has struggled to isolate sugar itself, instead highlighting noted dependencies on “junk food,” which is often a combination of salt, sugar and fat. Calling sugar addictive without evidence from human studies is an attempt to find a simple answer to a complex problem, says Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, founder and medical director of the Bariatric Medical Institute in Ottawa.
Still, there’s a deep-rooted reason why sugar addiction in humans remains a possibility. “The systems of the brain involved in addiction are there to make us respond to sugar in the first place, not to make us respond to drugs,” says University of Guelph neuroscientist Francesco Leri. Before refined sugar found its way into our diet, sweet things in nature were generally not poisonous (as opposed to bitter-tasting ones) and so were considered “safe” to eat, Leri says. In other words, our brains were programmed a long time ago to feel rewarded by sweet foods.
If sugar is eventually proven to be addictive in humans, not everyone would be at risk of becoming dependent — just as not everyone who consumes alcohol becomes an alcoholic. Stress levels, genetics and environment all contribute to higher risks of dependency, along with a person’s chemical makeup.
And just as there are multiple factors that determine risk of addiction, some experts argue that sugar in and of itself can’t be blamed for obesity and weight gain. Excess is the real culprit, says Dr. Valerie Taylor, psychiatrist-in-chief at Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital and chief of general and health systems at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. “We’ve created a society of overconsumption,” she says. “One piece of cheesecake is okay — a cheesecake is a problem.” And while there are certainly people who have more trouble than others controlling cravings, it’s hard to pinpoint sugar itself as the culprit.
“[Sugar] is part of the holy trinity of hyper-palatability, which is salt, sugar and fat,” Freedhoff says. The combination, perfected by the food industry, lights up the pleasure centres of the brain and changes our neural circuitry, former U.S. Food and Drug Administration head David A. Kessler writes in The End of Overeating. It’s the key to “bet you can’t eat just one.” So while sugar is no doubt a problem, at this stage, it can’t be singled out as the biggest evil of the three.
As researchers continue to investigate the various ways refined sugar affects our health, it’s unanimously accepted that we should all be cutting back. Health Canada is trying to steer Canadians toward healthier choices by overhauling nutritional labels. The new rules will call ingredients like fructose and sucrose what they are — sugar — and include a daily recommended intake. Considering that, according to Statistics Canada data, the average Canadian consumes 26 teaspoons of sugar a day, compared with the six teaspoons of added sugar recommended by the World Health Organization, we can use all the help we can get.
“You came to the RCMP wanting to personally contribute to your community, and we failed you.”
“We hurt you.”
“For that, I’m truly sorry.”
With tears in his eyes, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Bob Paulson uttered those words at a news conference in Ottawa last Thursday. Along with the formal apology, there was the announcement that the federal government had set aside $100-million to settle hundreds of claims over harassment, bullying, discrimination and sexual abuse within the force dating back to 1974 when women first joined, with no cap on the payouts. (The settlement agreement is still pending approval by a federal court.) Former RCMP members Janet Merlo and Linda Gillis Davidson — the two lead plaintiffs who had brought forward the class-action lawsuits against the RCMP — were present at the conference.
There was another woman watching the apology on the screen of her cellphone, from the parking lot of a Thunder Bay DriveTest Centre nearly 1,500 km away. She was waiting for her 16-year-old daughter to pass her road test. She had heard about the statement earlier, but hadn’t seen the formal apology yet. “Baby, we won,” she’d told her daughter. (Her daughter had just passed her driver’s test, too).
That woman was former RCMP constable Heli Kijanen — and she’s the single mother who spearheaded the initiative in 2011 that what would soon become the class-action lawsuits related to harassment and gender-based discrimination within the force, initiated with counsel Alexander (Sandy) Zaitzeff, a Thunder Bay lawyer.
“The minute I heard the statement, I thought, ‘Thank you, lord, I can truly start my healing,’” Kijanen said in a phone interview from Thunder Bay, fighting back tears. “The RCMP said sorry, so that means they acknowledge that there was a problem, and that the many women who were harassed over all these years didn’t deserve to be treated that way. Up until that moment, my life has felt, for the most part, unpredictable and out of control. That’s what enduring abuse will do to you. But now I feel that I can start to close this chapter of my life.”
Resigning from “extremely toxic” workplace environment
Kijanen graduated from an RCMP training program in Regina in 2008 and was soon stationed in a small detachment in Saskatchewan. She excelled at her job, she says, so much so that she bought a sterling silver ring with a Superman emblem. But things changed during her second year at the detachment. While Kijanen can’t share the exact details of the harassment she says she experienced due to an ongoing investigation, she can say that her work environment became “extremely toxic.”
“It was an old boys’ club, and they didn’t want a single mom there — at least, that’s how I was made to feel.”
“They tore me to shreds until I was pretty much forced to resign,” she says. Kijanen felt scared to go into her workplace. “I had to call my mom every day as I was walking into work just to hear her calming voice.”
Kijanen remembers one day feeling so scared and alone that she went into the locker room onsite and held a loaded service revolver to her head. “At that moment, holding a gun to my head, I felt like I didn’t even deserve to exist anymore,” says Kijanen. “All I could picture right then was my two girls, Faith and Grace, and that pulled me out of it,” she says, in tears.
During this time, Kijanen says she developed bulimia. “The harassment made me feel like a useless human being who didn’t deserve to take up any space,” she says. “I think I developed the eating disorder because it offered me a sense of control when everything else felt beyond my control.”
Kijanen resigned after the harassment became too much to bear.
“I went into the RCMP to protect and serve my community, but I was made to feel helpless and vulnerable. They trusted me with a pistol, yet I still felt like I couldn’t defend myself against the bullying and harassment,” says Kijanen. “Who’s supposed to protect the person whose job it is to protect others?”
Setting the class-action lawsuits into motion
After she resigned, Kijanen returned to Thunder Bay to be closer to her family and says she stayed in bed for at least a week and a half. Then she turned her upset into action. “I reached out to Alexander Zaitzeff and he listened to my story with disbelief. He said if I could find some other women like me, we might have a case.”
So Kijanen did her research. “I just started googling, and I found one woman who invited me to a private Facebook group with some other female Mounties. It was a good place to go and share my story. As I realized that other women had similar experiences, I just put it out there, ‘Does anyone want to join me for a lawsuit, because I’m starting one.’”
From there, Kijanen says she pulled Zaitzeff out of retirement, and another Thunder Bay lawyer, Christopher Watkins, also signed on to help. Zaitzeff and Watkins began to build the case with six other lawyers in Ontario and B.C., including David Klein and Won Kim, and soon heard similar stories from Mounties all across Canada. Together they decided the lawsuit would be filed on behalf of two former RCMP officers, and that they would then seek a class-action certification of the suit so that more people could join as plaintiffs.
Taking centre stage on The Price Is Right
Having set the case into motion, Kijanen needed a break. “I wanted to escape Thunder Bay for a bit and visited L.A. not knowing a soul,” she says. She rented a car and remembers feeling something pushing her to go to The Price Is Right Live Stage Show.
“Somehow I printed out the tickets and found the studio,” says Kijanen, who showed up wearing an ‘I Heart T. Bay’ T-shirt. “Out of 300 people, I was the first person called up. I got on the stage after guessing the exact right price of two video cameras. I remember going up and hugging host Drew Carey and thinking, ‘This can’t be real.’ I was up on stage with another contestant called Daniel Lack, and near the end of the whole thing, I won. I actually won! It was just the boost I needed,” she says.
