Senator Yvonne Boyer during a news conference on July 14, 2022, in Ottawa.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Senator Yvonne Boyer is on a mission to change the Criminal Code to establish an offence for forced and coerced sterilization procedures – an issue her office has received numerous calls and messages about and one that keeps her up at night.
The Métis lawyer, who has also worked as a nurse and law professor, introduced legislation earlier this year. Bill S-250 proposes that everyone who, through deception, intimidation, threat, force or any other form of coercion, causes or attempts to cause a person to undergo a sterilization, would be guilty of an indictable offence. The legislation says a guilty individual would be liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than 14 years.
Ms. Boyer is now working to build support for the bill, which she hopes will be endorsed by all parties and passed before the end of the year. So far, it has cleared first and second reading in the Senate and is now at the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. Once it clears the Senate, it will have to go through legislative steps in the House of Commons.
Ms. Boyer has researched coerced and forced sterilizations, including for a 2017 report for the Saskatoon Health Region that she co-authored prior to becoming a senator. It detailed how Indigenous women in Saskatoon and surrounding areas were coerced into having their Fallopian tubes severed or clamped after giving birth in hospital.
In their research, she and fellow investigator Judith Bartlett documented survivors’ experiences, such as one woman who recounted how doctors and nurses said the procedure would be for her benefit and that she already had children.
Ms. Boyer, who was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in March of 2018, spoke about the issue of coerced sterilization in her inaugural address to the Senate. She cited how her Aunt Lucy was never able to bear children, though the senator was unable to confirm if her aunt had been sterilized because the medical records had been destroyed.
It is likely every Indigenous person knows someone who has been sterilized or has been sterilized themselves, the senator told The Globe and Mail.
In the past, she said, she has been hesitant about bringing in criminalization because, as a lawyer, she has seen how the Criminal Code has been used against Indigenous people. But she heard from multiple women who said they had been sterilized and who were adamant criminalization was necessary.
“I had to show these women that they had been heard,” she said. “The women were so relieved. They were so grateful that I had introduced this and they’ve been following it ever since.”
More than 220 survivors have come together to form the Survivors Circle for Reproductive Justice, she added.
In 2019, the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights conducted a study on the extent and scope of forced and coerced sterilization of persons in Canada and it heard from experts and groups. In 2022, the committee heard additional testimony, including from several survivors who shared their stories.
Last July, the committee released a report entitled “The Scars that We Carry: Forced and Coerced Sterilization of Persons in Canada.” It described sterilization as a surgical procedure to prevent conception. Forced or coerced sterilization, the committee report said, occurs when sterilization is performed without the patient’s free, prior and informed consent.
The committee recommended, among other measures, that legislation be introduced to add a specific offence to the Criminal Code that prohibits forced and coerced sterilization, saying the practice is “not confined to our distant past.”
“Law and policy changes are needed to prevent this horrific practice from being inflicted on others,” the report said.
Then-health-minister Jean-Yves Duclos responded to the report, saying it was further evidence of a broader need to eliminate racism and other forms of discrimination embedded within systems and practices, including the health care system.
Sterilizing persons without their informed consent is not only morally and ethically wrong, but illegal, he said.
“We recognize the pressing need to end this practice across Canada,” he said in a letter to the committee chair. “Forced or coerced sterilization is a serious violation of human rights and medical ethics, and is a prosecutable offence under existing Criminal Code offences.”
In response to the suggestion that legal mechanisms are already on the books, such as assault provisions in the Criminal Code, Ms. Boyer said she wishes she never had to put forward this bill.
What is in place now does not go far enough, the senator said. “We wouldn’t have a problem then, would we?”