Status of Women Committee on Feb. 3rd, 2015

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Good morning.

Welcome to the 44th meeting of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. Today, we are resuming our study on promising practices to prevent violence against women.

We have with us Jane Doe, an author and activist appearing as an individual. We also have Rosemary McCarney, from Plan International Canada Inc., and Todd Minerson, from the White Ribbon Campaign.

Thank you all for being here.

Each witness will have 10 minutes to give their presentation.

We'll start with you, Ms. Doe.

[Jane Doe, Author, activist, litigant in Jane Doe v the Toronto Police Force, D.U. LLD, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you today.

Among other things, I'm the woman in the lawsuit Jane Doe versus the Toronto police force. You may recall that in 1998, after an 11-year court battle, I successfully sued them for negligence and gender discrimination in their investigation of my rape and sexual assault generally. I argued that even though police had identifying information about the man dubbed the “balcony rapist”, they chose not to warn women in my area about the danger. In doing so, they violated my equality rights under section 15 of the Canadian charter.

I'm also an author, researcher, and educator. I have developed sexual assault policy in a number of sectors, including with the police. I lecture extensively in Canada and internationally on a topic I call the politics of rape.

I need not remind any of you of the complicated and systemic nature of politics of any sort. When it concerns the growing incidence of sexual assault in our country, the failure of our systems and institutions to deal with it, the low rate of reporting, the minus 1% conviction rate, as well as the sexism that we all agree exists in a rape trial, that's politics of a particular sort.

As a woman who has been sexually assaulted and who continues to use the relative anonymity of the publication ban, I thought that might be a good place to begin today.

Every few years or so and currently, the media and a politician or two opine that women who have experienced sexual assault should report to the police and use their own name when they do that. They argue that if women would just do that little thing and let us know their name and face, we could connect to their humanity. They could speak for themselves. And before you know it, things would change for the better.

Of course, they are right to suggest that women should be able to do these things, but no matter what I say, what scores of thousands of experts have been saying for decades, it doesn't work like that.

We appear to be allergic to the reality that a woman's past sexual, medical, mental, familial and work history, as well as what they read, watch and believe are used to annihilate them in a court of law. That's why we use the ban.

How upside down that we aren't focusing on ending that treatment as a remedy instead of dropping the publication ban. It is simply not safe, civilized, or just to identify as a rape victim. The term itself, rape victim, conjures feminine passivity, helplessness, and lack of agency, or says that we have survived an illness or an injury that has rendered us broken, marked, or even fallen.

In 2008, I travelled to four provinces and I interviewed sexually assaulted women who had and who had not used the publication ban about how their decisions affected them. I have provided you with a copy of that research, which details what I can't say in these few moments. I hope you will have a look at it.

The research overwhelmingly supported that the treatment of the 42 women who do or do not use the ban is itself criminal. It shows that they would not have proceeded without it or that they regret not using it. The publication ban isn't really that effective anyway. It keeps you anonymous from people who don't know who you are. If you live in a more urban area or small town or city, the ban barely works for you at all.

Its stated purpose as it reads in the legislation is to foster complaints by victims of sexual assault by protecting them from the trauma of widespread publication resulting in embarrassment and humiliation. That wording is confirmation of the disgrace and dishonour we attach to a raped woman, and to the manner in which her virtue and body are understood to be sullied and defiled.

Women I interviewed spoke about having their divorce, their abortions, and their pregnancies, as well as any criminal convictions that they might have, any child abuse or other assaults they had suffered in their lives, or any mental health conditions or diagnoses, used against them in a court of law.

One woman talked to me about how her red bikini underwear was used as evidence against her in a court of law and how the accused's lawyer waved it around in court. These and other outrages are reported in the media, and if a woman is using it, her real name is part of the story.

If you really believe that the prohibitive effects of the ban outweigh the scrap of protection it provides sexually assaulted women, what are you doing to make it easier, to make it safer, more dignified for women to use their own names in a court of law? That is what we would like to do, especially for women who are racialized or colonized, who are young or sex-working women, transgendered and disabled women, substance users, immigrant or homeless women, or women who have dated, married, or partnered with the man who raped them.

The ban offers those women a shadow of protection when those very identities that I just mentioned are used against them in a court of law, and they are used against them every day, in any sexual assault trial, in any city, at any time in our country. What Canadian women must deal with in our homes, reserves, and workplaces, in Parliament, on university sites, at our doctors, dentists, in the military, and in sports is a national crisis. We expect women to report sexual assault and use their own names when we all know that the system they asked them to report to, engage with, simply does not and cannot work in their best interest.

