An Act of Institutional Femicide: Remembering the Life of Michele M

(Content warning: suicide, violence)

            The last three weeks of 58-year-old single mother and abuse survivor Michele M’s life were spent on the run from a multi-generational history of male violence against women and children.

Despite having saved herself and her children nine years ago from an abusive ex-spouse, Michele was treated as a serious criminal by a Canadian state that, despite white ribbons and feminist window dressing, refused to acknowledge and believe the well-established history of abuse she and her children had suffered. 

While it was reported that Michele took her own life the evening of November 5 at the notorious Leclerc prison, it would be more accurate to conclude that her life had been stolen from her long ago by male abusers, police, judges, social services agents, media, and a system that refuses to believe or understand the reality of male violence against women. While Michele had tried with the greatest of dignity to win back piece after piece of her life through the years, she tragically ran out of hope three weeks after the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear her appeal for a second time.

            A former U.S. resident, Michele had been sought since 2010 for extradition from Canada to the state of Georgia to face trial for the alleged crime of interstate interference with custody.  The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear her case in October was the final leg of a nine-year legal odyssey that required Michele, as part of her bail conditions, to turn herself in to custody each time a court was about to pronounce on her fate.

            But by this fall, Michele had had enough of prison. Since 2010, she’d been jailed at various times for periods up to six months, and forced to live under a house arrest regime that kept her cooped up for 23 hours a day in a modest Lac Megantic apartment.

            Rather than report for custody last month, she went on the run from a forced return to the state of Georgia where, like every other U.S. jurisdiction, “domestic violence survivors have been criminalized, prosecuted, and imprisoned for acts carried out by their abusive partners. Often, these were actions that they either knew nothing about or were powerless to stop. But at trial, their experiences of abuse are often downplayed or outright dismissed.”

            In the end, the RCMP tracked her down and arrested her in Quebec after Michele spent two weeks resisting surrender to prison. Her life ended four days later.

           

Breaking the Cycle of Violence

In 2010, Michele (long known as MM in her court history), while living in the state of Georgia, had sought to break the cycle of violence plaguing her life by rescuing herself and her kids (then aged 14, 11 and 9) from an abusive father and fleeing to Quebec for their collective safety (all were joint U.S.-Canadian citizens). On that score, she was ultimately successful. She saved their lives. All three children are now adults, Canadian citizens who, almost a decade ago, were sleeping in an abandoned Georgia garage to escape their father’s abuse.

Despite doing what any loving parent would do, Michele was sought for extradition by the United States – at the behest of her vengeful ex-husband – for alleged interstate interference in child custody. That her abusive ex-spouse had previously been awarded custody of the children despite his record of violence was depressingly unsurprising for, as Salon reports, “In family courts throughout the [USA], evidence that one of the parents is sexually or physically abusing a child is routinely rejected. Instead, perpetrators of abuse are often entrusted with unsupervised visits or joint or sole custody of the children they abuse, putting children in danger of serious, often life-threatening harm, according to children’s advocates.”

Originally arrested by the RCMP 2 days before Christmas, 2010 while staying in a Quebec women’s shelter, Michele spent the following six months awaiting bail behind bars, and an additional eight years fighting a case that should have been dismissed as being without merit long ago.

When asked in a 2011 court hearing why she had gone into a Quebec women’s shelter upon her arrival north of the border, Michele replied: “Because I had been beaten by him for the last final time.”

The first year back in Quebec was difficult, she told me a few years ago, but “from a jailhouse with zero resources, I pulled from any place I could to make sure those children were not sent back to their abuser, and even the children said, ‘we’re not going back, we’ll take foster care here.’”

Michele’s Final Weeks

This past October, Michele received her customary command to report to prison to await the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision on whether they would hear her case. Michele always had to turn herself in to prison authorities to await the outcome of court deliberations at various stages in her case, after which she would return on bail to her house arrest. But this time felt different. From the moment that chilling message to report to jail arrived, Michele was scrambling to get her affairs in order, to arrange long-term care for her mother (suffering with Alzheimer’s), and figure out her next move. She was clear with me that she could not face the humiliation of entering prison doors anymore in her life. The degrading conditions, the humiliating strip searches, the incessantly petty violence of prison routine were too much for her, especially after a traumatizing stay behind bars in the spring awaiting a decision of the Quebec Court of Appeal

 “Why, why, why why, why do they keep doing this to me?” she would plead with me. “Why isn't HE in jail?” she asked, referencing the abusive ex-spouse who had repeatedly told the children that his goal was to see Michele either jailed for life or six feet under. Much as she feared more jail and more courts, she ultimately feared seeing him again. Hearing that voice, seeing the rage-filled face, would reopen all the traumas she tried to overcome through a disposition best described by her facebook moniker, Sunshine.

I last spoke with Michele the day before she was discovered without vital signs in her jail cell. She had been arrested the previous Friday after a frantic two-week journey. She had refused to report to prison, and an arrest warrant went out for her.

Once on the run, she’d purchased a burner phone to avoid detection and paid cash for her necessities. We discussed her limited options, and her dream that the decade-old case – so old it was packed away in the archives of the Cobb County District Attorney’s office – would be too much trouble to unpack and revisit. She kept telling me, again and again, as if doing so would make it true, that she just could not go back to Georgia.

