How much death is enough?

We all know what happened in Nova Scotia on April 19 and 20, 2020. The events of those fateful days are etched into our collective consciousness; a stain on our very fabric.

A 51 year-old man—in a car he designed himself to look like an RCMP vehicle—went on a murder rampage, killing 22 people and injuring three others before he was shot and killed in Enfield, fully 13 hours after the attacks started.

As a province, we were shocked. How could this happen here? In our home that we love? We banded together, changed our Facebook profiles to “Nova Scotia Strong” and we grieved and we mourned and then we moved on. To make sense of it, we convinced ourselves that this was a one-off; a case of one bad apple. Because what was the alternative?

The truth though, whether we like it or not, is that this attack—while horrifying—was not a case of one unhinged man going off the deep end one day, but the result of a systemic problem: of lack of care, understanding or accountability around gender-based violence.

What if the Department of Community Services—which had a long history of giving the killer government funding to treat underprivileged, mostly Black women as outlined in Avalon Sexual Assault Centre’s report “We Matter and our voices must be heard”—had checked in on the patients and asked about their experience? Maybe they would have found out that his was a household name among many African Nova Scotian communities, a name notorious for using power and privilege as a white denturist to violate and perpetuate violence toward vulnerable individuals for years. When individuals could not pay the full cost of the dental services provided to them, he was known to sexually exploit them by exchanging dental work for sex.

But the Department of Community services subsidized him, trusted him and turned their back.

What if professional organizations like the Denturist Licensing Board of Nova Scotia—knowing that he was being subsidized by the government to treat marginalized communities—paid attention to what he was doing. Victims say that he was known to have crossed professional boundaries and violated codes of ethics, so where was the safeguard?

But the board—whose mandate is to “ensure that standards of practice and policies are maintained by denturists in a safe, competent and ethical manner”—turned their backs too.

What if the police that were routinely called to his house to respond to reports of domestic violence actually investigated and asked questions—what if they actually believed what they were told rather than what they assumed to be true? What if they recognized the long history of violence in his household? What if instead of trusting the word of a privileged white man of power because he was charming and charismatic, they did their jobs to protect and serve?

But the police liked him, laughed it off, patted him on the back and turned theirs.

Everybody turned their back until nobody could turn their backs. Everyone ignored it until it came into such stark focus, we couldn’t look away.

Kristina Fifield is a Halifax-based trauma therapist and a member of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund’s Accountability Project Advisory Committee. LEAF’s Accountability Project recently released a report by Dr Amanda Dale called What It Takes: Establishing a Gender-Based Violence Accountability Mechanism in Canada. The report provides a way forward to ensure a coordinated and sustainable infrastructure of response and prevention to gender-based violence.

Fifield believes that proper accountability mechanisms across all sectors and all parts of society would help prevent perpetrators from having their violence go unchecked and, ultimately, escalating. “We need gender-based accountability mechanisms built into all parts of society, including within workplaces, institutions, schools and government,” says Fifield in a phone interview with The Coast.

It starts with a communal, cultural shift in our understanding of how gender-based violence impacts all parts of society, because remember: an abuser at home also goes to work, to church and coaches sports teams.

“The response to gender-based violence cannot solely focus on violence taking place in homes, often seen with family violence and intimate partner violence,” said Fifield. “A response requires all forms of violence to be acknowledged and accountability mechanisms in place.

And a response also requires political will and that means that the government in power—whoever that turns out to be after the Nov 26 election—needs to start seeing the truth about gender-based violence, enlisting the experts who are ready and willing to help, doling out funding to the crisis and making policies that stop this violence from going unchecked and ignored.

Gender-based advocates and community organizations have banded together this election to demand attention and action—sending a letter to each of the government parties, whose official platforms are glaringly devoid of any sort of plan to implement accountability measures to combat the epidemic. The group has yet to receive a response. This, after three cases of intimate partner violence in Nova Scotia ended in murder-suicides in less than a month.

“Accountability requires all levels of government to take bold leadership in the cultural shift, challenge the status quo culture of violence, turn inward, and address how violence and oppression show up within government structures, policies and practices,” says Fifield. “Leadership at the federal, provincial and territorial levels are required as the National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence is based on individual agreements and lacks over-all accountability.”

Fifield adds that she firmly believes that there needs to be a person appointed to lead the charge as a gender-based violence commissioner, as per the recommendation made by the Mass Casualty Commission (recommendation V.17).

She’s right. What’s the point in having a plan to end gender-based violence if there is nobody in charge of overseeing its implementation? Who is in charge of making sure it gets done and done right?

The Commissioners Report from the Mass Casualty Commission found there were “many warning signs of the perpetrator’s violence and missed opportunities to intervene” in the years before the mass casualty. And that’s the crux of the problem: there are always warning signs. But if we aren’t working together—across sectors and communities—to be on the lookout and to say something when we see something, the violence will continue and people will die.

As a province, we hold two records: the highest rate of gender-based violence in the country and the largest mass shooting in Canadian history. If you think this is a coincidence, you’re part of the problem, not the solution.