A personal moment

A personal moment.

It was a quiet Sunday night. September 22. Decades ago. My younger teenage brother had just left for his part-time job. None of us knew that night would split our lives in two.

That was the night our mom, Joanne, was murdered by her husband, Bob.

I have spent most of my life carrying that night without naming what it did to me. After decades, I am saying it plainly. The trauma is real. The mental health cost is real. For years I buried it because I thought silence was strength. It was not. It was survival. In the last two years, I have grown and leaned on my faith enough to stop pretending otherwise. I think of my mother in every decision I make. That is not a slogan. It is how I live.

Online, plenty of people think they know me. They decide I lived a privileged life, never struggled, had everything handed to me on a silver platter. They are wrong. We did not have money. We did not have ease. What we had was her. I would trade every dollar in the world for more time with my mom. I would give it all back tomorrow if it meant one more ordinary evening with Joanne in the kitchen.

She was an extraordinary woman. She raised three boys, often on her own. She worked full-time. At 40, she went after her dream and became a nurse. She made three kids who had very little feel like the luckiest boys on earth. She was our rock. Behind that smile, she was living in fear. She stayed because she wanted us to have the stability she never had. When she finally asked for help, the system failed her. Shelters. Police. Courts. The same pattern too many women still face.

Years later, I sat in a federal prison boardroom at his parole hearing and listened to the man who killed her try to explain it away. That day we learned what she had lived with: repeated cries for help, nights in shelters, terror that never slept. She had been sleeping with one eye open. He was judged “no threat to society,” unless you were a woman in a relationship with him I guess. That is the message too many families still get

This is not ancient history. In 2024, Statistics Canada recorded 100 intimate partner homicides in Canada. Eighty-one of the victims were women. That is a sharp jump from 53 women the year before. Police reported 128,175 victims of intimate partner violence that year; nearly eight in ten were women and girls. Another 25,938 children and youth were victims of family violence. Manitoba is not on the sidelines. In 2024, this province had one of the highest provincial rates of police-reported intimate partner violence in the country: 607 victims per 100,000, well above the national rate of 356. Family violence here sat at 568 per 100,000. These numbers do not care about your postal code, your income, or your politics. They land in kitchens and bedrooms across Winnipeg and rural Manitoba the same way they landed in ours.

I was one of those children. I share this not for sympathy. I share it to honour my mom, Joanne, to speak for people still too afraid to speak, and to tell every child living through this that it is not their fault.

Domestic violence is not a “women’s issue” we can park on an awareness calendar. It is a public-safety failure that leaves children without mothers, fills emergency rooms, and then watches offenders walk back into the same communities after serving a fraction of what the crime deserved. We argue loudly about bike lanes and photo ops. We go quiet when a convicted killer is declared safe. That silence costs lives.

I want to be part of the solution. Treat this crime with the seriousness we claim to give other violent crimes. Fund shelters so they are not rationing beds. Make protection orders mean something. Stop releasing men who have already shown they will kill the woman who tries to leave. Talk to our kids before the next Sunday night arrives in someone else’s house.

As mayor, I will remove property taxes from domestic abuse shelters in Winnipeg. A place that exists to keep women and children alive should not be writing a cheque to City Hall. That is a small, practical step. It is also a statement of what we value.

If you are in a violent home, do not wait. You are not alone. You matter. There is a way out.

Break the silence. Make space for someone to ask for help. Support a shelter in your community. Your action can save a life.

Thank you for reading this. Thank you for standing with survivors like my mother, and with families like mine. Every good thing I try to do still starts with her.

I love you Mom - R.I.P.

Kevin