Having known and worked with Michele for almost five years, I knew she was strong, inventive, and determined. She had, after all, saved her children’s lives. When she had been in jail facing forced removal to Georgia in December 2015 – after the Supreme Court rejected her first appeal in a narrow 4-3 loss – she went on 12-day hunger strike as we mobilized a national effort to force reconsideration of her case by the then new Justice Minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould. Five years to the day that she’d been arrested in the women’s shelter – December 23, 2015 – we won a stunning reprieve.

But this time around, four years later, Michele’s voice was different, as if a fire were slowly going out. Some days she’d call and ask what I thought about her walking across the border and taking a bus to Georgia and turning herself in there. There was something so galling to her about the humiliation of being picked up by U.S. marshalls and being led away in chains from her birth country of Canada, whose government had clearly betrayed her.

At times, the calls were intensely difficult, as she described two separate, unsuccessful suicide attempts that, she said, proved to her that “God wasn’t ready to take me yet.” Michele often said that she’d heard and believed a celestial voice speaking to her while she tried to sleep in her various prison cells. “Don't go back to Georgia,” the voices were telling her.  “You shouldn't be extradited.”

The Pain of Extradition

I have often worked as a community advocate in cases of extradition, a stunningly unfair process by which anyone living in Canada can lose all of their Charter-guaranteed due process rights when a foreign state issues a request for their arrest and forced removal, no matter how flimsy the case. In trying to meet the challenge of these impossible cases, I got to know and work with Michele.

The injustice of her situation was clearly part of a pattern I had personally witnessed in my own work. I’d seen cases where refugees’ protected person status in Canada was overturned based on an extradition request by the country from whose persecution they had fled. There was the case of an African American man who 35 years earlier had defended himself against a racist and potentially lethal police attack on the streets of Chicago. Despite the clear conflict of interest, that same cop who perpetrated the racist attack pursued the case as both the alleged victim and the investigating officer.  Canada accepted the request despite the destruction of evidence, the deaths of witnesses, and major inconsistencies in the file.

And then there was what is one of the most high-profile extradition cases in Canada, the still ongoing saga of Dr. Hassan Diab. Sought by a country, France, which refuses to extradite its own citizens, Diab spent three years in a French prison, without charge. This despite the fact that he did not share the finger and palm prints, or the physical description, of the original suspect in a 1980 crime. Diab was also the subject of secret intelligence that, his lawyers argued, was “based largely on intelligence reports from unnamed foreign entities, who in turn obtained information from unknown sources in unknown circumstances.”  Notably, malfeasance by officials in the Canadian Justice Department only prolonged Dr. Diab’s nightmare, and no one has been held to account.

Like Michele, Dr. Diab was subjected to years of severe bail restrictions, which in his case included an ankle monitoring bracelet for which he had to foot the $2,000 monthly bill.

This is the type of judicially sanctioned political persecution that ruins the lives of individuals and their families. Those sought for extradition learn quickly there is little hope. As Manitoba Queen's Bench Justice Freda Steel concluded in a 1999 extradition case, "evidence at an extradition hearing should be accepted even if the judge feels it is manifestly unreliable, incomplete, false, misleading, contradictory of other evidence or the judge feels the witness may have perjured themselves."

Indeed, Steel quotes a fellow judge as noting that questioning the validity of a requesting state’s often paper-thin, fabricated, perjured, misleading, or contradictory  evidence "conveys a reflection of the gravest possible kind, not only upon the motives and actions of the responsible government, but also impliedly upon the judicial authorities of a neighbouring and friendly power.”

It is against this background that Michele knew the cards were stacked against her. But she also shared a perverse hope. She actually believed (and who wouldn't want to?) that if only the right people looked at the case file – the documentation of abuse, the testimony of the fearful children, the evaluation from Children’s Services that the father was not safe to be around, the history of abuse against her—that someone would believe her. Yet even at Canada’s highest judicial level, judges were asking the usual questions that women survivors of male violence always get asked: why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that?

Insults at the Supreme Court

I was sitting behind Michele and three of her kids during her 2015 Supreme Court hearing, and saw her back visibly stiffen when Justice Michael Moldaver betrayed his own lack of understanding of the dynamics of male violence against women and children. He knew that, in Michele’s case, the children were not taken from the father’s home, but rather had escaped and sought their mother’s assistance. Michele had argued that because the children were in danger and everything else she had tried to protect them had proven unsuccessful, a trip to Canada was the only option.

"She didn't take the children from the father at the house in terms of him having possession,” Moldaver declared. “She took them [after] they'd already left. Where's the imminent harm? I'm just kinda missing that. Imminent harm's gotta mean something.” Had one of the allegedly most learned judges in the land not looked at the court record, which included the report from Quebec’s Director of Youth Protection (DYP)? The DYP accepted the conclusion of Child and Family Services in Georgia that they could not confirm that “the children will be safe from abuse if taken back to Georgia.” Sounds a lot like imminent harm. The learned judge also seems to have overlooked in the court record the very explicit details of the beatings the children had run away from, the father’s imprisoning of the children in a locked basement, and the children’s own statements that they were fearful of their father.

But as advocates working to end male violence against women see every day, such facts magically disappear in cases where misogyny’s logical results come before a judicial setting. (Anyone who still doubts how unsafe calling the cops and going to court are for women survivors should read Elizabeth Sheehy’s Defending Battered Women on Trial and Elaine Craig’s Putting Trials on Trial: Sexual Assault and the Failure of the Legal Profession.)

