2021-06-09

Mahone Bay’s Be The Peace Institute invited to join Mass Casualty Commission

A Lunenburg County-based advocacy group aimed at preventing and dealing with gender-based violence has been invited to participate in the Mass Casualty Commission.

Be The Peace Institute (BTPI) in Mahone Bay joins Women's Shelters Canada (WSC) and the Transition House Association of Nova Scotia (THANS) in participating in the inquiry, along with a host of other groups including victims' families, organizations dealing with victim advocacy and gender and health issues, as well as members of the justice and law enforcement systems.

The Mass Casualty Commission was jointly struck by the federal and Nova Scotia governments in late October 2020 to inquire into the mass casualties that occurred in April 2020 in Nova Scotia. On the evening of April 18, 2020, a man set out on a deadly rampage that started with a violent attack on his domestic partner at their cottage in Portapique. By the time he was finally stopped by the RCMP, he had killed 22 people, making it the deadliest attack in recent Canadian history.

The Commission has been given a broad mandate to inquire into what happened and produce findings concerning the causes, context and circumstances that gave rise to the mass casualties.

Sue Bookchin, executive director for BTPI, sees the commission's aim as being"finding out what happened, how it happened, what are the circumstances and context that they brought into it, what was the responses by police in terms of policies and training and education and public alerts...

"And then the part of the role of intimate partner violence and could it have, could response to that have prevented this?" she said in a phone interview with LighthouseNOW.

"It's all about the gender-based violence, the intimate partner violence, in this relationship which sounds like [there was] longstanding violence, that lots of people knew about," Bookchin added.

She explained the commission will also be looking at the role of misogyny and gender-based violence in general as an underlying ideology in mass killings, she said in a phone interview with LighthouseNOW. As an example, she points to the École Polytechnique massacre, a misogynist terrorist mass shooting in Montreal on December 6, 1989 at an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal in which 14 women were murdered and 10 women and four men were injured.

Stacey Godsoe, Project Officer for BTPI, said the organization can bring something unique but relevant to the commission table since it deals a lot with rural domestic and gender-based violence. Much of the violence in the mass casualties in April 2020 was concentrated against a rural backdrop.

While rural communities traditionally are highly supportive of their members, "we also know that there are some conditions in rural communities that really increase the likelihood of violence," Godsoe commented to LighthouseNOW.

"We're underserved in rural communities., especially in terms of those kind of services that would help women and families leave violence - so affordable housing, transportation, women's centres and transition houses that are over capacity, under funded. People are quite isolated physically, but then also emotionally they can be very isolated. "

Moreover, she said, gender-based or domestic violence is "still sort of in the shadows," whereby people don't want to interfere or judge. "There can be a hands-off approach which can be quite harmful," said Godsoe.

Bookchin opined that "hasn't actually changed much. We still have some kind of a cultural acceptance of some level of gender-based violence that is always going to happen.

"And people are afraid to get involved. Afraid of retaliation. Like certainly the neighbours in [the April 2020 tragedy] were afraid of the man."

However, she points to the fact that the commission has articulated that gender-based violence is one of the key areas it's looking at as a sign of progress. "Because that wouldn't have happened 10 years ago."

Godsoe agreed. "I'm hopeful and optimistic that it will lead to real change, to, you know, really make those important connections to the deeper causes and context that led to this tragedy [and] to prevent future massacres and future incidence of gender-based violence on the whole."

The Commission is expected to produce a report by November 2022, setting out lessons learned and recommendations to prevent an incident like the April 2020 tragedy from happening again.