Retraining as a paralegal to fight for the underdog (and hearing from Erin Brockovich)
After she returned from her whirlwind trip, Kijanen decided to become a paralegal. “I had all this legal knowledge and wanted to put it good use,” she says. “When I was an RCMP officer, I was known for being compassionate and professional without resorting to brutal force. I wanted to use those skills in some way, and by becoming a paralegal I realized I could fight for and defend the underdog.”
Kijanen also fought her eating disorder and started a weight-training program that eventually led to her participation in a bikini competition.
“Getting physically stronger helped me heal a lot of the trauma,” she says. “I figured if I couldn’t feel strong inside, at least I could damn well look it on the outside.”
All the while, the class-action lawsuit gained momentum. In 2015, the number of misconduct investigations launched by the RCMP into its own staff increased by 158 percent over 2014. And at one point, Kijanen says that Erin Brockovich, the American legal clerk and environmental activist who took on California’s Pacific Gas and Electric Company in the early ’90s, even reached out to see how she could show her support.
Last summer Kijanen graduated her paralegal program and has since started working in Christopher Watkins’ office. She also runs her own business, Heli Kijanen Paralegal Services, in Thunder Bay.
Feeling like a superhero after the $100 million settlement announcement
When she head about last week’s settlement, Kijanen says she felt relief. Although the specific terms of the agreement won’t be disclosed until they’ve been federally approved, we now know that more than 20,000 current and former female employees may be eligible for compensation through an independent and confidential claims process involving six different levels of coverage, based on “the severity of the acts and the impact on the woman’s welfare and career.” RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson also said that as part of a course of organizational change there were will new initiatives to “eradicate gender discrimination and sexual abuse.”
“Hearing the news made me feel overjoyed,” says Kijanen. “It’s amazing how a few little people can make a big change.”
If Kijanen had the chance to talk to Paulson face-to-face, she would tell him, “I hope you realize that your people were wrecking lives and families. I hope this is this beginning of a new era, and that the RCMP will hold themselves accountable to their promise.” Kijanen will remain an advocate for fixing what she says she sees as the “flawed culture” of the RCMP and has since proposed returning to the force.
Kijanen still wears her Superman ring, and says she feels every bit of a hero today — especially to her daughters. Her advice for women facing harassment in the workplace? “Do not remain silent. Don’t try to fight it on your own. Be strong, open up, ask for help and don’t stop until you find someone who will listen. And feel free to come and talk to me. I’m always here to help.”
Hillary Clinton, former senator, secretary of state, and most recently, presidential candidate, was in Toronto on Thursday evening to promote her new memoir, What Happened, about the outcome of last year’s American election.
The enthusiastic crowd of about 5,000 at the Enercare Centre was comprised of mostly women, many in pantsuits — though there was a sprinkling of more colourful satirical outfits, like one woman in a full Statue of Liberty get-up (crown and all), encouraging U.S. voters abroad to register.
The evening opened with a bewilderingly corny entertainment act, a crooner who sang a set including “Time To Say Goodbye,” “Sway,” and “Hold On.” Then Clinton came out, five minutes earlier than her scheduled time (!), resplendent in red and beaming at the audience.“A lot of Canadians have been struggling to understand how someone who won three million more votes than their opponent can lose an election,” she said with a wry smile. “And I know that feeling.” Her adoring audience laughed and cheered in response.
After a 10-minute solo address outlining the key takeaways from her loss, Clinton sat down for a Q&A with Caroline Codsi, president of Women in Governance. Though this felt scripted at times, the unfiltered fury and disappointment of Clinton’s book was present — Clinton was not afraid to lay blame on those she believescontributed to Trump’s win, including James Comey, the former head of the FBI, whose “unprecedented intervention,” she said, was the “principal reason I lost the election.”A through line of her talk, however, was the importance of women continuing to push forward. Here are five key takeaways:
Women need to keep running for office
“The only way to get sexism out of politics is to get more women into politics,” she said. A political career can be “downright infuriating,” Clinton said, but also “deeply rewarding.” And no matter what a woman’s political views are, simply being in the room makes a difference. Clinton pointed to the absurdity in a photo taken at the White House earlier this year that featured a group of men discussing women’s health without a single woman in the room.
Self-care is a thing for good reason
After her heartbreaking loss, Clinton did what normal people do: She went on long hikes, binge-watched TV, indulged in glasses of Chardonnay and did a lot of yoga. “Yes, alternate nostril breathing really does work,” she confirmed.
Women’s progress is in danger
“We have to be aware that there is a kind of blowback going on,” she said in response to a question about the role sexism and misogyny played in her campaign. Clinton pointed to two scenarios since Trump’s election where female senators, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, were literally silenced by their Congressional peers.
When asked why she didn’t attend the Women’s March the day after Trump was inaugurated, Clinton said she wanted to make space for “new voices” in progressive movements. When talking about potential candidates for the 2020 election, she said she hoped many of them would be women, and that she couldn’t wait to be able to support one.
Keep going
Clinton began the evening by saying that everyone gets knocked down, that “everyone faces loss and disappointment.” But giving up isn’t an option for her, and that’s why she created an organization called Onward Together, to encourage grassroots activism in the spirit of the resistance. “I’m convinced we can take on the challenges we face and get back on track,” she said. The last few words of her talk were a call to action: “Resist, insist, persist and enlist.”
Doiron and her dog, Una, near her home in New Brunswick.
I wanted to join the military from the time I was a little kid, when we’d go to visit Mémère and Pépère (my grandparents), and I’d see a picture on their wall of my grandpa in his Second World War soldier uniform. It was my first memory of knowing about my family being in the military and how much of an honour it was to serve your country. My uncle Bill Roussell was on the front lines in Korea, and then later my brother Jean Claude and my cousins joined. As a teenager, in the 1980s, I joined the naval reserves for the volunteer organization Katimavik, which once had a military division. That’s where I came out as a lesbian. Then I came out to my family, and decided, after high school, that I would join the military. There was a going away party, andeverybody said, “Good for you, we’re so proud of you.”
When I went to basic training, I was treated like just another number. I loved that feeling, like I was part of something bigger. I did really well (I wound up graduating second in my platoon) and wanted to be a peacekeeper. After I got my assignment and learned I’d be posted at CFS Shelburne in Nova Scotia, one of the training sergeants — a woman I would run into at gay events years later — said, “Be careful who you choose as friends, keep your nose clean, andkeep your head down.”
Being a naïve 20-year-old, I was like, “It can’t be that bad.” But I got there and I swear to God, as soon as the bus pulled in, I was like, “This is bad.” I felt the energy right away. You know those scenes in the movies when the character walks into the cafeteria alone with her tray and all eyes are on her? That’s what it was. It was right after five women had been kicked out of the military for being lesbians — everybody was on edge.
So I followed that training sergeant’s advice. Almost instantly, I went from feeling like I was on the fast track to a great career in the military, to feeling like a prisoner: I wore a uniform, and every night, I went to avery small bedroom, which pretty much became my cell. I avoided the parties and hanging out in the TV room. I have pretty good “gaydar,” and was getting so many mixed messages from women. A lot of them were picking up men just to cover their asses, basically.
Doiron at an official ceremony with her military commander
A few months in, there was this girl I really liked, but I knew nothing could ever happen. Still,I asked her to go for a hike one day and, while we were alone walking on the beach, I reached out to hold her hand. She pulled away from me like I had a disease and said, “I don’t know if you’re the secret police or not.” It had never even dawned on me. I had been keeping away from everyone so some people were assuming I was the cops.
