The Response of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies to Reforming Criminal Code Defences: Provocation, Self-Defence and Defence of Property

I. Background

The Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies (CAEFS) is a federation of 24 autonomous local societies. The mandate of CAEFS is to work with and on behalf of women and girls in the justice system, particularly those who have come into conflict with the law.

CAEFS has a long history of urging the Department of Justice to reform the defence of self-defence to reflect the realities experienced by battered women who defend themselves and others with lethal force. After the Supreme Court of Canada handed down the Lavallee decision in 1990, CAEFS and other equality-seeking women’s groups requested a review of the cases of women who had been jailed for killing their abusers.

These efforts resulted in the establishment of the Self-Defence Review (Ratushny, 1997). The purpose of the Review was essentially to examine the cases of women jailed as a result of their involvement in the deaths of their abusers and recommend how they might achieve some measure of justice for women who had been convicted in Canada of homicide in circumstances where self-defence should have been considered.

CAEFS has also been involved in national consultations with women’s groups on violence against women, and has articulated the link between women’s experience of male violence and their subsequent convictions and imprisonment. In this regard, CAEFS participated in 1995, along with other women’s groups, in responding to the White Paper proposals (Standing Committee on Justice, 1993) on reform of the law of self-defence (Sheehy, 1995).

In 1998, the federal government released its latest consultation document on the reform of self-defence, Reforming Criminal Code Defences: Provocation, Self-Defence and Defence of Property (Department of Justice, 1998), which included proposed reforms to the defence of provocation and defence of property as well. In the summer of 1999, CAEFS convened a national consultation with equality-seeking women’s groups to discuss the relationship between self-defence, the defence of provocation, and the mandatory minimum sentence of life imprisonment for murder. This brief is the product of that consultation process.