Indeed, Moldaver later asked the “why didn't she go to police” question with a Don Cherry-esque air of exasperation. “There were all kinds of other options available at that point other than escaping to Canada,” Moldaver opined, referencing an incident in which Georgia police had stopped Michele and the children for an alleged DUI incident (for which Michele was never charged). Moldaver demands: “What better opportunity to say ‘by the way officer, my children are in imminent harm. Please do something?’”

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin also questioned Michele’s lawyer along similar lines, noting: “It is suggested in some of the material of the [government] that she should have just gone to court or done something like that if your children are in trouble with their custodial parent. This is what we encourage citizens to do in our country. What do you say to that?”

Michele was no stranger to having dealt with the Georgia police and courts. She spoke often of their corruption, their collusion with abusers, and their dismissive attitude when it was obvious who was the target of abuse. Indeed, desperately afraid of what awaited her in Georgia – “they cannot extradite a corpse,” she told me a few days before her life ended – Michele knew with certainty in her soul that she would not receive a fair trial, would be housed indefinitely in a private, for-profit prison, and would serve long years for an alleged offence that provided her no proper defence in Georgia.

Raybould-Wilson Adds Insult to Injury

Michele was not alone in her fears. Three justices of the Supreme Court of Canada (all women) agreed with her when they delivered a dissenting opinion on her case in 2015. Justice Rosalie Abella pointed out that “the defence of rescuing children to protect them from imminent harm does not exist in Georgia [and] the mother will not be able to raise the defence she would have been able to raise had she been prosecuted in Canada.” This contradiction violates a cornerstone of extradition law, the “double criminality” requirement that the Supreme Court acknowledges is a process that ensures Canada is “not embarrassed by an obligation to extradite a person who would not, according to its own standards, be guilty of acts deserving punishment.”

Unfortunately, the court’s three male members – supported by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin – voted against her in a decision the dissenters called “kafkasesque,” a rare public rebuke.

When Michele won her Christmas reprieve in 2015, we felt strongly that putting forward new information to Raybould-Wilson – including an expert legal opinion that reminded the Justice Department’s legal staff once again that there was no defence available to Michele in Georgia – would turn the tide. But it was not to be so. Seven months later, Raybould-Wilson signed the surrender order, what eventually proved to be a death writ for Michele.

Raybould-Wilson’s arguments defending the surrender order could have been written by an angry men’s rights activist. In one particularly insulting section, the Justice Minister wrote with the dismissive language that has been heard by countless abuse survivors:  “In my view, even applying the most generous modified objective standard to the situation that takes into account Ms. Messina’s claimed background as an abused spouse, it cannot be said that she was of the opinion that at the time that the children were at risk of ‘imminent harm.’”

Raybould-Wilson criticized Michele for not allegedly providing “any reasons for not contacting the police or child and family services on behalf of her children regarding her concerns about her children’s well-being.” Raybould-Wilson continued by claiming Michele “had adequate opportunity to contact the authorities and it cannot be said that there were no legal alternatives such that she was left with no choice but to take the children to Canada.”

The former Justice Minister also seemed more concerned here about the abusive father that the children clearly did not want to see. In one stunning sentence, Raybould-Wilson’s complained that in her view, Michele had “deprived” the abusive father “of the reasonable opportunity to visit his children.” Clearly, Raybould-Wilson took no account of the DYP report that showed that in one 2011 interview with the father, “at no time did the father call the children by their names. It was the ‘girls’ or the ‘boy.’ He did not express that he loved the children and wanted them to return home.”

Raybould-Wilson also downplayed the well-documented violence the children and Michele had experienced by conceding she recognized that “the children’s accounts of their relationship with their father are less than positive.” She also downplayed the violence with the implication that it could not have been that bad given that the children did not complain to a high school counselor about the abuse and that they attended school regularly. (What high school student shares anything with an over-worked school counselor, knowing that it could result in a phone call home and retaliatory violence from an abuser?)

The painful conclusion of Raybould-Wilson was that “it cannot be said that the harm that [Michele] was attempting to avoid was proportionate to the harm that she caused her children.”

During last winter’s SNC-Lavalin scandal revelations, one could forgive Michele for agreeing that Raybould-Wilson was not the fount of integrity and justice that everyone made her out to be.

Trying to Move On

Michele’s children, her mother, and her friends, are all still trying to deal with the shock of what has happened. In follow-up conversations with those who knew and loved her – and those who knew her dearly did love her – it was clear to me that everyone was in a state of disbelief that Canada’s judicial system had reached such a point that it would expend such vast resources to ensnare and throw away a mother who saved her kids.

When Michele’s life ended in early November, it was widely known by inmates and staff at the brutal Leclerc prison that this was a preventable suicide; the jail staff and inmates all knew when she entered that she was suicidal. While investigations are likely to follow, it does not appear from this angle that necessary precautions were taken.

Michele’s final, desperate act might be more accurately described as the result of a years-long, slow-drip act of institutional femicide. Her loss shines a light on so many pressing social issues that continue to be swept aside, including a compelling need to undertake serious reforms to the Extradition Act that would bring it in line with domestic and international human rights standards. Dr. Hassan Diab – Michele had often prayed for him and followed his case – had called for a public inquiry that would point the direction forward, but that was rejected by Raybould-Wilson in favour of a severely limited review that led to a complete and total whitewash.