Shortly after that, at the end of an overnight shift, I was called to the military police shack for my first interview with the Special Investigations Unit, which was in charge of weeding out all the gay military members. Back then, I had no idea what they wanted. They said, very calmly, “We know what you are.” Then they said, “Do you know what a homosexual is?” I said, “Well, yeah.” “Do you know what homosexuals do?” “Yeah, of course.” Then they said “Are you a homosexual?” I lied and said no. Then they said, “What about this person, or what about that person? If you tell us, we won’t ask you in here again, but if you don’t tell us, we’ll keep on asking you.”
They kept harassing me. I can’t tell you how many times I was interrogated, but it was many. I was always paranoid. I know I was followed at least once going into town to visit a friend. I was warned never go to the gay bars in Halifax because they would intentionally give you shore leave so that they could follow you — you’d show up and they’d be there, watching. It wasn’t evencat and mouse, because the cat was enormous and the mouse was tiny. You knew you were going to get pounced on; it was just a matter of time. I lost so much weight during those two years that I had to get my uniform refitted twice.
Doiron with her brother Jean Claude, who has since retired from the military. This picture was taken near the end of Doiron’s time with the Canadian Armed Forces.
There’s an image that pops into my head whenever I’m stressed — a symptom of the post-traumatic stress disorder I was later diagnosed with. It’s of my hand on a doorknob leading into the military police shack. I was in a cold sweat by that point – I didn’t want to go in there but I knew I didn’t have a choice. After they questioned me for a while, my shift commander said to them, “Do you have any proof that she’s gay?” I watched as they shuffled their papers and said, “No.” He said, “Well, f—-ng leave her alone then.” That was the last time they interrogated me. Days later, I had a nervous breakdown and was discharged from the military, with everyone thinking it was my choice. I have lived with the shame of the discharge and the burden and symptoms of PTSD — anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide — for all of my adult life. I tried to survive the best I could and I put it away for 30 years because I didn’t want to tell anybody my country didn’t want me.
I’m 52 now, and over the years, I’d try to find people who’d been through what I went through. Then, earlier this year, I found the We Demand an Apology Network, an advocacy group that has been lobbying the government to apologize for historical wrongs committed by the Canadian militaryagainst LGBT.That’s how I realized many people stayed in the military about as long as I did before they were pushed out, too, with interrogations and polygraph tests and all of that. Canada’s military treated us like prisoners of war at home, and we were in their military.
That was hard — telling my 84-year-old mother that basically I had been traumatized by the military everybody loved. She’s the kindest, sweetest person, and she was mad. Last month, I went hunting with my uncle, who is 89, and I thought, “Good lord, I can’t tell this man.” We were sitting on the porch at the hunt camp. I’ll never forget this image: He pointed at me and he said, “You go after them with everything you have and when you’re done that, I want you to join the Legion because you’re more of a soldier than most of them in there are.”
I’ll be in Ottawa with nearly 100 other former military men and women like me when Justin Trudeau apologizes to us in the House of Commons. It won’t be easy. I know our Prime Minister is trying to do right by us. But I also want the commissioner of the RCMP there; I want anybody who has to do with recruitment or promoting the military to be there. I’d like them to have a memorial in Ottawa, so people don’t forget this actually happened.
Doiron currently volunteers as a firefighter in Baie Ste-Anne, N.B.
This Yellowknife ER doctor is raising the alarm about the mental health impact of climate change
While large parts of southern Canada are feeling the effects of climate change—unchecked forest fires, once-in-a-century storms that now happen once a year—people living in the North have been on the front lines for a long time. There, rising temperatures have meant, among other things, thawing permafrost, dramatically unstable weather and dwindling caribou populations.
But for Courtney Howard, an indefatigable emergency room doctor in Yellowknife and the president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, the physical changes wrought by a warming planet are just, well, the tip of the iceberg. She argues that climate change is also, not surprisingly, very bad for your health; it’s the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.
Some of the illnesses caused or exacerbated by climate change are obvious (heatstroke induced by longer, more severe heatwaves, for example), but Howard highlights less apparent psychological conditions: post-traumatic stress disorder experienced by forest fire survivors or the increasingly common anxiety and depression felt by people freaked out by the imminent apocalypse.
Howard is one of the lead authors of the Canadian policy makers’ brief, produced in conjunction with the 2018 Lancet Countdown—the medical journal’s comprehensive analysis of the health issues associated with climate change—and she and her co-authors have several policy recommendations. It’s an ambitious list, including phasing out coal, introducing global carbon pricing and rapidly integrating climate change and health in all medical and health sciences facilities. With the International Federation of Medical Students, she’s trying to introduce climate change and health in the curriculum of every medical school in the world by next year. Howard currently spends 30 to 40 hours a week on her climate health work, most of it as a volunteer, while still working eight shifts a month in the ER. That balance may have to change soon, though, she says: “The timelines of climate change are just so urgent.”
Photo, Julie Durocher
This millennial is suing the federal government for environmental negligence
Last November, the Montreal-based environmental non-profit Environnement Jeunesse (ENJEU) sued the federal government for failing to do enough for climate change. Their legal argument was devastatingly simple: By not reducing carbon emissions enough to avoid dangerous climate change, the government was violating the charter rights of Quebeckers, who are guaranteed the right to live in a “healthful environment.”
Catherine Gauthier, ENJEU’s executive director, initiated the class action lawsuit on behalf of nearly 3.5 million Quebeckers who are age 35 or younger—each one seeking $100 in damages. It was the first such litigation in Canada, but it was certainly not the first time Gauthier has taken on such a formidable challenge. At an age when other kids are learning to drive, Gauthier was mastering the eco-activist ropes: In short order, at 16, she went from launching a composting program at her high school in Mont-Saint-Hilaire to addressing 10,000 delegates at the UN Climate Change Conference in Montreal as a youth representative of the Canadian delegation. ENJEU selected her for the role, and she has been with the organization ever since.
The non-profit is all about educating and empowering youth around environmental issues, but Gauthier’s work doesn’t stop there—since 2014, she has also been a lecturer at the Université de Sherbrooke, teaching courses on climate change negotiations and eco-politics. While the lawsuit likely won’t be resolved for a few years, she is optimistic: A comparable suit in the Netherlands forced the Dutch government to cut its emissions levels by at least 25 percent by 2020. ENJEU hopes for a similar outcome, holding the government financially accountable for the past 25 years of inaction and making it legally responsible for future climate measures. Gauthier describes her own attitude toward climate change as a bit of a “roller coaster”—inspired one day, pessimistic the next—but she is confident that the lawsuit provides young people with a certain hope. “It’s given us more ammunition,” she says, “and it shows that young people really want to tackle climate change.”
Photo, Courtesy Jinny Yun
This family of four reduced its annual garbage output to three one-quart jars
Jinny Yun was once a self-described shopaholic. “I was the opposite of green,” she says. She grew up in Seoul, South Korea, in the Gangnam neighbourhood and would go browsing in its designer boutiques whenever she could, filling her closet with status items. In 2005, she moved to Vancouver and, a few years later, married her home-builder husband, Joel. He had grown up in a hippie haven and tried to convince her to reduce her consumption, but her work as a college recruiter required travelling to Asia two or three times a year, where she resumed her shopping habits.
But in 2016, after the birth of their second daughter, she started to feel overwhelmed by stories of polluted oceans and environmental catastrophe and was inspired to make a real change. Yun had collected reusable shopping bags, coffee cups and water bottles for years; now, she was finally using them. She switched from disposable to cloth diapers. “Even with the extra laundry and water usage, the cloth ones are more sustainable when you factor in manufacturing, shipping and disposal,” she says.
