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 in 1993 and in discussions regarding proposals for reform of the law of self-defence in 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, 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.

CAEFS’ primary and most critical response to the Department of Justice paper, Reforming Criminal Code Defences: Provocation, Self-Defence and Defence of Property is to urge the abolition of the mandatory minimum sentence of life imprisonment. CAEFS has, since 1979, formally opposed all mandatory minimum sentences, as have many other government commissions such as the Sentencing Commission of Canada. Given the extremely serious repercussions of the mandatory minimum sentence of life imprisonment for individual women convicted of murder and for the conditions in women’s prisons, CAEFS calls for abolition of this and all other mandatory prison sentences.

First and foremost, the abolition of mandatory minimum sentences is necessary if we are to address systemic discrimination in the criminalization and imprisonment of women, members of racialized communities, people with disabilities, the poor, and lesbians and gays. While some people seem to believe that mandatory minimum sentencing amounts to “equal treatment”, this assumption is falsely simplistic.