When she was in jail, Michele often spoke about the women she met there, many of whom were Indigenous and/or being held on immigration holds. They all shared stories of being separated from loved ones. As an older inmate, Michele was often seen as the motherly aunt figure to whom many would go with their problems, their fears, and their tears.

Michele’s life and death also screams out for the desperate need to develop and implement a United Nations-mandated National Action Plan to End Violence Against Women and Girls. In February 2015, Women’s Shelters Canada launched A Blueprint for Canada’s National Action Plan (NAP) on Violence against Women (VAW). As of today, there is still no such action plan (but rather only a very skeletal proposal from a Trudeau government that seems unwilling to properly prioritize this national crisis.)  It also reminds us that the largest percentage of women behind bars in this country are Indigenous, and that there needs to be mmediate action on the call from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls for the creation of a national plan to address violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQI+ people.

She sometimes spoke about one day becoming a paralegal to help women in her shoes. She also said that one of the worst things about being in jail was being away from her beloved flowers.

As I made the painful round of calls two weeks ago to let friends and family know of this outcome, one long-time friend from Georgia sighed on the other end of the line. “We can’t let her story be left untold,” she said.

With that in mind, a public memorial will take place at the front entrance to the Justice Department in Ottawa at 12 noon on Monday, November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Called “Roses for Michele,” this memorial will place the flowers that she loved at the foot of the building where such horrible decisions were made.  It will be followed later in the week by a group in Montreal gathering to honour Michele’s life by writing to prisoners still left behind in Leclerc prison. 

This post originally appeared on rabble.ca, by Matthew Behrens

Abuse Survivors Seek Jody Wilson-Raybould's Assistance to Resolve Their Cases

 Women Seek Reconsideration of Former Attorney General's Extradition Orders, Signed on Behalf of Abusive Ex-Spouses


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 27, 2019

Abuse Survivors Seek Jody Wilson-Raybould's Assistance to Resolve Their Cases;
Women Seek Reconsideration of Former Attorney General's Extradition Orders, Signed on Behalf of Abusive Ex-Spouses
 
In response to today's announcement that her run as an Independent in the Fall 2019 federal election will represent a new way of doing politics – and in answer to Jody Wilson Raybould's invitation to hear from Canadians – two Canadian women affected by the former Attorney General's decisions have responded.

The two Canadian women, who escaped their abusive ex-spouses in the U.S. and U.K., respectively, have sent an open letter seeking the assistance of former Minister of Justice and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould in ending the threat they face of being forcibly removed from Canada based on what appear to be vindictive and baseless charges.

    MM and KT – whose names are subject to court-ordered publication bans – are both sought for alleged interference in child custody arrangements under Canada's notorious Extradition Act, whose low standards and vulnerability to political bias have come into sharp focus in Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou's case as well as in the case of Ottawa university professor Hassan Diab. Dr. Diab, who spent over three years in French detention without ever being charged, returned to Canada last year, following which media investigations revealed political interference at the Justice Dept. on behalf of the French government.

    In an open letter to Wilson-Raybould, KT and MM write that they are "women whose lives are in peril because of decisions you made in both of our extradition cases during your tenure as Justice Minister and Attorney General. You had the power to accept or reject the extradition requests of our abusive ex-spouses, who still seek to have us forcibly removed from Canada to face potential jail terms based on vindictive, trumped up allegations. We don't know whether you went through the details of our cases before you signed off on them or whether you trusted the word of the Justice Dept.’s International Assistance Group, whose record on ramming through weak and politically-motivated extradition cases has drawn a good amount of well-deserved criticism."

    The women state that "having witnessed your powerful testimony and truthtelling regarding SNC-Lavalin, we were bolstered with the hope that perhaps, no longer shackled by the limitations of your former position, you would take a fresh and critical look at our cases. Having heard your eloquence at the Justice Committee hearing, and being moved at your reference to being  'a truth teller in accordance with the laws and traditions of our Big House,' we found it hard to believe that it was you, personally, who ignored our pleas (and those of our children) when you had the power to reject our extraditions." 

    According to Matthew Behrens, a member of the support group Women Who Choose to Live, "Having worked on a number of such cases over the years, it appears that the Extradition Act is open to being used as a back door bludgeon by vindictive ex-spouses who take advantage of the very low standards to continue punishing the women who have escaped their violent grasp. I am aware of at least half a dozen cases of Canadian women who feel trapped in the cycle of abuse because any move they take to protect themselves and their children from abusive fathers and husbands who live in other countries could make them subject to extradition requests, forced removal from Canada, and overseas detention."

    Two petitions on behalf of MM and KT – originally addressed to Wilson-Raybould but now being sent to her replacement, David Lametti – detail problems with the cases and affirm that the extradition cases should be stopped because they "shock the conscience" of Canadians. They  have garnered over 5,000 signatures. The MM case has an extensive history that includes a trip to the Supreme Court, where a 4-3 decision against her was deemed "Kafkaesque" by the dissenting justices.

    "It is our sincere hope that Ms Wilson-Raybould will apply the same standard of truthtelling she brought to the SNC-Lavalin case to the cases of these women, as well as the gender-based analysis that seems completely missing from the reasons she originally provided for rejecting their cases," says Behrens. "We believe it would be the right thing to do for her to publicly call for an end to the clouds of uncertainty and fear that continue to hang over the heads of these women and to demand that the extradition requests be cancelled."