Nor can we look at the publication ban in isolation of the other offence of dehumanizing legal practices that women who do report their rapes endure. These are things, for instance, like the sexual assault evidence kit, or the rape kit, which is used only 10% of the time, and which women experience as a second assault; the use of paid and so-called expert psychiatric witnesses who are used to discredit women and who set rapists free; and the fact that judges and lawyers flaunt the law when they allow such practices in the first place. Then there is the police warning or alert that we must regulate our movements, monitor the actions of strange men around us, and avoid shortcuts, transit, or parking spaces when a sexual assault is committed in our area or neighbourhood.

We have to examine the very language that we use to “speak rape”, and on that note, what is it anyway, sexual assault or rape? Certainly with the very legislation, I have led to that contradiction or problem with those terms.

Most critically, if we are at all serious, it is imperative that we take the focus off women and place it on men, the perpetrators of the crime. I'm not talking about lengthier prison sentences as a remedy. I don't believe they work at all. I refer to the need to look at masculinity and the manner in which we are socializing men, our baby boys and youth, who are born to us free of malice or ill will, and how those wonderful creatures are raised and socialized to understand violence as acceptable. We must look at the need to design and support bystander and sex education curriculum that is consent-based and speaks to the pleasures as well as the responsibilities of sex, and it must begin at a very early age. We must understand that nothing can be meaningfully accomplished unless we incorporate issues of race, sexuality, and ability into our dialogue and our actions, and that goes for any politic that we are examining.

Few can deny the issues that I've raised, the need to look at all of the pieces and intersections of sexual assault, and yet we don't. We do not do that. Is that because we are a nation, an institution, or an individual who benefits from keeping things the way they are? Until we examine the multiple and systemic nature of sexual assault, until we spend the money and take the time to do that, the social band-aids that we've been applying will continue to fall off and will result in more crime.

I assure you that there are experts across Canada who work on the front line of sexual assault directly with women who experience it, experts who have lived it, or experts who write, research, and develop policy about sexual assault. That's who we must be consulting with and listening to if we are to draft any policy on violence against women, sexual assault in particular.

These experts, of which I'm a member, are legion, and today I offer you my services to assist you in accessing that expertise in addition to the expertise at the table today in order to consult and organize effectively on this subject that this committee has adopted and is examining.

Thank you.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much, Ms. Doe, for your presentation.

Just a note to the members, the research document that Ms. Doe mentioned is in translation and will be distributed to all the members of the committee.

Ms. McCarney, you have 10 minutes.

[Rosemary McCarney, President and Chief Executive Officer, Plan International Canada Inc.]

Thank you very much.

I hope I can add a different perspective from what Jane provided, which is so compelling.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear today. I'd like to share with you some of the best practices drawn from our international programming and policy experiences. I hope these lessons will offer practical steps to help shape a comprehensive and coordinated response to any violence against women and children, including girls here in Canada.

My name is Rosemary McCarney, and I'm the president and CEO of Plan lnternational Canada. With over 75 years of experience, we're one of the world's oldest and largest international development agencies in Canada and overseas. Without political or religious affiliation, all the work we do is founded on children's rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the human rights instruments and documents in practices that exist here in Canada and overseas.

Women and men, girls and boys all have the same rights but face different obstacles in accessing them as a result of inequality. In our conversation before the committee hearings we talked about how inequality isn't working for boys and men either, and we need to address this. But the challenges faced by women and girls are unique, and girls versus women are unique. Girls require specific attention because their vulnerability stems from the fact that they're both young and female, a very dangerous intersection for girls everywhere.

As the organization behind the Because I am a Girl campaign, we welcome your decision to conduct this study, but Because I am a Girl is a global initiative for gender equality, to promote girls' power and rights so that girls themselves can lift themselves and their communities out of poverty. In Canada the campaign has inspired a movement of over one million Canadians committed to creating a safer, more prosperous world for our girls and the girls of the world.

Access to safe, quality education is central to that campaign. What gets in the way is the persistent, systemic, and endemic incidents of violence in schools and universities in Canada and around the world.

I'd like to start by highlighting a global report that we did, "A girl's right to learn without fear", which has been submitted to the committee for consideration. Together with the University of Toronto faculty of law's international human rights program, we launched this report, the Canadian edition, to bring a focus to gender-based violence in and around our schools. It sets out a global policy framework based on the experiences of best practice, good practice around the world, to end gender violence at the local and national levels.

While the report focuses on the school context, the key lesson we learned was that to be effective, efforts to address violence against girls have to be multi-sectoral and integrated. Jane said the same thing. Schools are only one of the first. Based on the experience of other countries, including Australia and the United Kingdom, we found that one-off initiatives do not address a core issue: that many of the victims of violence are from marginalized and vulnerable groups and they're largely invisible or choose to remain invisible, and therefore an integrated, multi-sectoral national action plan is needed to prevent these young women from falling through the cracks.

