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By LegalMatters Staff • The Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability recently released a report detailing the violent deaths of women and girls between 2018 and 2022 in Canada.
According to the organization, 850 females were killed in the past five years, or one every 48 hours. Additionally, between 2019 and 2022 there was a 27 per cent increase of deaths from male suspects.
The report notes that most cases of femicide involved intimate-partner violence (IPV).
Some advocates say the Criminal Code should include the crime of femicide. According to the report, 22 other countries have already done that.
The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) uses the term “femicide” in its public statements, even though an OPS advisory committee had not yet finalized its definition of the word.
A coroner’s inquest examining the 2015 deaths of three women killed by the same man in Renfrew, Ont., offered 86 recommendations aimed at preventing IPV. One of those was that the federal government should explore adding the term “femicide” to the Code as a separate offence from homicide.
Ottawa criminal lawyer Céline Dostaler says that while she agrees the issue of intimate partner violence needs to be addressed in this country, she is not convinced that creating a formal charge of femicide is the way to do that.
“The concept of femicide is already in the Code,” says Dostaler, pointing to s. 718.2 that outlines the “Purpose and principles of sentencing.” In the list of aggravating factors that can result in a harsher sentence, the second is “evidence that the offender, in committing the offence, abused the offender’s intimate partner.”
“I may be cynical, but I wonder why we would want to differentiate between the murder of males and females,” she says.
The definition of who is a woman is also a problem, Dostaler says, considering there are multiple gender identities recognized in Canada.
“If an individual who identifies as a woman is murdered, is that a femicide?” she asks. “And what about trans people or those who are transitioning?
And if femicide were a separate charge, would the penalties be harsher than for homicide, Dostaler asks.
“Let’s keep calling all murders homicides,” she suggests. “The real issue is how to reduce intimate partner violence. Introducing the charge of femicide will not achieve that.”