A petition calling for an end to the cases is available to sign at https://www.change.org/p/don-t-send-canadian-abuse-survivors-mm-and-kt-to-foreign-jails-to-face-baseless-vindictive-charges-from-abusive-ex-spouses
 
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An Open Letter to Jody Wilson-Raybould: Help Two Canadian Survivors of Violence Against Women Whose Cases You Summarily Rejected as Minister of Justice
May 27, 2019

Dear Ms Wilson-Raybould,

We write to you as two Canadian women whose lives are in peril because of decisions you made in both of our extradition cases during your tenure as Justice Minister and Attorney General.

You had the power to accept or reject the extradition requests of our abusive ex-spouses, who still seek to have us forcibly removed from Canada to face potential jail terms based on vindictive, trumped up allegations.

We don't know whether you went through the details of our cases before you signed off on them or whether you trusted the word of the Justice Dept.’s International Assistance Group, whose record on ramming through weak and politically-motivated extradition cases has drawn a good amount of well-deserved criticism.

But having witnessed your powerful testimony and truthtelling regarding SNC-Lavalin, we were bolstered with the hope that perhaps, no longer shackled by the limitations of your former position, you would take a fresh and critical look at our cases. Having heard your eloquence at the Justice Committee hearing, and being moved at your reference to being  “a truth teller in accordance with the laws and traditions of our Big House,” we found it hard to believe that it was you, personally, who ignored our pleas (and those of our children) when you had the power to reject our extraditions.

In the beautiful spirit of sisterhood that you appear to share with Jane Philpott and some other MPs, we are asking you to expand that circle of solidarity and look into our cases.

We believe that if you were to take a fresh look at our cases, you would agree that the low standards of Canada's Extradition Act are being used as a back door bludgeon by abusers to continue persecuting women who have escaped their grasp.

By way of background, you – and thousands of Canadians who have signed petitions in our support – know us as Canadian citizens MM and KT (both names protected by publication ban).

It shocks the conscience that as survivors of male violence against women – who have acted in the best interests of our own safety and that of our children – we are still exposed to extradition proceedings in which the Canadian government and, specifically, your former ministry, is acting on behalf of our overseas abusers.

It shocks the conscience that your prior pursuit of our cases sends an insidious message to other women in Canada who feel trapped in the cycle of abuse: any move they take to protect themselves and their children from abusive fathers and ex-spouses who live in other countries could make them subject to extradition requests, forced removal from Canada, and overseas detention.

Because these cases shock the conscience, and also because Section 44a of the Extradition Act allows the current Minister of Justice to reject any request that is "unjust or oppressive having regard to all the relevant circumstances," we are asking you and your colleagues to join us in our call to stop the extradition cases against ourselves: MM and KT.

As you know, the Justice Minister can also stop these cases under Section 44b of the Extradition Act, which states "the request for extradition is made for the purpose of prosecuting or punishing the person by reason of their race, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, language, colour, political opinion, sex, sexual orientation, age, mental or physical disability or status or that the person’s position may be prejudiced for any of those reasons."

It is clear that we are being sought by ex-spouses because we are women who have escaped our abusers. Indeed, in both cases, the abusive fathers would not see the return of their children under the Extradition Act. It would only serve to punish and further harm us: the women they are targeting.

When you were elected, your government pledged to engage in an across-the-board gender-based impact analysis when it comes to creating and implementing policies, yet in these specific extradition cases, your former ministry failed two women who have broken no laws that would leave them open to prosecution here had the alleged offences occurred in Canada.

In MM's case, it has been clear since her ordeal began in 2010 that she was protecting her children from an abusive father in the US. Eight years on, there would clearly be no justice in uprooting MM and sending her to a US prison, where she could spend decades behind bars for a charge that, were it considered in Canada, would provide her with an adequate defence and high likelihood of acquittal. As Supreme Court of Canada Justice Rosalie Abella notes in the MM case: “the defence of rescuing children to protect them from imminent harm does not exist in Georgia [and] the mother will not be able to raise the defence she would have been able to raise had she been prosecuted in Canada."

In the case of KT, no legal violation occurred that would allow for an extradition to the United Kingdom. She left the UK to visit Calgary with her kids, who intended to return within the 28-day period stipulated in a custody order. But the ex-husband initiated court action before that 28-day period had expired to, without any rationale, forcibly return the children to the UK. Ironically, it was only the father's intemperate legal intervention that has kept the kids here in Canada, where they have decided they wish to stay.

As noted by the B.C. Supreme Court, KT imputes to her ex-husband "a goal of wishing to harm her, using the extradition proceedings and a potential prison sentence as a bludgeon." Like you, the court has dismissed as "irrelevant" proposed evidence about the best wishes of the children (who clearly do not wish to be forcibly returned to the father). Also dismissed was KT's affidavit, documentary evidence of bruising, and U.K. police reports that illustrate a history of assaults that include being hit by her ex-spouse's car.

In the MM case, Supreme Court Justice Abella was clear: "At the end of the day, there is little demonstrable harm to the integrity of our extradition process in finding it to be unjust or oppressive to extradite the mother of young children she rescued, at their request, from their abusive father. The harm, on the other hand, of depriving the children of their mother in these circumstances is profound and, with respect, demonstrably unfair."