Yun dispensed with single-use baby wipes, using her own eco- and bum-friendly cleaning solutions, and brewed an ancient apothecary’s worth of natural toiletries: deodorant (made from shea butter and essential oils), body scrub (leftover coffee grinds), conditioner (she uses an apple cider vinegar rinse) and toothpaste (clay, baking soda and stevia). Kitchen towels get upcycled into reusable lunch bags or donated to a company that uses them to stuff car seats. The only things she and her husband buy new are socks and underwear.
The family subscribes to a mostly vegetarian diet, eating preserves and fresh produce from her in-laws’ garden and growing their own peas, carrots, lettuce, onions and beets in their backyard vegetable patch. The rest of their food comes from places like the Soap Dispensary and Nada Grocery, a zero-waste market where customers fill their own containers with bulk items. “We save so much more money,” Yun says. “But the main thing we spend it on is food. We try to waste nothing. I want to teach my kids that food is precious.”
Other parents often ask for advice about how to recycle difficult items or throw a less-wasteful birthday party for their kids. After three years of zero-waste living, Yun and her family have reached the point where their yearly garbage fills just three one-quart Mason jars—and the bragging rights are almost as satisfying as the waste reduction.
Photo, Courtesy Julie Stankevicius
This firefighter is leading the battle against wildfires
Last year, there were some 6,800 forest fires in Canada. Most were in British Columbia and Northern Ontario, and collectively the fires burned through more than 2.2 million hectares of Canadian wilderness. In B.C., it was the worst season on record, with 5,000 people displaced from their homes. This woodland inferno is the direct result of climate change, sparked by an excess of fuel (dead trees from droughts), more frequent lightning strikes and a spike in dry, windy weather that keeps the flames alive.
Julie Stankevicius, a fire operations technician with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry in Sudbury, Ont., is a hero straight out of Backdraft. She started fighting fires on a summer contract in 2005. “I was looking for adventure and honest, meaningful work,” she says. Since then, she has snuffed out fires across the country, working for the Ministry of Environment in Saskatchewan, the B.C. Wildfire Service and the Jasper FireSmart crew. By the record-breaking summer of 2018, she was in her current role with Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, where she manages several teams of dozens of firefighters.
In July, Stankevicius was stationed in Sudbury as an incident commander: She flew helicopters over the fire to coordinate response efforts, deployed crews and provided food and equipment to firefighters on the ground. Later that month, she was sent to Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater Provincial Park in northeastern Ontario, where she led a team using bulldozers, skidders and other heavy machinery to strategically build a line of flames to direct the rampaging wildfire. At the end of August, Stankevicius was back in B.C., fighting the Shovel Lake fire, which annihilated almost 100,000 hectares of forest. She worked alongside about 80 people from across the continent, including teams from Quebec and Mexico. By the first week of September, the fire was contained.
In her 15 years of fighting fires, she says last summer’s were among the worst, yet she knows the job is just going to get harder. “Fires are becoming more challenging to manage,” Stankevicius says, “and we need creative solutions.”
Photo, Bar Perry and Benjamin Luk Photography
These two university friends help youth have real influence on climate policy
Ana Gonzalez Guerrero and Dominique Souris met as students at the University of Waterloo and became energized by grassroots environmental projects and UN climate meetings with student delegations. Together, they launched Youth Climate Lab, an organization that helps young people around the world pilot environmental projects with governments and businesses and brokers relationships between the boomers and Gen-Xers who are often directing climate policy and the millennials who will be affected by it.
So far, they’ve tested 10 projects and joined two court cases in Saskatchewan and Ontario that argued for the constitutional right to price carbon. “We want to prepare young people for a future where work will be impacted by climate and business models,” Guerrero says. “We need to create the jobs and the economy that will engage with climate realities.” The Climate Lab has consulted on youth environmental projects in the Seychelles and recently worked with the United Arab Emirates to host a dialogue series between young activists and government ministers. In Canada, it partnered with Student Energy and the Global Green Growth Institute on Greenpreneurs, a 10-week accelerator program for early-stage green start-ups. Their goal isn’t to engage young people in climate change—millennials are already involved—but to empower them to do something about it. “There’s a huge sense of urgency,” Souris says. “We need ambitious targets, and government can’t do it alone.”
Photo, Jonathan Sabeniano
This urban planning prof has solutions to cut back on food waste
More than half of the food produced in Canada is thrown away. Over a year, that’s enough to feed every Canadian for five months. The cost to the environment is even more pernicious—avoidable food waste in Canada produces the equivalent of 56 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
These glum statistics come from a recent report produced by Second Harvest and Value Chain Management International, but they’re old news to Tammara Soma, a resource and environmental management professor at Simon Fraser University. Soma is one of the country’s foremost experts on food waste and the complicated, surprising and often dispiriting ways it intersects with income inequality, urbanization, land use and climate change. Soma co-founded the Food Systems Lab—charged with proposing a food system that’s more equitable, greener and less wasteful. (Some ideas: more community food hubs, more diverse farms, more and better cooking and nutrition education in schools.) One of the lab’s early projects was to analyze the efficacy of food waste awareness campaigns by creating a fun, educational pamphlet and fridge magnet with the University of Toronto; the results of that study will be released late this spring.
Soma has recently moved to Burnaby, B.C., and is now focusing her efforts more specifically on food system resiliency projects in the province, as well as on food-based biodegradable packaging. She’s also in the final stages of editing a new book for Routledge called The Handbook on Food Waste, a guide, really, for anyone who eats. “Food is critical for survival,” Soma says, “and yet in a world of 24/7 food availability and abundance—we produce enough food to feed close to 10 billion people—close to a billion people globally are still malnourished. As a scholar and, most importantly, as a human, I care deeply about environmental and social justice and strongly believe these problems can be solved.”
Photo, Courtesy of Annett Rozek
This chemist is helping farmers replace synthetic pesticides with natural products
Annett Rozek started out as a green-industry skeptic. Ten years ago, the Berlin-born chemist was working in the pharmaceutical industry in British Columbia, enamoured with the purity and simplicity of working with synthetic compounds. “I had a skepticism about plant extracts, because you never really know what you have in there,” she says. Over and over again in her work, however, Rozek kept encountering plant-based health remedies and traditional medicine. She couldn’t help but wonder: “What if we applied the rigour, techniques and massive funding of the pharmaceutical industry to analyzing what we found in nature? What might we discover?”
Upon joining Terramera in 2011 (and becoming chief scientific officer a year later), she began to do exactly that. The Vancouver-based company is working to replace synthetic pesticides with natural products from plants like rosemary, wintergreen and neem trees. Terramera’s mission is lofty: to increase global agricultural yields by 20 percent while reducing the synthetic chemical load by 80 percent. It’s a goal Rozek has come to see as urgent. The way we grow our food today is unsustainable and, as we learn more about the toxicity of the pesticides that have boosted global food production for decades, we’re in desperate need of replacements.
After much careful testing and research, Rozek has reached the point where Terramera’s organic pesticides match or even outperform traditional chemical competitors. A few years ago, on a trip to California to see the results of one of Terramera’s trials on red table grapes, she discovered the fruit wasn’t just thriving and free of mildew; it was redder and juicier than the untreated grapes or those being sprayed with chemicals. “We discovered that the product we were using wasn’t just able to control the disease; it was able to accelerate the ripening process,” says Rozek.
