Indeed, it is with regret that I am here, alone, in the absence of the women with the lived experience of criminalization. Under the guise of security concerns, too many women are not permitted the necessary access to travel and voice their concerns. Moreover, advocates and allies are also increasingly being silenced with threats of criminal charges and law suits. As a lawyer, I am well aware that the deep pockets of government could drive us easily into the ground as an organization. And, believe me, this threat gets held over the heads of most of us who dare to challenge their authority.

Given the urgency we all feel, or should feel, about the increased criminalization of women and girls worldwide, my hope is that we will truly engage and work to correct what is fundamentally flawed and wrong about current attempts to reform and correct or change individual and/or groups of women, when it is increasingly the laws and policies within which we all work that are increasingly coming in to conflict with the lived realities of people, especially poor, racialized, and disabled women.

We have no choice but to challenge our pre-conceptions and therefore our approaches, responsibilities, language – in short, everything, about how we are working and envisioning the future.

Women are the fastest growing prison population world wide and this is not accidental. In Canada, we recognize that the now globalized destruction of social safety nets – from social and health services to economic and education standards, and availability is resulting in the increased abandonment of the most vulnerable, marginalized and oppressed. It is for this reason that our organization is abolitionist in orientation, and we demand not equality with men in and from prison, but substantive equality for all women. It is simply not acceptable that laws and policies are increasingly in conflict with peoples’ lives, resulting in the virtual inevitability of criminalization, pathologizing, homelessness and even death.

For example, by creating criminally low welfare or social assistance rates, renaming it as work fare, and even placing lifetime bans on receipt of state resources, many poor people are immediately relegated to the criminalized underclass. It is incontrovertible at this stage, that since the 1996 elimination of the Canada Assistance Plan, we have witnessed in Canada the shredding of our social safety net. There are no provinces where social assistance rates are actually adequate to support the poor. In order to survive, most people, especially poor mothers who are the sole supports of their families, are required to obtain income by means that would be considered fraudulent if welfare authorities become aware of it.

Some such behaviour is also considered criminal in and of itself. For example, if a woman sells her body at the end of the month to make her rent or feed her children, she may face the possibility of a “communicating for the purpose of prostitution” or ‘living off the avails of prostitution” charges. Similarly, if she agrees to carry a package across the border, across the country, or across town, she may also face trafficking, importation or other similar sorts of charges. In addition, if she fails to report any additional income received, including debts owed to them (only people on welfare are required to declare debts and then have them counted as income), then she may also face fraud charge(s) as a result of investigations by welfare workers into such activities.