Lori is raising awareness about intimate partner violence, one step at a time

A grandmother from the east coast is about halfway through her walk across the country to raise awareness against intimate partner violence and to raise money for womens' shelters and the Canadian Mental Health Association.

Lori Haggerty is walking in remembrance of her older sister Patty, who died in 2008. Haggerty says her sister died under suspicious circumstances, but a conviction was never made in the case that's now over 16 years old.

"I'm doing the walk in Patty's honour, but it's not just about her story for me," said Haggerty. "I don't hold up hope that we're going to see justice there, so the walk is my way of doing something more positive."

That positive outlook includes raising the awareness about intimate partner violence and offering support and encouragement for women who are living through it.

"I'm just asking us to have an open conversation and to look at the way we deal with these cases in Canada," she said. "We need to think of them in different terms."

She started her journey in Vancouver, B.C. on April 2 and planned to complete the walk across Canada by Christmas. Partly because of an ankle injury early in the walk, Haggerty is behind schedule but still pushing her way through with a goal of completing about 30 kilometres per day.

"I don't always make it. I didn't make it (30 kilometres) yesterday," said Haggerty about the Sunday leg of her walk leading into the Sault. "It might not look pretty, it might be pretty slow going but as long as I just get up every day and walk, I'll eventually get across."

She said the doctor who treated her recommended that she stop her walk across Canada.

"'That's helpful doc,'" she said of the conversation. "But he didn't offer anything other than to say I should stop and I'm like, that's not gonna happen."

Haggerty suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2020 when she was a passenger in an automobile collision. Although she was planning to go back to school at the time, the injury left her unable to concentrate for long periods of time and made it difficult to study or even do simple tasks like watch television.

It was during this time that she was able to do a lot of thinking and tried to come up with a way to honour her sister.

"I was left with nothing. I knew I couldn't go back to university. I couldn't watch TV, couldn't read, couldn't be on my screens at all, so I was just kind of living in my own little imagination," she said.

"At the time, I had a hard time walking a city block. I had a hard time getting across the street before the light," said Haggerty about her level of conditioning when she began planning the walk in about 2021.

Haggerty is not quite making the 42-kilometre-per-day pace that Terry Fox set on his Marathon of Hope in 1980, but says she's doing pretty well for a grandma. She live-streamed an emotional moment when she reached the Terry Fox memorial in Thunder Bay on Aug. 31. 

The web site name Just Walk Away Canada was chosen to acknowledge her using her feet to cross the country, as well as to start a conversation. Haggerty knows for many women, it's not as simple as just walking away.

"People have kids and pets and money and all these different factors that go into the decision — it's not a matter of just walking away," said Haggerty. "But it makes a good talking point."

Haggerty wants the people living with abuse that she encounters to be inspired by her walk to leave their own situation.

"I hope that people who are living with abuse will see the courage and strength that takes for me, a 54-year-old non-athlete who is recovering from a brain injury, can walk across this country on the highway with trucks speeding by," said Haggerty. "I want them to find their own inner courage and their own strength to escape their abuser, to find the support that they need, and I want their abusers to hear my message and in that moment to just walk away because they all have a choice and if they get the help they need, it could change everything."