Today, she walks through her big-box grocery store in Vancouver and notes the growing size of the organics section with excitement and pride. “I now think that the power really is in nature,” she says. “Nature has all the solutions for the problems we are experiencing. All we need to do is understand it.”
Photo, Greg Miller.
This entrepreneur is installing solar power projects in oil country
From Standing Rock to Trans Mountain, it is now, sadly, an all-too-familiar image: large groups of outraged, despondent Indigenous protestors united against yet another pipeline that threatens their land and water. But a story that gets a lot less exposure—and one that offers a lot more hope—is that of the dozens of Indigenous communities building alternatives to those pipelines.
In 2017, about one-fifth of the renewable energy projects in Canada were owned and operated by Indigenous communities, generating both clean power and jobs. This September, many of those projects will be the subject of a new 13-part documentary series called Power to the People, airing on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. The host of the series is Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a member of the Lubicon Cree First Nation, a former Greenpeace Canada climate campaigner and, most recently, a Climate Change Fellow at the David Suzuki Foundation.
If Laboucan-Massimo wasn’t hosting the show, she might well have been one of its stars. In 2011, her home community of Little Buffalo, Alta., already devastated by decades of resource extraction, was the site of a pipeline rupture and one of the largest oil spills in the province’s history. Four years later, as part of a master’s degree project in Indigenous governance at the University of Victoria, Laboucan-Massimo helped Little Buffalo build a 20.8-kilowatt solar installation to power the local health centre. Not only did it demonstrate to the community that renewable energy was accessible and could create employment but it was also both a way toward a sustainable future and a link to the past.
Lubicon Solar, the firm she formed to implement the project, has since solarized houses for the Tiny House Warriors, a group of activists who have built homes on the path of the proposed Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. “The way Indigenous people live in connection with Mother Earth is through reciprocity,” Laboucan-Massimo says. “Giving and taking, honour and respect. You don’t take more than you need. Renewables are a rejuvenative energy; they’re about respect and love for the land and ensuring that it’s passed on to future generations.”
The women and girls pictured represent a tiny sample of those killed recently in Canada in confirmed or suspected incidents of domestic violence by men. Some of these cases are still before the courts. Their names are included at the end of this article.
On Dec. 3, 2016, Dr. Angela Mailis awoke to a shocking barrage of text messages. “Did you hear about Mo?” was the theme, a reference to Mohammed Shamji, a Toronto-based neurosurgeon just arrested for first-degree murder. The victim was his wife, Elana Fric, a family physician and mother of their three children.
Mailis cried out in disbelief. She and Shamji had worked closely at Toronto’s Western Hospital, where she founded the Krembil Neuroscience Centre’s pain program. Her horror intensified with details of the verbal, emotional and physical abuse Fric experienced during her 12-year marriage. Fric was killed two days after she handed Shamji divorce papers: he beat her, broke her neck and ribs and choked her to death, stuffed her body in a suitcase and threw it in a river. (Shamji pleaded guilty to second-degree murder this year.) Mailis also learned that Fric was a member of a private Facebook group of female physicians abused by their partners.
Mailis, who emigrated to Canada from Greece, knew that successful, financially independent women could be abused in the home; she once was. In person, she’s articulate and engaging, no shrinking violet. Colleagues at Western dubbed her “The Bulldozer.” For 27 years, however, Mailis endured constant, erosive abuse—verbal and emotional—from her husband, the father of her two sons. She divorced him in 1995, an acrimonious, debt-inducing process. Later, when she disclosed her abuse to other accomplished women—women who sat on boards, women married to well-known men, doctors—many confided they were in similar situations. Some were physically abused, but more experienced coercive, controlling domination meted out in insults, intimidation, sexual assault, financial abuse and stalking, both physical and technological.
Mailis, who went on to found the Pain & Wellness Centre in Vaughan, Ont., began collecting stories. Patterns emerged—many women didn’t identify coercive behaviour as abuse or justified it. She examined biological and cultural factors—and conducted a small survey of women aged 18 to 36. Half said they’d experienced abuse in a relationship, a stat that squares with a 2017 Statistics Canada report.
Dr. Elana Fric (@ElanaFricShamji/Twitter)
Fric’s murder prompted Mailis to write Smart, Successful and Abused: The Unspoken Problem of Domestic Violence and High-Achieving Women, published in September. It puts the spotlight on a population often overlooked in studies of intimate-partner violence, despite a parade of high-profile cases—Nicole Brown Simpson, Reeva Steenkamp, Nigella Lawson—that reveal domestic abuse knows no boundaries, class or otherwise. Focus, understandably, has been on the most vulnerable: immigrants and refugees, disabled women and women in rural and northern communities, while the spotlight has shifted only recently to Indigenous women as well.
Mailis defies the entrenched image of the “battered woman” that veered into public consciousness almost 50 years ago in another way. She was never subjected to physical violence. Rather, she experienced coercive, controlling behaviour, which can be just as or even more traumatic. She was constantly demoralized, lacking autonomy, always “walking on eggshells”—all within her own home.
Her book arrives alongside two new important examinations of the personal and societal ravages of intimate-partner violence: No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by American academic Rachel Louise Snyder and See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse by Australian investigative journalist Jess Hill. Both books dismantle entrenched biases and stereotypes: that victims can always just leave; that violence in the home is of a lesser order; that a non-violent person cannot become violent; and that shelters are an adequate response. We’re asking the wrong questions, Snyder writes: instead of “Why does she stay?,” we need to ask “Why does he abuse?” and “How do we keep a family safe?” Women don’t “stay,” she explains. They constantly calculate how and if they can leave so they and their children escape harm. Hill is blunt as to why intimate-partner violence persists: “Men abuse women because society tells them they can be in control.” It’s a society, she writes, that can be cruel to men too.
The complex topic of intimate-partner violence is one of renewed urgency in Canada. National rates of homicide, domestic violence and dating violence have decreased since 2009, but recent spikes in domestic homicide have experts concerned. “Epidemic level” is how Staff Sgt. Paul Wozney of the Calgary Police Service described domestic abuse in his city earlier this year. Six of 12 confirmed homicides in the first half of 2019 were believed to be “domestic,” nearly equal to totals from both 2017 and 2018: a 40 per cent increase in the five-year average. In May, 25-year-old Jasmine Lovett and her 22-month-old daughter, Aliyah Sanderson, were found murdered. A May house explosion killed 22-year-old Dorsa Dehdari and her 15-year-old sister, Dorna; it was set by their father, who also died. (The girls’ mother had just filed for divorce.) They join the growing list of women or girls killed every 2.5 days, on average, in Canada, most often at the hands of someone they trusted, according to the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability at the University of Guelph.
It’s impossible to calculate the number of women and girls experiencing violence at the hands of an intimate partner, spouse or relative. The majority—more than 80 per cent, according to one StatsCan estimate—go unreported. Most of the 1,300 new callers at the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter every year never contact hospitals, doctors or police, says Sophia Hladik, its spokesperson. She notes an alarming rise in the severity of violence reported, including more accounts of strangulation. The Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters (ACWS) reports a rise in the number of women it assesses as facing “extreme danger”—from 54 per cent in 2011/12 to 64.8 per cent in 2017/18. Alberta shelters received more than 58,000 crisis calls in 2018, up 10 per cent over 2017. Demand at the country’s 550 shelters exceeds beds, Kaitlin Bardswich, a spokesperson for Women’s Shelters Canada tells Maclean’s. The 2018 average turn-away rate was 78 per cent, up 2 per cent from 2017.
