A new report on femicide says a woman or girl was killed every two and a half days on average in Canada last year.
The first annual report by the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability -- titled `` CallItFemicide'' -- was released today.
Myrna Dawson, the observatory's director and a professor at the University of Guelph, says the report also answers a call from the United Nations for countries to better track gender-related killings of women.
The goal of the report, at least in part, is to acknowledge that the circumstances and motivations surrounding women's violent deaths differs from those of men so that femicide can be better understood and prevented.
Dawson says the context in which women and girls are killed is vastly different because they're most often killed by people they know -- whereas men are often killed by acquaintances and strangers.
The report says 148 women and girls were killed in 133 incidents in 2018, with 140 people accused in their deaths.
More than 90 per cent of those accused were men.