Status of Women Committee on Dec. 9th, 2014

[Tracy O'Hearn]

I think there are zero.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

There are zero psychiatrists for all the north.

[Tracy O'Hearn]

I'm not aware of any psychiatry resident in the north. These services in Nunavik, I think, are available through telehealth—virtually. That would be one.

I would say that the second overarching recommendation would be the need for investments to address the immediate crisis. There are 53 Inuit communities across Inuit Nunangat, as it's called. Some 70% of those do not have a safe shelter for women and children trying to flee violence. I know personally and first-hand that that situation has directly resulted in the death of women and children. More than 70% do not have a safe shelter. It's not even a band-aid, but there has to be much better access for women to leave their homes, their communities. Their communities are fly-in.

I heard one story not long ago, when Helena Guergis was the minister responsible for the Status of Women. She attended our annual meeting. There was a woman who had virtually begged a social worker in western Nunavut to get her on a plane out of her community to escape violence. That request was denied, and she was murdered.

So I know first-hand. I don't know how you rank such urgent priorities, but that would be the second—better access to safety for women and children.

The third, I would say, would be sustained efforts, not one annual project based on predetermined criteria and that maybe does or doesn't fit Inuit needs and priorities. It has to be sustained. And to me, part of that is a whole-of-government response. Let's all work together with their regional Inuit women's organizations. We need to be able to work together. They have virtually no capacity. I think all Inuit stakeholders, the federal government, provinces, and territories—we have a round table coming in February with the provinces and territories—need to get together, identify Inuit priorities and what role each entity has to play and how we can move those forward in a meaningful and sustained way.

Thank you.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you, Ms. O'Hearn.

I'm going to touch on sustainable core funding. You talked of $27 million. Was it a half of a half per cent?

[Tracy O'Hearn]

It was half of one per cent—$155,000 of $27 million this year.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Little, could you comment on how Bill C-36 will impact on the safety of women?

[Marion Little]

Certainly research in Canada and around the world and sex worker advocacy agencies across Canada are expressing considerable concerns about how the bill is likely to drive sex work underground.

I spoke about how just one very small factor, which is the few unethical police officers in every region, can undermine the capacity to even implement such a bill because they themselves are undermining the relationship between sex workers and police.

The confusion around what the restrictions are on sex workers is huge, so for people who are engaged in that kind of work to support themselves, I think we've created a very complex situation for them to try to navigate.

Certainly when we look at a country like New Zealand we see that when there is consultation with the marginalized women affected by a certain law, the law that is created then tends to decrease violence against that group. In over 10 years in New Zealand we've seen how that kind of consultation with peer-to-peer groups, as well as with business and government, has exponentially decreased violence there and increased reporting of things like exploitation, human trafficking, exploitation of youth, and that kind of thing.

Here, with the law in place, people are going to be more reluctant to go to police, which means that when sex workers witness human trafficking or exploitation of youth, where they were already reluctant to go to police under the previous law, they're going to be even more reluctant because they will be uncertain about what the implications are for themselves. So I think that's certainly a concern.

I know it was well intentioned.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

Mrs. Ambler, you now have the floor for five minutes.

[Stella Ambler, Conservative, Mississauga South, ON]

Thank you, Madame Chair.

May I continue with you, Professor Little, talking about the peer-to-peer programs? Those are the ones that I found you obviously highlighted the effectiveness of in your presentation, and you've since talked a little about why they're so effective. Can you tell us, is it because mentoring is involved?

You did mention that often when someone has been through something and they've come out the other end they're a shining light, but that seems so simple. There must be more to why these programs work. Can you tell us how they work?

[Marion Little]

I think mentoring is an important part of peer-to-peer programs. I think the most important part, particularly with marginalized groups who feel isolated within community—and marginalized as Wally Oppal defines marginalization—is there are very few resources in the community for the groups of marginalized women I named in my presentation to reliably access resources and trust that they will be received not only with courtesy, but with meaningful response and resources.

