Advocates disappointed by province's initial Renfrew County inquest response
29 of 75 coroner's inquest recommendations to Ontario still need to be addressed
The Ontario government says it needs more time to consider many of the ideas a coroner's inquest jury championed for preventing deaths tied to intimate partner violence (IPV), while advocates say they're disappointed with what they've heard from the province so far about some of the jury's other recommendations.
"We had hoped the government would honour Carol, Anastasia, Nathalie and the inquest process by moving quickly to implement key recommendations such as declaring intimate partner violence to be an epidemic," End Violence Against Renfrew County said in a news release on Thursday.
Last summer in Pembroke, Ont., a nearly month-long inquest examined the 2015 murders of three women in and around Renfrew County: Carol Culleton, Anastasia Kuzyk and Nathalie Warmerdam. All three women were murdered on the same day by the same man, despite red flags about his potential to inflict further harm.
Over 14 days of evidence, jurors heard about everything from under-funded survivor services to missed opportunities by Ontario's probation and parole service following the man's prior IPV convictions involving two of the women he eventually murdered.
In response, the jurors suggested the provincial and federal governments adopt a sweeping list of preventative measures.
But the Ontario government's initial response to those recommendations, filed last week, doesn't address 29 of the 75 recommendations aimed at the province, including:
- Formally declaring IPV a provincial epidemic.
- A plan for housing IPV survivors fleeing abusers.
- Funding for safe rooms inside survivors' homes.
- A 24/7 hotline for men at risk of committing IPV.
- Considering allowing police services to disclose information about a person's history of IPV to new or future partners, following in the footsteps of similar laws in Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba.
- Creating a record of past IPV abuses and charges that's accessible to all police services.
- Reviewing the practice of mandatory charging, where police are required to charge someone with assault if they feel they have reasonable grounds to do so.
- Studying judge's decisions in IPV-related cases.
The Renfrew County organization said it is "disappointed at the number of items that haven't had any response at all yet," said Kirsten Mercer, the lawyer who represented it during the inquest. "It's not like these recommendations are being heard for the first time."
WATCH | 'Where possible' qualifier could have several meanings, lawyer says
Mercer said the province's response so far doesn't adequately address the help IPV perpetrators need while they're in the criminal justice system — or even before.
During the inquest, "there was a lot of evidence about [how] Ontario is far from where it needs to be," she said — pointing, for example, to a much-criticized treatment program for IVP perpetrators out on probation.
Particular jarring, Mercer said, is the absence of any response to Recommendation No. 5 from the inquest, which asked the province to immediately launch an implementation committee that would apply some pressure on the government to act on the recommendations.
"That's the obvious job number one and that's on the TBD list. That just really feels like a miss to me," she said.
Province says issues are complex
In its response last week, the province said the list of 29 unaddressed recommendations demands more analysis and collaboration, adding that it expects to address those in a second response by the end of June.
Asked about EVA Renfrew County's criticism of its initial response, a spokesperson for Ontario's Ministry of the Solicitor General said via email the work needed to understand, assess and plan for the recommendations is complex and must be done with care and attention.
"Ontario is committed to breaking the cycle of intimate partner violence and supporting survivors to help keep communities safe. We look forward to a completed review of all recommendations before the summer," the spokesperson added.
EVA Renfrew County said it was encouraged by some of the province's promises, including looking at ways to streamline the reporting requirements for groups that help women fleeing abuse. The inquest heard heavy paperwork takes workers away from their frontline duties.
But EVA "had hoped for more" from the province's overall reply, the organization said in its news release.
One of the responses to some of the inquest's most explosive testimony — in which a representative from Ontario's probation and parole service addressed "missed" opportunities to more closely monitor the murderer who killed Culleton, Kuzyk and and Warmerdam — also contains a troubling qualifier, Mercer said.
The Ministry of the Solicitor General wrote that policies have been implemented to ensure that, when a perpetrator is out on probation, officers maintain contact with past IPV victims "where possible."
The inquest heard contact with the Renfrew County murderer's victims dropped off in the months leading to the triple homicide.
"I'm not suggesting that [an] officer should be hounding a survivor who doesn't want to engage. But 'where possible' is doing a lot of work in that sentence," Mercer said.
"There are not enough people doing this work, and so 'where possible' may mean 'I simply don't have time to keep following up with someone who doesn't call me back,' or 'I don't have enough people on the ground to contact not only this survivor, but the three people who I know that this perpetrator is currently involved in a relationship with.'"
Idea of school police detachments nixed
Only one recommendation to Ontario, encouraging IPV to be integrated into every municipality's community safety and well-being plan, has been rejected so far.
The Ministry of the Solicitor General said that while it appreciated the intent of the recommendation, such initiatives must be locally driven.
One recommendation, calling for police to set up satellite offices to spread resources more widely over large rural areas, was accepted, even while one element of the recommendation — asking schools to consider providing office space — was not.
"Schools ... are not recommended for host or satellite detachments due to security concerns with individuals access the site," the ministry wrote.
Dozens of other recommendations addressed so far have either been wholly or partially accepted, with the province stating it started doing those things before and after the jury made its findings.
Police have charged men with second-degree murder in the deaths of two women in Renfrew County, Sommer Boudreau and Lisa Sharpe, since the inquest wrapped last summer.
On Friday, the Ontario NDP is holding a virtual news conference in which it will call on Premier Doug Ford to pass all the recommendations under his government's jurisdiction.
Read the Ontario government's initial response to the coroner's inquest jury recommendations below.
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