In Canada there's a range of different types of vulnerability and forms of violence: rape, physical abuse, sexual violence, and bullying, which is amplified by the use of online social media. We know the statistics in this country, but we generalize and we're approximating because we do not have good statistical evidence in the country to be able to bring some of these issues to fruition so we can create an unassailable empirical base. But my view is we do know the statistics and we know the problems are prevalent and pervasive, so these points should not be debatable. I think that's what Jane said as well.

Through extensive research and consultation with global experts and 17 leading organizations across Canada, we put forward eight key principles that we think could guide the work of this committee. These are critical for the recommendations, because they address prevention, response, and then the provision of services. We call for a comprehensive and integrated action plan, effective legislation and regulation, safe and effective reporting for women and girls, evidence-based policy formation on a foundation of statistical evidence, well-supported and well-trained personnel, partnerships across government and local groups, across school boards, police commissions, policing, and police officers, as well as shelters and the experts who are legion across this country.

We're very pleased to see Canada addressing the problem. We certainly recognize that since 2007 about $146 million has been invested to support more than 720 community-based programs across the country. We can celebrate that, but at the same time, I urge the committee to step back from that statistic and ask if we have had a good return on investment for that. While these investments are critically important, they're uncoordinated. It's really a patchwork of initiatives and small projects that permeates this country without any cohesive, coherent approach.

I've said to media and others that depending on where you live in this country, as a young girl or as a woman you will be more or less protected, and you will have more or less access to services. It shouldn't be a matter of where you're born in Canada in terms of the level of prevention and response you receive.

While we applaud the call for a national action plan and support it, we want to ensure this plan considers the needs and rights of, and our obligations to, children, especially girls. In the call for the national action plan to end violence against women, we urge you to consider embracing that whole piece. Violence against women doesn't begin at 18, when they're legally adults. It begins very early on. It begins in the first decade of life. Our little girls across this country know very well what it is to experience gender-based violence in all of its forms.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended that Canada, “Develop and implement a national strategy for the prevention of all forms of violence against all children, and allocate” resources to it. This call has been reiterated by the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children.

Furthermore, as part of the ongoing global negotiations toward the post-2015 agenda, the sustainable development goals, all countries are looking at the principle of universality. It's not good enough for us to create foreign policy with respect to the rights and obligations toward girls and women; we also have to address our national context first. That's why Plan Canada calls for a very effective consultation process to develop this national action plan to end violence against women and children. There are very important precedents for doing so.

Experience from other countries has shown that the causes and consequences are interrelated. I've found in my conversations with members of Parliament and others across Canada that often the issue of our federal system is thrown up, that it's too difficult, that the provinces have control over this and the municipalities have legislative responsibility over that, and what can the national government do?

What I'd like to bring to your attention is that we are very much behind colleagues such as those in the United Kingdom and Australia who have complex federal systems as well. ln their respective national action plans, the U.K. and Australia have articulated the respective responsibilities of various levels of government departments at different jurisdictional levels, including status of women, justice, health, and education. They've set out a strategy to support and fund front-line workers, wherever located, law enforcement agencies, teachers, health care workers, and the voluntary sector.

From their experience there's a process we can learn from to develop the plan. What those in the U.K. and our colleagues in Australia have told us is that the process of developing the plan is as important as the content of the plan. That legion of experts, of practitioners across our country, must be consulted in this. Both the U.K. and Australia have demonstrated that this process of meaningful consultation with provincial and territorial governments, aboriginal governments, and front-line service providers will, in fact, inform the substance and content that will work, but that it's an iterative process.

In both countries they have revisited. The U.K. began their process in 2010, as did the Australians, but they have revisited and redrafted, and they continue to think about these 10- and 12-year plans. They will never get it right. It will never be perfect. We learn as we go. But we need to get started, and we need to put this into writing.

On a final note, Plan is an active supporter of the Up for Debate campaign. This campaign is led by an alliance of over 100 women's organizations from across Canada. The goal of the campaign, which you'll be hearing a lot about over the coming weeks and months, is to facilitate a national debate to give party leaders the opportunity to speak directly to the issues identified by women, including violence.

In conclusion, we're a bit behind the times, but we can catch up. While our peers in the U.K. and Australia have the same jurisdictional challenges, they've already undertaken national action plans and national action consultations, and they are now implementing.