When I was the executive director at PEERS, and we were serving the most distressed portion of sex workers, which is about 20% of that population, and serving people who were maybe more stable, but then going through a crisis, they would come into our centre and they would often only access our centres. The point with marginalized people is that often they will not access other centres.

When we lost funding at PEERS last year, due to changes in provincial funding and had to temporarily close several of our services, our colleague agencies around town told us that the people we were serving were not appearing at their door. They were disappearing into the community.

[Stella Ambler, Conservative, Mississauga South, ON]

Do you think that's because when they go elsewhere they don't feel they're understood?

[Marion Little]

It's about understanding; more critically, it's about trust and dignity, and having a safe sanctuary. Those peer-to-peer agencies serve as threshold agencies in accessing the entire scope of other agencies across the social service spectrum—from housing, to food, to legal support, to court—and particularly to policing, which I think is of interest to this committee.

[Stella Ambler, Conservative, Mississauga South, ON]

Yes, most definitely. In fact, you're starting to describe the child advocacy centre model. It's very similar.

[Marion Little]

I really liked what they said and I think it's important—particularly around aboriginal women, first nations, Métis, and Inuit—that focused, marginalized peer-to-peer programs and national action are nested within a larger national action plan for dealing with violence against women generally. It exactly requires that early education and family education that my colleagues at the Sheldon Kennedy Foundation were talking about.

[Stella Ambler, Conservative, Mississauga South, ON]

Let me ask you, Ms. Johnston and Ms. Ofrim, about the centre. First of all, let me thank you for your focus on talking about prevention. I appreciated that.

I was particularly intrigued, I guess, by your first point, which is that children who are victims are more likely to become victims of abuse as adults and to become abusers themselves.

Why do you think that is and what we can do to prevent that?

[Jenny Ofrim]

The point you mentioned is clear within all the literature we look at, but we also see it evidenced through our data at the centre. I'm not completely sure why that exactly happens. I think there are a few factors. One is that violence is a learned behaviour. When you see violence, it becomes ingrained in your own way of interacting with other people.

The other thing we need to look at is brain trauma and attachments at a very early age. Those things impact all of your relationships moving forward. If they are not created in a secure manner as a child, they need to be addressed, or else you will see impacts of insecure attachments and then violence in the future.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

Mrs. Sellah, you have five minutes.

[Djaouida Sellah, NDP, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Ladies, I would like to thank you for your testimony this morning.

I will begin with a comment on your answers.

As mentioned, nothing has been done and nothing is being done to prevent violence against women. I knew that you hadn't been consulted about the national plan to counter violence against women.

Unlike my colleagues opposite, I think that, regardless of the number of women, in Nunavut for example, the amount allocated should be the same. Instead, it should be a matter of quality.

You said that women and children in Nunavut—in Canada—are in danger, and that scares me. We need to invest more in order to intervene in urgent cases, to protect the safety of these women and children, rather than invest only based on population.

There is another problem. The court has recognized that sex workers are the most vulnerable women, yet nothing has been done so far to protect them appropriately.

How do you explain that nothing has been done to protect sex workers and women and children in Nunavut from violence?

[Marion Little]

I think that one of the critically important pieces is that when any policy or law affects marginalized women, whether they're sex workers, aboriginal women, Inuit, first nations, Métis, women who have recently immigrated, refugees, or those with temporary status—whichever group it is—that group has to be consulted, particularly through peer-to-peer points of contact with that group. Then, the national research consensus on best practices and on the implications of various policy applications have to be very seriously considered. When we neglect both of those pieces, we end up with the kind of example, the very small example, that I gave about what happens when, among the very excellent police officers we have across Canada, one or two in each region are unethical. Those one or two literally decimate the possibility of sex workers or first nations women or whoever engaging with that particular authority. The same situation happens within the health system and within social services: one or two unethical people in positions of power and authority in each region decimate the capacity for marginalized women to access resources in an equitable way, which the rest of us assume everybody can access, without having to deal with exploitation.

So those consultations are important, and funding for the agencies is, of course, critically important. Basing law on research and information is important, and then, of course, we need prevention training for abuse prevention generally to shift the culture of violence. In Canada, we're looking at embedded issues around racism and classism and things like that, which are affecting people in ways that most of us don't imagine.