A similar standard must apply to the case of KT, who committed no crime and who only finds herself in the legal crosshairs of her ex-spouse because of his own abusive actions.

As we state above, we salute your courage in standing strong under challenging circumstances. This proved to us that you have a great capacity for courage and truth.

Although you are no longer the Minister of Justice, we ask that you and your colleagues in a self-identified feminist government call upon your successor at the Justice Department to reconsider our cases and put a stop to them.

Because these cases shock our conscience and are unjust or oppressive having regard to all the relevant circumstances, we call on you to do the right thing and raise the questions needed to immediately drop the extradition cases of MM and KT.

We look forward to hearing from you through the support group which continues to work with us, Women Who Choose to Live (613-267-3998, tasc@web.ca)



Best wishes



MM and KT

Canada ignores national security threat posed by femicide

By Matthew Behrens

            Every other day in 2018, a woman in Canada was murdered, almost exclusively  by men. Sexual assault crisis centres reported a record numbers of calls last year. And according to a new report, male violence against women has claimed the lives of at least 10,495 women and girls in Canada since 1961, an average of 184 femicides per year. 

            “Femicide is recognized internationally by the United Nations as the most extreme form of violence and discrimination against women and girls,” according to the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability. “Its definition varies across disciplines and world regions, but broadly captures the killing of females, primarily by men, because they are female.”

            Despite such massacre-scale figures, successive federal and provincial governments have refused to recognize and act upon the scale and severity of a national security threat that daily targets more than half the population. It’s certainly not news to those who courageously – and almost always without the necessary funding and resources they need to do their jobs – staff the shelters and sexual violence hotlines counseling the targets of hundreds of thousands of daily acts of male violence. 

            While the Trudeau government has thumbed its nose at a United Nations commitment to enact and properly fund a National Action Plan to End Violence Against Women and Girls, its Public Safety Minister also refuses to recognize the national security implications of male violence. Indeed, when a man inspired by extremist misogynist ideology (the so-called incel movement) went on a murderous Yonge Street rampage in 2018, Ralph Goodale had the audacity to declare the terrorist act did “not appear to be connected in any way to national security.”

            Instead of naming and addressing this major national security threat, the Canadian government continues to rely on racist tropes generated by white supremacist state security agencies to imagine threats that are minimal at worst but which, when parroted by a compliant media, actually make life even more dangerous for anyone who does not enjoy the protective shield of white privilege.

A Flimsy Terror Plot

            Nowhere was that more clear than in the arrests last week of two people in Kingston on an alleged terror plot. While one of those arrested was released without charge, the media continue to spout inflammatory lines about the non-charged individual being part of a refugee family fleeing Syrian violence. Needless to say, that irresponsible reportage was immediately picked up by Donald Trump’s Canadian Tweet Deputy, Andrew Scheer, who reinforced the utterly nonexistent notion that falsely equates refugees with terrorism. (Indeed, research concludes that new immigrant communities have lower crimes rates than those who came before them).

            While we have yet to learn the details about this alleged plot, its timing is, as with all so-called terror arrests, curious, coming as it does as the Senate is set to renew hearings on the dangerous new state security powers being debated in Bill C-59. Its substance is also open to some very reasonable questioning. A tip from the FBI – an organization with a remarkable record of initiating and planning terror plots that are then pinned on vulnerable individuals – led some 300 Canadian agents into high-octane motion, even though there was  “no specific target identified”; the superintendent in charge confirmed there was “no specific time, date or location affixed to” the alleged plot of the 16-year-old; there were only “elements and trace elements” of a “potentially” explosive substance allegedly found in one of the houses raided by police; and the superintendent in charge declared: “At no time was the city of Kingston or any Canadian area under direct threat.” It appears there was some vague talk of “facilitating” someone setting off a non-existent explosive device at a place and time that had not been determined, which sounds a lot like the kind of plots that are cooked up by eager FBI and RCMP informants who fish the internet to find vulnerable individuals who might take the bait.

            The arrests also play into what will likely be a significant racist narrative during the 2019 federal election: Canada’s allegedly “porous” borders and equating refugees with security threats. Evidence of this trend was a lazy and fear-mongering CBC piece that read more like a press release from CSIS than the work of a responsible news organization. In reporting on a heavily redacted government document entitled “Subject of national security concern granted permanent residency,” CBC took great pains to point out, adding fuel to the fire, that the granting of landed status here “means the person is entitled to most social benefits —including health care — can live, work and study anywhere in Canada, and is protected by Canadian law and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but isn't considered a Canadian citizen.”

While the document allegedly could not detail why the individual was considered a threat because to detail CSIS’s “derogatory information” would allegedly harm “the conduct of international affairs, the defence of Canada or any state allied or associated with Canada,” the CBC failed to properly contextualize the consistent pattern of state security agencies claiming “national security confidentiality”  as a means of covering up anything that could prove embarrassing to the government. Such rationalizations are also employed to cover up the fact that “derogatory information” in the hands of CSIS is often the product of torture or other forms of mistreatment that Canada’s spy agency  eagerly  receives from some of the world’s worst dictatorships.