A Maclean’s investigation into intimate-partner violence, which included dozens of interviews with front-line workers, lawyers, police, government officials and academics, found a response mechanism structured to fail—a lack of data, inconsistent record-keeping, systemic disconnects, lack of accountability and failure of political will. Yes, we’ve seen the creation of specialized domestic violence units on police forces, specialized courts, provincial death review committees and classes teaching children respectful relationships. But an examination of provincial and international systems, as well as anecdotal reports and new literature, reveal an underlying lack of concern for the human rights and safety of women and children. The courts remain shadowed by “coverture”—the archaic legal status that saw a wife subsumed in her husband’s identity. Public perceptions reflect entrenched cultural stereotypes about marriage and relationships, including the notion that controlling and violent behaviour is part of the romantic “fairy tale.”
We’re at a stall, says Elizabeth Sheehy, professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa’s school of law and a leading scholar on the law’s response to violence against women. “There’s resistance at all institutional levels to recognizing men’s use of control and force against women,” she tells Maclean’s. She sees a lack of political will: “We’ve never had a government that has centred men’s violence against women and developed a massive policy.” Yet if ever the “personal is political” had meaning, particularly on the cusp of an important federal election, it’s in addressing intimate-partner violence.
The term “epidemic” is apt when describing intimate-partner violence given the social contagion it can wreak. Children are the first collateral victims, directly and indirectly. Rates of children and youth implicated in police-reported intimate-partner violence have declined since 2009, though a 2017 Statistics Canada survey noted a rise in recent years. In February, 11-year-old Riya Rajkumar of Brampton, Ont., was murdered by her father, who died of a self-inflicted gun wound. There was more outrage over the late-night Amber Alert Rajkumar’s abduction triggered than her murder. In May, Trent Butt of Carbonear, Nfld., was found guilty of first-degree murder of his five-year-old daughter, Quinn, who was found in a fire he set as an act of vengeance against his estranged wife, Quinn’s mother.
Children not physically harmed growing up in an abusive home cannot escape trauma known to register later in life in the forms of chronic illnesses, higher suicide risks and likelihood of being victims or perpetrators of intimate-partner violence. Anyone an abused person cares about is a potential target. In July, Alexis Ames of Rocky Mountain House, Alta., was shot by her long-term partner; her 26-year-old sister, Ashley Smith-Ames, was killed in the attack. Animals are casualties too. In one Australian study of women abused by their partners cited in See What You Made Me Do, half said their abuser abused or killed their pet.
There have been efforts to estimate the total cost of domestic violence to the economy—lost productivity, heath care, police costs and so on. A Justice Department of Canada report determined “spousal violence” cost $7.4 billion in 2009.
Men who abuse their partners pose another societal threat. What mass shooters share—far more than religion or ideology—is a history of domestic abuse. Increasingly, intimate-partner violence is being likened to terrorism: in 2017, Shane Patterson, acting police commissioner in Victoria, Australia, announced the force would address domestic violence with the same urgency as terrorism in resources allocated and focus, given their similar outcomes: “We have death, serious trauma, serious injury and people impacted for the rest of their lives.”
If any country should understand, it’s Canada, where Dec. 6 is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, marking the targeted massacre of “feminists” at the Université de Montréal’s École Polytechnique in 1989; 14 women died, and 14 were injured, including men. Yet an April 2018 report by a United Nations Special Rapporteur found violence against women in Canada remains a “serious pervasive and systematic problem” and “unfinished business that requires urgent actions.” Canadian women’s human rights are “protected in an incomplete and patchwork way,” Dubravka Šimonović wrote after touring the country, citing disparities in provincial and territorial laws and unequal access to services, particularly for women in rural and northern communities. She also noted a “dire shortage” of shelters and a general lack of affordable public housing forced women to return to their homes, where they’d face further violence.
Šimonović’s recommendations echo demands made for decades by academics, legal experts and front-line workers—even a 1991 all-party subcommittee report, The War on Women, written after the Montreal massacre. The UN Special Rapporteur called for implementing a coordinated national plan between the feds, provinces and territories, a federal law on violence against women and domestic violence, uniform access to and enforcement of protection orders in domestic violence cases across the country, and specialized sexual assault training for police officers and prosecutors.
The Liberals’ Strategy to Address and Prevent Gender-Based Violence, introduced in 2017, is insufficient, Šimonović writes, lacking a “holistic legal framework with a clear elaboration of prevention measures, integrated services delivery and prosecution of perpetrators in a coordinated manner and guaranteed in all jurisdictions.”
Maryam Monsef, minister of international development and minister for women and gender equality, defends the strategy, heralded in some quarters for its $100-million funding of women’s groups across the country. She outlined plans for increased shelter beds and affordable housing in an interview with Maclean’s. She admitted unequal access to services nationally. The federal strategy is “meant to fill in existing gaps across the country,” she said. “Some provinces were way ahead of us [in initiatives], and our job wasn’t to step on their toes.”
Offering supports via employment and housing is crucial, says Kathryn Smithen, a Toronto lawyer who represents victims of domestic abuse; she once was one. “If you don’t give women the tools to take care of themselves and their children, of course they will go back. When I split, I had no idea how hard it would be to survive financially.”
It is impossible to fix what you can’t see. In 2017, the Canadian Femicide Observatory was established at the University of Guelph to track femicide, defined as “the killing of one or more females by one or more males because they are female.” More men are killed than women annually. But the killing of women is vastly different in a way not captured in StatsCan’s annual homicide stats, the observatory’s director, Myrna Dawson, says. “Women are most often killed by male partners, and prior sexual violence and abuse is often a factor.” Tracking dead women in Canada, viewed as minimal estimates, is laborious. Because there is no domestic violence, family violence or even “femicide” criminal offence of the sort that exists in South America that would centralize statistics, the observatory relies on media reports, regarded as accurate as official sources, Dawson says; the alternative is submitting hundreds of access to information requests.
Many victims remain unnamed since many police forces don’t report names of some homicide victims or victims of murder-suicides, which are frequently “domestic” in nature. One-third of the 445 homicides reviewed by the Ontario Domestic Violence Death Review Committee between 2003 and 2017 were murder-suicides. Police justify withholding names by claiming there’s no investigative reason to make them public, and out of respect for grief-stricken families that want to keep them private.
There are signs of change. Edmonton Police Services reversed its position on withholding names of homicide victims this year; it will do so on a selective basis.
Not naming victims in murder-suicides creates secrecy and stigma around domestic violence, says Jan Reimer, executive director of the ACWS: “Women shouldn’t be murdered in secret. Family, friends, schools and the workplace all know. It’s important the public know.” The family of Nadia El-Dib, a 22-year-old Calgary woman murdered in 2018, thought so. They asked police to release the horrific details of Nadia’s final minutes: her ex-boyfriend stabbed her 40 times, slit her throat and shot her.
Not naming or withholding details can sanitize and blur. No cause of death was initially provided in the 2016 murder-suicide of Darby Maurice and Calvin Dunn in Delisle, Sask., which led to this Star-Phoenix headline: “Foul play is not suspected in the deaths of two 26-year-old parents in Delisle, according to RCMP,” sending the message that murdering one’s spouse isn’t “foul play.”
“Saying ‘no foul play’ is intended to put the community at ease—to say that it’s an isolated incident,” Cpl. Rob King, media relations officer with the Saskatchewan RCMP, tells Maclean’s. The RCMP releases information on a case-by-case basis, balancing what the public needs to know and being compassionate to the family. King says, “We have to ask: ‘Would releasing cause of death hurt or attach stigma to the family?’”—a question never asked in a stranger murder.