I'm not sure what to say. The pieces about doing those kinds of things are in front of us. I think these issues don't need to be divisive. In the case of Bill C-36, for example, had consultations involving women's agencies across Canada been more comprehensive, those conversations at the ground level would have led to more consensus at the table, in Parliament. We need to look at these issues as health issues. When H1N1 infected 10% of the population, we created the Public Health Agency; we created an office; we created a contingency fund. This is sustainable. It's ongoing. Violence against women is a threat involving 50% of the population. It's a far greater health and justice threat than any health epidemic that we've faced has been. We need to look at implementing the kinds of best practices we already know exist through having responded to epidemics within the health system.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Crockett, you have five minutes.

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Thank you very much.

I really appreciate the testimony we've heard so far today. I feel as though we are getting to best practices, which is really what this study is intended to do. I think we heard at the outset—and it sounds very ominous—that we've been doing a lot of these things for 30 years, and yet in some areas like the area of violence against women, we haven't seen much change.

I want to turn, therefore, to the Sheldon Kennedy Child Advocacy Centre, because I really feel that it represents a new wave of change in how we deal with these issues, and it has some great innovation that we can learn from today.

I'm hoping, ladies, that you can help us expound on that and really learn from what you've learned.

I want to talk about how we know. One of the great challenges with pouring money into a field that we all feel deeply needs our attention is to actually know what is working and how to measure that as you go along.

Can you talk about that, please, Bonnie?

[Bonnie Johnston]

Yes, thank you very much for the question. We really appreciate that.

You know, we've been operational just under two years, and the impact that we see happening with these systems coming together is quite exceptional. I've been in this business for a number of years, and we've all tried to figure out how we can do better by our kids and families. Again, the leadership that came together in Alberta around this has helped move us forward here. The whole measurement piece that we're looking at—and that's why Jenny sitting next to me is an evaluator—is the creation of five strategic directions in that centre. Behind each of those comes in a whole ops plan. We run this as a business organization, and behind those ops plans comes in what we're trying to identify right now as key performance indicators. We've been very blessed with KPMG coming in with us, and they're donating a considerable amount of time and energy with us to look at these outcomes.

Within the centre, as well, we created a practice framework early on to figure out that this wasn't about 100 professionals coming in and getting to sit next to each other. This was about truly creating a different culture with different outcomes and different expectations under a practice framework, so we created this early on. Back about six months ago—and this was quite unprecedented—the police opened their files, child and family services opened their files, and Alberta Health opened their files. We were able to go in and look at those files and that sharing of information and figure out how far we had already come in terms of our practice, what was working, what wasn't working, what we needed to continue to push, and what barriers we saw preventing really helping these kids and families. We bring this to the table every two to three weeks. We're sitting with all those systems. We're talking about what's working, what isn't working, and what could work differently. There's certainly a transparency. There's an openness there to continually push the bar around what we can do better. We continue with all of our evaluation, working with KPMG and outlining the key performance indicators. We're now creating a whole evaluation framework that will steer us in those directions as well.

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Our time's really short so I'm kind of hoping that you can sort of consolidate what other people and organizations might take forward. What are you measuring, and how are you measuring it, so that we know that you're achieving phenomenal success with this integrated model?

[Bonnie Johnston]

Well go ahead, Jenny, with some of the indicators we've got. You're poring over all of that, really quickly.

[Jenny Ofrim]

What we're looking at right now is just a lot of descriptive data around the children and families we're seeing. We're also looking at evidence of collaboration, so how many cases, or representative cases, are actually showing evidence of joint investigation, joint assessment, consultation during treatments, and even further down the road into the court process. What we're also seeing is expediency of these processes. Like Bonnie said earlier, what used to take weeks or months is now taking hours or days. We're also noticing more qualitative data such as different professionals being on the same page; they're able to speak the same language more closely than they ever have before. They're better able to understand the perspectives of one another and then make joint decisions on how to move forward with a case.