 The CBC also failed to question what it meant to declare that CSIS had “derogatory information” against this individual, especially given the spy agency’s lengthy historical record of falsely naming individuals security threats (often leading to torture, as we have seen in the cases of Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad ElMaati, Muayyed Nureddin, and Abousfian Abdelrazik, among others).

In addition, CBC failed to place this allegedly bombshell document within a long history of Canada using overly broad definitions of security threats to declare individuals  inadmissible to Canada.  That includes, for example, thoe who were involved in struggles against South African apartheid or death squad dictatorships in Central America. The overly broad interpretation of what it means to be a member of an organization – membership being a ground to make one inadmissible to Canada on security grounds – is so broad that it can encompass someone who wrote for a party newspaper or provided catering services to a political meeting. Ottawa fails to consider, for example, whether someone joined a group before it took up arms or after it eschewed violence. It also fails to distinguish between membership in groups with a single brutal purpose -- the employment of violence without regard to civilian casualties -- and multi-faceted organizations that, while possessing a military wing, also act as de facto governments that provide social services (such as the Palestine Liberation Organization).

The Tunnel Vision of State Security

That Canada’s state security agencies would not focus on real threats to security and instead pin blame on individual targeted communities is understandable. They have always demonized Indigenous people, immigrant communities, and anyone who threatens an unequal status quo. It's in their DNA, reflected recently in a 2017 lawsuit by a group of CSIS employees who declared they had been “harassed and discriminated against by CSIS management and colleagues, on the basis of religion, race, ethnic and/or national origin, and/or sexual orientation." That lawsuit was quietly settled with the usual promise to “do better.”

Meanwhile, the 2018  “Terrorist Threat to Canada” report, issued just before the December holiday season, proved a significant dose of cognitive dissonance on steroids. While Ralph Goodale inaccurately described it as “a balanced and frank assessment of the current threat environment,” it is in reality a recycled hash of racist nonsense produced by a nation that Goodale describes as “being a collaborative force for good in the world”. While the 2017 public report declared, without substantiation, that “the principal terrorist threat to Canada continues to be that posed by violent extremists who are inspired by violent Islamist ideology, and terrorist groups such as Daesh and al-Qaida,” the 2018 report returns to the tired evil Muslims nostrum of “violent Sunni Islamist ideology.”

The basis for such conclusions is a timeline dating back to 2006 that features a series of incidents that almost exclusively relied on the role of highly-paid RCMP and CSIS agents in creating and organizing various plots, leading vulnerable individuals right into lengthy prison terms via elaborate entrapment schemes. Others – single individual incidents – were carried out by people with serious mental health challenges but, given their ancestry, were translated into so-called terrorist acts.

In the check-box virtue-signalling and faux political correctness that defines the Trudeau regime, some space is devoted to Right-Wing Extremism. But it is seriously downplayed, noting in a major affront to the lived reality of millions that  “while racism, bigotry, and misogyny may undermine the fabric of Canadian society, ultimately they do not usually result in criminal behavior or threats to national security.” It’s a remarkable statement – not only because racism, bigotry, and misogyny actually make up the fabric of Canadian society – but also because it flies in the face of readily available public figures.

Indeed, whether it’s the epidemic of male violence against women – perhaps most dramatically illustrated in 2018 by the Yonge Street misogynist massacre – or racism (January 29 marks the second anniversary of the terrorist attack that murdered six and injured 19 Muslim worshippers in Quebec City), there is clearly a growing threat from white supremacists that’s been well documented by researchers Barbara Perry and Ryan Scrivens.

Downplaying White Supremacist Violence

Indeed, as the Toronto Star reports: “Between 2015 and 2018, researcher Barbara Perry said she’s observed a 20 to 25 per cent jump in the number of right-wing extremist groups active in Canada. Based on Perry’s previous estimates, that would mean anywhere between 100 to 125 active right-wing extremist groups operating from coast to coast.   Between 1980 and 2014, there have been more than 120 incidents involving right-wing extremist groups in Canada, according to Perry and co-author Ryan Scrivens’s 2015 research. The ‘incidents’ range from drug offences to attempted assassinations, firebombings and attacks.” The researchers noted, by comparison, only seven incidents during the same time period that could possibly be described under the government’s definition of “Islamist” ideology.

(Notably, a recently released report from the Anti-Defamation League also confirms that every single extremist killing in the USA in 2018 was committed by right-wing extremists.)

Despite such readily available figures, it remains controversial within the Canadian government to mention this reality. Indeed, an initial muted reference to right-wing extremism in the 2017 Canadian terrorism report almost didn't make it given the objections of CSIS.

According to documents obtained by Global News, CSIS originally proposed that the 2017 report would include the claim that  “Within the broader context of extremism in Canada, the number of right-wing extremists who promote or are willing to engage in politically-motivated violence is extremely small.”  (This false claim would be consistent with CSIS behaviour:  the spy agency’s review committee  found that CSIS dropped an investigation into Canada’s far-right in 2016 because Canada’s spies felt these groups did not represent a national security threat.) Global News continues that while Public Safety Canada initially included the CSIS statement on the far fight, it was later changed from “extremely small” to “quite small,” and then cut altogether.  CSIS also disputed that right-wing extremism was “a growing concern in Canada,” saying that was a “subjective statement” and demanding, “What is your facting for this?”