The expectations are high, for sure, on this committee, and the national action plan will need to be all of what Jane and I have said—well funded, well thought out, integrated, multi-sectoral, and have wide consultation—because violence against women and children is unjustifiable, but it's also absolutely preventable.

I look forward to your questions.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much, Ms. McCarney, for your testimony.

We'll go to Mr. Minerson for 10 minutes, please.

[Todd Minerson, Executive Director, White Ribbon Campaign]

Madam Chair and honourable members, it's a real honour to be here, especially with my fellow panellists, two women for whom I have a great deal of respect and admiration. They've done a fantastic job already of laying out some of the things that I'd like to talk about.

My name is Todd Minerson, and I'm the executive director of the White Ribbon campaign. We're a Canadian based non-profit that's working on ending violence against women and girls, but our unique approach is to engage men and boys on that issue.

I want to talk to a few different aspects around engaging men and boys in violence prevention, and really I want to focus on three distinct things today.

I have to tell you a little bit about White Ribbon or else my board of directors will kill me, so I'm going to share a little bit about what we do. But I really want to focus in on two critical questions: why should we engage men and boys, and how should we engage men and boys in prevention of violence against women and girls?

Finally, I would like to pose some challenges and make a few concrete recommendations for the committee. It warmed my little heart on this cold Ottawa day to hear both of my fellow panellists mention the importance of engaging men and boys on this issue.

Here's a little bit about White Ribbon, and I promise to be brief. Many of you probably know that White Ribbon has its roots and origins in the tragedy of the Montreal massacre of December 6, 1989, when 14 women were tragically murdered at École Polytechnique in Montreal. After that tragedy, a small group of men, including the late Jack Layton, sat around a kitchen table in Toronto and tried to understand what the roles and responsibilities were for men on ending violence against women and girls. Some 24 years ago now, they came up with a pledge and an organization that we still use today. That pledge is to never commit, condone, or remain silent about violence against women. In the ensuing 24 years, a few very interesting things happened.

First of all, we've grown to be the only national organization that's looking at prevention of violence against women with men and boys. We do this work in partnership with women's organizations, first nations, Inuit, and Métis groups, educators, community builders, and many others. Second, in that time, we have become a globally recognized issue leader on this, working with the United Nations, governments around the world, major institutions, multinational corporations, and other international NGOs. Finally, out of a grassroots movement, we have become the largest effort of men and boys in the world. We now support activities in over 65 different countries, where men and boys are organizing around this little Canadian idea that we have a role and a responsibility as men to work to end violence against women and girls.

I'll move on to the key questions. Why should we work with men and boys? What does the evidence tell us?

If nothing else, these high-profile and tragic events of the past few months have brought men's roles around violence against women to a more significant place in our collective consciousness. If I were to play a little word association game with you and say the names Ray Rice, Jian Ghomeshi, Bill Cosby, or if I were to mention some university hockey teams or dental colleges, you would all know what I'm talking about. lt is no doubt evident to this committee that there is a serious problem when it comes to violence against women not only in this country but around the world, and that men have both a prominent and a troubling role in that violence.

I want to put the names of some other men out to you here, which you may not be as familiar with. I want to start with the name Glen Canning. He's the father of a young woman named Rehtaeh Parsons. Now he's become a tireless advocate for working to end violence against women.

You may have heard of a gentleman named Paul Lacerte. He is the executive director of the B.C. Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres, and he started a campaign called the Moose Hide Campaign with his daughter while he was out hunting. This is to encourage first nations, Inuit, and Métis men to get involved in ending violence against women.

I want to tell you also about a 13-year-old boy named Max Bryant who I met a couple weeks ago at the United Nations. Max raised $40,000 for girls to go to school after he heard an interview with Malala Yousafzai.

I had a chance to talk to Max. I went up to him and I said, “Why did you do this?” Honestly, he looked at me like I was from Mars. He said, "What do you mean why? Why not? Girls have a right to go to school safely just like boys do.” It was completely natural for him to assume that gender equality is the norm.

My point here is that the traditional narratives around men, when it comes to violence against women, clearly focus on the problem and not so much on the solution. At White Ribbon, we want to vigorously dispute that narrative. While most men will never use violence against women or girls, too many men are silent about it. We believe that all men, as Jane was saying, have both the promise and potential to be part of that solution, and we are engaging thousands of men and boys across the country to do just that.

If we want to understand why and how we get men involved, we need to get a deeper understanding of the core causes of violence against women. My colleagues have already mentioned them in some detail. It's a complex issue, but there really are, according to our perspectives, three core root causes.