A disconnect between understanding how the private informs the public underlines the way we see and talk about intimate-partner violence. This extends to terminology. “Domestic violence,” by definition, fails to capture its impact; it implies a household concern, a lesser matter. “Intimate-partner violence” is seen as an improvement in that it recognizes abuse outside matrimony. Orla Hegarty, a statistician in rural Newfoundland who tracked domestic homicides in her Counting Dead Women blog before the Femicide Observatory was founded, views even the intimate-partner label as restricted: “One of the most disturbing things I saw was how many sons and grandsons kill their mothers or grandmothers.”
Front-line workers, among them Sophia Hladik, reject “spousal assault” and “domestic violence,” saying they veil the fact that, in almost all cases, it’s men’s violence against women. Hladik uses “men’s violence against women and girls.” The issue is complex: stats also show that women who identify as lesbian report higher incidence of intimate-partner violence than women in heterosexual relationships.
“Clarity in language is crucial to good policy-making,” says Sheehy, who was invited by the federal government to speak at its initial gender-based violence strategy planning committee. Her first recommendation: rename the strategy “men’s violence against women and girls.” “‘Gender-based violence’ is so vague it’s meaningless,” Sheehy says. “It could include any form of violence—women’s violence against men, women’s violence against women, homophobic and transphobic violence. It can also be commandeered by men’s rights activists who say women are at least as violent as men, if not more violent.” Language can obscure, and minimize, she says: “The more we use these euphemisms as opposed to ‘women-killing’ or ‘femicide,’ the easier it is to ignore and silence what is actually happening.”
Intimate-parter violence, and the society that ignores it, hurts boys and men as well. Direct male victims of domestic homicide do exist but are rare, says Deirdre Bainbridge, a nurse who chairs the Ontario Domestic Violence Death Review Committee: “In most cases, there’s a record of him being a perpetrator.” Ontario is one of six provinces, along with British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick, with such a committee (Quebec is setting one up). Again, protocols vary provincially. Generally these committees summarize annual domestic homicides, without names or identifying details, and identify risk factors, some of which are blaring sirens, including a history of domestic violence and/or recent or future separation. Other known risks include escalating violence, threat of suicide, depression, unemployment, obsessive behaviour, stalking, the presence of a gun in the home or the presence of an actual or perceived new partner. A major red flag, says Bainbridge, is strangulation, in which an abuser literally has the victim’s life in his hands: “Someone strangled to unconsciousness but left alive is seven times more likely to be killed than if never strangled.”
Death review committees make recommendations to a host of agencies. Yet no mechanism exists that requires these recommendations be read, let alone implemented. Bainbridge has seen five responses to dozens of recommendations in two years. “We log responses,” she says. “But we don’t collate it as data.”
Inability to demand a response is a problem, says Dawson, who sits on the Ontario committee. Some countries have laws in place, she says: Australia’s Coroners Act mandates that there be a report back on recommendations—and that it’s made public. Sheehy cites New Zealand’s Family Violence Death Review Committee as a model: its mandate is full systemic change. One improvement: police manuals on how domestic violence must be handled at every level are publicly available. Dawson agrees that drilling down on risk factors on an individual or relationship level fails to challenge the society in which a couple lives—“whether it’s poverty, or discrimination if an immigrant family, or colonization if it’s an Indigenous family.”
Death committee reviews can lay bare an utter lack of communication between agencies supposed to keep families safe. A 2016 review of a 2013 murder-suicide of a separated couple with a history of domestic violence in Alberta found that the person with “the clearest picture of the severity of risk to the victim” was a shelter worker. But she had no mechanism, nor perceived authority, to bring together needed service providers that could defuse the situation and help the woman and her children. “No change will come without including front-line workers in law reform projects,” says Sheehy. ‘They’re the real experts.”
Lori Dupont, a nurse, was stalked and stabbed to death in Windsor, Ont., by her ex-boyfriend (Windsor Star/CP)
What does change systems, if slowly, are inquests into headline-making tragedies that should not have happened. In 2005, nurse Lori Dupont was stabbed to death at Hôtel-Dieu Grace Healthcare in Windsor, Ont., by a staff doctor she’d broken up with and who was known to threaten and stalk her. In 2010, the Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act was amended to include the threat of domestic violence from someone in the workplace; other provinces followed suit. An inquest into one of this country’s most heinous cases of intimate-partner violence was announced in late April: Basil Borutski’s Sept. 22, 2015, rampage in Wilno, Ont. Borutski had a decades-long record of domestic abuse and stalking; he strangled Carol Culleton, then shot Anastasia Kuzyk and Nathalie Warmerdam.
One possible outcome of that inquest is the requirement that police and courts notify victims when their abusers are released from prison, something not done when Borutski was released. But, typically, a long history of violence already exists before an alleged offender is identified by police, or jailed. And it’s not unusual for that record to be hidden, not only from authorities, but from family members, friends and co-workers. Again, it’s a question of what is “private” and “public.” In 2018, Saskatchewan was the first, and to date only, province to introduce legislation that allows police to warn someone of a new partner’s violent or abusive past. Based on the U.K.’s 2014 Clare’s Law, it’s intended to be a preventative early measure before violence escalates.
Cultural attitudes toward love and relationships also figure into how we see, or don’t see, intimate-partner violence. Here, red flags for domestic homicide are sometimes upheld as part of a romantic “fairy tale.” One woman told of “being swept off her feet,” says Bainbridge. Abusers often rush the first stage of intimacy—known as “love-bombing,” she says. Likewise, sexual jealousy, constant texting and continual checking in on someone are seen as signs of love.
And it’s precisely that perceived connection and trust of a partner that makes coercive control such an insidious facet of intimate-partner violence, Hill writes in See What You Made Me Do: “the perpetrator takes advantage of their partner’s love and trust and uses that person’s most intimate details—their deepest desires, shames and secrets—as a blueprint for their abuse.” What evolves is “a terrifying language”—a sideways look, sarcastic tone or stony silence, understood only by the people involved. Reimer recalls a lawyer telling the story of a client, a victim of domestic abuse, unexpectedly conceding to terms in a settlement hearing attended by both parties. The woman told him later she folded after seeing her spouse twirl his wedding ring–something he did before he beat her. Cultural conditioning also shapes how victims react. They want the abuse to end, not the relationship, Snyder writes. Mailis notes many high-functioning women believe they can fix the situation, or are in denial (thinking “That’s not really him” or “It’s partially my fault”). Many fear that no one will believe that a “pillar of the community” could be abusive. In some cases, the women are being financially controlled and have no place to go.
Media coverage often downplays violence to uphold the fairy tale myth. Stories of Elana Fric’s brutal killing were routinely illustrated with social media posts of her and the man who killed her kissing and laughing; Shamji’s patients were quoted expressing denial that the man they knew could do that. In August, Kenneth Soederhuysen of Burlington, Ont., was charged with the first-degree murder of his wife, Laura Grant, shot dead in their backyard. Even then, an unnamed neighbour called Soederhuysen “a stand-up guy,” adding: “He doesn’t seem like that type of person.”
Domestic abuse is different from other crimes, like robbery or stranger assault, because it’s ongoing, never a one-time event. But people don’t want to accept that, says Bainbridge: “We want to believe that this is normally a good person who lost it one time. We don’t see how it’s insidious, it’s deliberate, it’s conscious. He knows exactly who to pick to get away with the abuse. It’s not as if he’s never been upset with his boss. But if you punch your boss, there are huge repercussions.”
