The Department of Justice must take advantage of the consultation process with women’s advocates who work in the area of violence against women before proceeding further with a law reform agenda. The expertise offered by these advocates facilitates identification of practical failures and erroneous assumptions embedded in criminal law and practice. In turn this information allows for the development of sound legal and procedural rules around defences to crime, and ultimately contributes to the creation of law that has longevity and integrity. By way of example, the research and experience of women’s advocates describes the way in which violent men threaten and harm others as a way to control and hurt their women partners. This knowledge pushes us to examine "defence of others" (s. 37) and to consider expanding its legal basis beyond threats to those "under one’s protection" to include neighbours, family members, and friends.

In addition, consultation enables women’s organizations to consider, negotiate, and resolve conflicts and competing interests. For example, at the consultation for Bill C-72 (extreme intoxication), while a number of women were willing to seriously consider a new offence of criminal intoxication or intoxicated sexual assault, representatives of Aboriginal women’s groups persuaded the others that this option would have a disproportionate negative effect on Aboriginal and poor peoples and this reform option was abandoned. Similarly, there are competing interests at stake in the reform of self-defence and intoxication that warrant a broader process to consider Aboriginal, gay and lesbian, and criminalized women’s interests and those of poor women, other racialized women, and women with disabilities. The advantage to the Department of Justice of such work is a better quality of legal response as well as broader based support for its legislative interventions.

Although officials from the Department of Justice had indicated during the fall 1998 Criminal Procedure reforms consultation that a further consultation would be provided for national women’s organizations to discuss changes to self-defence and provocation before the federal government proceeded with a reform agenda, to date no such opportunity has materialized. Instead, in 1999 CAEFS itself organized, with a very small budget, a two day meeting with over 40 women representing Aboriginal women, women with disabilities, francophone women, women who work in shelters and crisis centres, as well as the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), the National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL), and the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF). CAEFS held discussions on mandatory minimum sentences, self-defence, and provocation. As a result of this meeting, CAEFS has clarified its own positions on these two defences.