CSIS could have easily found that “facting” via a search engine that most 2^nd graders know about called Google. They would have discovered a rigorous academic study by the  Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security & Society (whose partners include CSIS and Public Safety Canada) that concluded the right-wing extremist movement in Canada “is more extensive and more active than public rhetoric would suggest.” They noted there were over 100 groups, some of which “were actively engaged in brutal acts of violence directed at an array of targets” including Muslims, Jews, Indigenous people, LGBTQ communities, and “people of color, such as Afro-Canadians, Asians, and South Asians.”

            Significantly, their research confirmed that “a key factor enabling the emergence and sustainability of right-wing groups was a weak law enforcement response. Typically, activities of the far right have not been monitored or taken seriously…there was a tendency for officials to deny or trivialize the presence and threat.”

            Still, Canadian officials tried to soft pedal right wing extremism, questioning why it was listed as a Principal Threat to Canada. “Is far-right a ‘principal threat’ to Canada?” asked an official in the released documents obtained by Global News.  “Good that it is outlined in this document, but may want to revisit how this is framed.”

Naming New Unsubstantiated Threats

            The unwillingness of Canadian state security agencies to develop threat profiles based on readily available public information is another reason why CBC’s abovementioned reportage of alleged security threats receiving permanent landing in Canada is so irresponsible. Indeed, the CBC’s preferential option for the powerful assumes that CSIS and the CBSA actually know what they are doing. Notably, these terrorism threat reports are produced by the same agencies that treat as security risks land and water defenders from Wet'suwet'en to Muskrat Falls (a chilling but consistent historical practice well documented in the excellent book, Policing Indigenous Movements). 

            The 2018 public report on terror threats also suddenly raised out of the blue alleged “Sikh (Khalistani) Extremism,” pointing to events that happened over 30 years ago as part of its rationale. It also backs up this claim by declaring that two Sikh organizations were listed as terrorist entities in Canada, but that is old news that dates back to 2003. This understandably upset Sikh groups, prompting Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale to say he would look into tweaking the language of the report because “words matter and being precise matters,” but six weeks later, the libelous reference remains on the website. 

            And because Canada’s state security agencies are equal opportunity Islamophobes, they also bring in alleged “Shia Extremism” with the very lazy, vague claims that some people in Canada “may sympathize with [Hizballah] for political reasons” and that individuals in Canada send material and financial support to the group, without providing any evidence. Hizballah was listed as a terrorist entity in 2002 by Canada. 

            The largest amount of space in the report is dedicated to “Canadian Extremist Travellers,” even though the report notes that “Canada has not experienced, and does not expect to experience, a significant influx of returning Daesh-affiliated extremist travellers.” While the report claims that these travellers pose a threat because they return with the “capability to conduct unsophisticated attacks, such as with knives and vehicles,” it completely ignores the fact that white Canadian men are perfectly capable of conducting such attacks against women with no need for overseas training, as reports from hospital emergency rooms and women’s shelters will bear out. Indeed, a December, 2018 report from the Canadian Domestic Homicide Prevention Initiative found that the most common means of men murdering women in Canada was by knifing, all carried out without the support and inspiration of Daesh or Al-Qaeda. 

            The report offers an extensive explanation of initiatives being undertaken to counter what it already admits is not much of a threat – those who have travelled overseas – while completely failing to list any efforts being undertaken to counter right-wing extremism and misogynistic attacks.

Will Canada Acknowledge an Epidemic?

            As billions of dollars continue to be poured into state agencies chasing almost non-existent threats (including the commityment to purchase warships at a staggering cost of anywhere from $62 to $100 billion) , those whose lives are on the line from racism and misogyny are left out in the cold. But with a federal election on the horizon, there is an opportunity to push all political parties on the epidemic of misogyny in Canada. 

            Former NDP Women’s Critic Sheila Malcolmson pointed out that “direct federal funding to women’s organizations represents less than 0.01% of total federal program spending; only about $1 for every woman in Canada,” and that proper core funding for said groups should be a cornerstone commitment that would allow Canada to live up to international and domestic constitutional obligations ensuring women’s equality.

             

When she testified before a Parliamentary Committee last fall, Megan Walker of the London Abused Women's Centre reminded MPS that any program going forward must consider that “male violence against women is an epidemic. If we were talking about violence in any other format except against women and we knew that 106 women were murdered this year, largely by men, with 33 murdered by their intimate partners, all bells and whistles would be going off. If it were an epidemic with respect to a flu or SARS or anything like that, we would be taking immediate action, yet for some reason we still continue to minimize the lived experiences of women and pretend it doesn't happen.

It's time to get our heads out of the sand and realize that we all have a role to play, especially government, in preventing women across this country from being murdered, particularly when they're being murdered by a man who is supposed to love them, and in their homes, which for most of us is the safest place we can be. That's our first recommendation: we want the Government of Canada to recognize this as the epidemic it is.

Further, we want the government to respond to this epidemic by including full core funding for all services that are helping women live their lives free from violence and abuse. We want to see major public awareness and education programs so that future generations of girls and boys grow up knowing that this is wrong, that the value women and girls have is not from the attention paid to them by boys and men, but in fact from who they are as people.

We also want to see a heavy investment in prevention. As I say, I think if we can see the results of one woman being alive today because of preventive action, we've done our job. We need to do that with much more frequency and with a much greater investment.”

(originally published at http://rabble.ca/columnists/2019/01/canada-ignores-national-security-threat-posed-femicide)