Intimate partner violence ongoing stain on province

Last month marked 35 years since the murder conviction in Canada’s most notorious case of domestic violence.

Yet, strangely, we still don’t frame the first-degree murder conviction of Colin Thatcher and the death of his ex-wife, Joann Wilson, in those terms.

It says much about Saskatchewan’s long and sad history with domestic violence and how this province seems to still be struggling mightily to come to terms with this issue.

Last Thursday afternoon, we witnessed a murder-suicide in Kindersley in which RCMP say David Michael Gartner, 66, shot his wife Elsie, 64, before shooting himself. According to RCMP, the couple was going through a divorce and the murder-suicide occurred in the family home that was being sold. Local RCMP said they had no knowledge of previous violent incidents between them.

Admittedly, the Kindersley deaths were not the Thatcher case. What happened last week wasn’t a movie-worthy drama involving a wellto-do politician and son of a former premier allegedly hiring a hit man to murder this ex-wife on a cold January 1983 night in a garage kitty-corner to the Saskatchewan legislature.

When it comes to the Thatcher case, there will continue to be stories told around the fire of the former MLA muttering to Progressive Conservative caucus colleagues: “Why should I pay $800,000 (in a divorce settlement) when a bullet only costs a dollar.” (Thirty-five years ago, the first question period of the fall sitting of the legislature opened with then-ndp Opposition leader Allan Blakeney asking who in the PC caucus heard Thatcher make that statement.)

But while the last week’s tragedy in Kindersley has none of the Hollywood drama, the lessons such all-too-frequent occurrences teach us are pretty much the same ones we should have grasped 35 years ago: Domestic violence can happen anywhere and escalation leading to death is preventable.

The tragedy of Joann Wilson’s death clearly demonstrated there were people — powerful people responsible for making the laws of the land — who could have and should have done more. That someone who heard these stories didn’t go to the police with what they heard after Wilson was shot and wounded the first time remains one of the overlooked tragedies in this case.

We still don’t have the mechanisms in place 35 years later to help both victims and assailants going through crises before their stories become tragedies. This may be part of a tragedy still unfolding. As NDP justice critic Nicole Sarauer noted last week in the wake of the Kindersley murder-suicide, Saskatchewan still has the highest rate of intimate partner violence in this country.

In fairness, marriages/partnerships break down every day without any domestic violence. And most, like the Kindersley tragedy, don’t have the blatantly obvious warning signs that were evident prior to Joann Wilson’s death.

But while we have improved mechanisms in the past 35 years for preventing such tragedies (one such improvement being last year’s adoption of Clare’s Law to help reveal to partners those with a violent past), our rates of violence and death are an admission that much more can and needs to be done.

For example, while the 2019-20 budget did provide a $75,000, one-per-cent increase to deal with interpersonal violence and abuse, Jo-anne Dusel, executive director of the Provincial Association of Transition Houses and Services of Saskatchewan (PATHS), rightly described it as a “nice token.”

Then there is last year’s Saskatchewan Domestic Violence Death Review Report that determined “many domestic violence deaths can be predicted and could be prevented” because escalation of violence was a commonality. The 19 recommendations in the report included things like a “comprehensive” education program for both K-12 students and anyone applying for a marriage licence; firstresponder teams “with expertise in domestic violence;” domestic violence programming for families, victims and perpetrators of domestic violence; and a provincial call centre line for information and support for victims.

While the recommendations have been accepted, few have been implemented.

We simply need to do better.

Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-post.