The biggest stumbling blocks to addressing intimate crimes, says Dawson, are entrenched stereotypes. “The most common phrase when a man kills a woman is that it’s a ‘crime of passion.’ But it’s not. It’s a crime of control.” And this is where the public becomes the private. Social messaging tells men they’re entitled to that control, Hill writes, that women belong to them, owe them, or must be punished for failing to love or obey them: “The unifying ingredient among abusers is a radioactive sense of entitlement. The animating force behind their violence is the belief that their feelings are more important than those of their partners and children.” In a CBC interview, Nadia El-Dib’s sister Racha made this point about the man who killed her sister: he “believed he had the right to murder her because she exercised her right of taking ownership of her life, body and soul.”
The shadows of coverture, a husband’s legal domination over a wife, persist in the Canadian justice system. In a 2015 study, Dawson coined “intimacy discount” to describe how men charged with killing intimate partners receive more lenient sentences than those who kill strangers or non-intimate partners. A 2017 StatsCan report found dating violence was more likely to result in a criminal charge than violence by a spouse: 91 per cent of alleged dating violence victims saw charges; 78 per cent of those reporting spousal violence did. A “master of the house” mindset prevails, says lawyer Kathryn Smithen.
Convictions on charges related to intimate-partner abuse are rare, she says, noting she’s seen only one in hundreds of cases she’s taken before the courts in eight years. Most cases don’t even make it to trial, she says. A high percentage of complainants are pressured to recant or not appear. Typically, the Crown withdraws the charges and the defendant enters into a peace bond after completion of a partner-assault response program; that means no trial, no sentencing, no criminal record. Decades ago, when her husband was charged with 17 criminal offences, including strangulation and sexual assault, the Crown was adamant that he would be tried, Smithen says. He was convicted of assault and assault with a weapon in 1996. She doesn’t see the same vigour today. (How many peace bonds are issued for charges related to domestic assault is unknown; the numbers aren’t kept.)
A disconnect between the criminal law system and the family system is another problem, Smithen says. “After entering into a peace bond, offenders carry on in family court as though the offence never officially happened in the justice system and then return to the cycle of terror against their victims.” There’s a sense having a father on premises is “best for the family,” Smithen says. The wives and mothers in these family law cases are expected to separate “their” issues with their former partners from their children’s right to have both parents in their lives. Some judges get it, others don’t, she says, recalling a female judge who said all couples have “tussles” when they break up, when Smithen was arguing for a restraining order. Special domestic-violence courts with specially trained judges and Crown attorneys exist across the country, but a 2011 study by University of Ottawa criminologist Holly Johnson found complainants experienced the same problems of being shut out and unheard that Smithen enumerates: “Women lack choice and control over critical decisions during court proceedings,” Johnson concluded.
Bill C-75, passed in June, included changes to laws governing domestic abuse, including imposition of a reverse onus at bail for those charged with related offences if they are repeat offenders, and added sentencing provisions aimed at making intimate-partner violence an aggravating factor that applies to former as well as current partners. Strangulation became an elevated form of assault, and a higher maximum penalty for repeat offenders was imposed. Given what’s known about intimate-partner violence, there were big holes: the law didn’t extend to include the equally dangerous men who stalk women who’ve refused them access to a dating relationship, or recognize that perpetrators also target anyone close to the victim.
A possible proposed change to the Divorce Act would make a record of intimate-partner violence a criterion when determining the best interest of the child, Smithen says. “There’s an attitude in some legal circles that domestic violence is isolated, that if a parent is violent with a spouse it has nothing to do with their relationship with their children. I don’t agree.”
In 2015, England and Wales became the first countries to make it a crime to engage in “coercive control” with an intimate partner. This year, Scotland made it a crime punishable up to 15 years in jail. Experts express concern that proper police and legal training is required to enforce the law properly and safely. Legislation is only as good as the people who implement it, says Dawson. “If we don’t train individuals—police, judges, lawyers—on the legislation and what we mean by coercive, controlling behaviour, what we mean by femicide, whatever the concept, then the legislation will miss its mark.”
A candlelight vigil in in Wilno, Ont., for Carol Culleton, Anastasia Kuzyk and Nathalie Warmerdam (Justin Tang/CP)
Given systemic failures to address intimate-partner violence, it’s not surprising that the upcoming Wilno inquest is being met with hope and skepticism. Holly Campbell, founder of the Because Wilno advocacy group, says it will put a spotlight on stalking as a serious criminal offence and the lack of services for rural women, but expresses mixed feelings: “It’s important that we draw attention to all of the systemic failures that led to the killing of these three women, but I also feel frustration because we continue to see women dying in such a predictable way,” she told the Ottawa Citizen. “For me, the question is, Why can’t we have leadership on this issue? Why can’t we react to what we already know is broken?”
Calgary’s Staff Sgt. Paul Wozney calls domestic violence a “community problem” that requires community engagement to address. In September, the force introduced an app to connect victims of domestic abuse with services. Bainbridge speaks of the need for bystander awareness campaigns focused on neighbours, family, friends and employers. We need to shift attention, Bainbridge says. “We focus on the person being victimized and put all the responsibility on her. But nothing will change without focus on the perpetrator. Even if we get her out, he’ll follow her until he gets a new girlfriend and then he becomes her problem. He’s the constant. And he’s not going to change unless he wants to change.”
Social stigma can change behaviour, as seen with changing attitudes to drunk driving. Bainbridge recalls an account of the friends of an abused woman moving in with her and her husband. “It made him very, very uncomfortable. He left.” She asks: Why should the woman always be the one to leave?
As a federal election nears, there’s no indication that violence against women and girls will be a campaign issue. Maclean’s contacted the major parties to ask for their platforms. The Green Party of Canada outlined “comprehensive solutions” to the problem of violence against women, girls and gender-diverse people that included working with women’s groups and Indigenous organizations, implementing recommendations of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and establishing a guaranteed livable income. The NDP’s “New Deal for People” commits “to end violence against women,” a party spokesperson wrote in an email, with “a comprehensive plan to address violence against Indigenous women, girls, and LGBTQI2S+ people,” which includes supporting community policing and “advancing gender equality.” The Liberals hadn’t released their platform days before the writ was to drop. The Conservative party did not return Maclean’s calls.
As Sheehy sees it, mainstream lack of concern about violence against women is itself a dire societal indictment: “Only in a misogynist society could you have this many femicides and not react,” she says. “I don’t think we value the lives of women and I don’t think we value the lives of children. Otherwise, we would be standing up in complete alarm.”
These are the women pictured in the photo at the beginning of this article.
Left to right, Top row: Abigail Ootoova, Holly Marie Hamilton (large photo), Amber Cobean, Ashley Smith-Ames, Brenda Lautaoja, Dorna Dehdari, Dorsa Dehdari (large photo), Alberta (Beth) McGaghey
Second row: Elaine Bellevue, Edresilda (Edra) Haan, Jasmine Lovett and Aliyah Sanderson, Kathryn Niedoba, Jennyfer Lachapelle, Hanh (Hana) Nguyen
Third row: Liisa Nukkala, Lise Danais, Lorraine Kerubo Ogoti (large photo), Maryhelen Johnston, Merna Fiddler, Quinn Butt, Noémie Lavoie
Fourth row: Riya Rajkumar (large photo), Nadia El-Dib, Tammy Brown (large photo), Laurie-Anne Grenier, Wendy Allan
Fifth row: Laura Grant, Sandra Anne Finn, Shawn Boshuck, Marie-Ève Naud, Yvonne Mooney