The first, as both panellists have already said, is the reality of gender inequality. If we think of the whole spectrum of gender inequality, on the tragic and traumatic end is the murder, sexual assault, and violence that happens to too many women across this country. Over 1,400 indigenous women are murdered and missing, and too many women suffer violence at the hands of intimate partners or families. Also, we have to remember the new and extremely troubling forms of violence that more women experience online and in social media than men do.

The second root cause is this idea, which Jane also mentioned, of harmful masculinities. When a baby boy is born, he is not born a violent human being, but there is something that happens. What is it about masculinity that makes some men feel it is acceptable to use violence against women? Are there links to the ways that boys are socialized at a very young age with an impossible-to-meet standard of what it means to be a real man, or where the worst thing you can do to a boy is call him a girl or gay or anything less than a real man? These phrases: “man up”, “boys will be boys”, “boys don't cry”, “you throw like a girl”, “don't show emotions”, “fight”, “take what's yours”, all these negative aspects of masculinity come with tragic costs to women and girls and, as Rosemary pointed out, also with a tremendous amount of harm for men and boys. This system of patriarchy is killing all of us.

Finally, the third root cause, which we have come to appreciate in our work with indigenous communities around the world, is the history of colonial violence and community trauma. We know that in many of these communities violence as a gendered act did not exist before contact. As a non-native person, I must bear witness to that.

If we accept these root causes, then we also must accept that men and boys have a role to play, not merely as perpetrators or potential perpetrators, but in the myriad other roles we play in society, such as fathers—which is a key entry point for engaging men—as bystanders, as faith and community leaders, as employers and business leaders, as government and institutional policy-makers, and as human beings.

We have come to call this work at White Ribbon primary prevention. Simply put, it's to stop the violence before it starts. If we want to do that, we have to engage men with practical means so that they can speak up and speak out to challenge and change social norms around men and violence, and to activate and amplify the roles that we can already play to eliminate all forms of gender-based violence. The important thing to note is that this is a complementary piece to the vital work that must continue to happen in supporting women who are leaving violent and abusive situations, as well as addressing those conditions that perpetuate the violence.

We think that this is an untapped approach to violence prevention. It has potential to be a game changer and it's difficult and frustrating work at times. It can also be fraught with challenges, but when we talk with guys like Max Bryant or the other men I mentioned earlier, we do have a lot of hope.

I want to touch a little bit on what we've learned about promising practices.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

You have two minutes.

[Todd Minerson]

Sure.

Some of them relate directly to a project we're doing funded by Status of Women Canada called our national community of practice. White Ribbon is facilitating a connection of nine Status of Women-funded projects across Canada working on prevention efforts with men and boys. These diverse, incredible partners are implementing innovative programs across the country from Whitehorse, Yukon, to London, Ontario, and Moncton, New Brunswick, to Edmonton, Alberta.

We'll be producing in November an impact and promising practices report, which is looking at the evaluation data from all of those nine projects, and from that evaluation data we're creating a tool kit for action, which will help communities across the country do this kind of work.

There is one last section I need to get to which we call the non-negotiables about working with men and boys. There are four things that are absolutely essential when we talk about this work.

The first, recalling that it is part of a struggle for greater gender equality, is that engaging men and boys must take place from a human rights and women's equality perspective. If we aren't working on gender equality, we're not doing it right.

Second, it also has to be gender transformative. It has to challenge and change those harmful ideas about masculinity that are causing so much harm to so many people.

Third, it also has to take into consideration the shortage and scarcity of resources for women's issues already. As men working on gender equality and as allies, we can't contribute to structural inequalities around resources or lack thereof for women's issues. That's something we have to think about: building a bigger pie instead of cutting another piece from an already small pie of resources that are there.

Last, it has to be evidence based.

There are a great deal of challenges and I have three recommendations that we have to address in this.

I knew when Rosemary was here that there was going to be a lot of detail about a comprehensive whole-of-government national plan, so I won't go into a lot of detail on that. But any plan also has to include primary prevention work with men and boys across a spectrum and a life cycle of engagement. What we also need is increased support for opportunities to collaborate and work together, because there really is nothing that can accelerate innovation and the pace of change more than face-to-face work and the sharing of best practices.

In closing, I hope I've made a compelling case for the positive role that men and boys can play in preventing violence against women and girls. Not only is it an effective intervention, but there is a moral imperative to create a safer world for women and girls. In 2015 we must be outraged that 51% of our daughters, sisters, mothers, and female friends and colleagues are going to experience an act of physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.

There are also some practical considerations. In 2011 some research from a woman named Colleen Varcoe estimated the cost of violence against women at $6.9 billion per year. At the Shift project at the University of Calgary, they have estimated that for every $1 spent on prevention, up to $20 could be saved in downstream costs for engaging violence against women. Let's be clear: most of this violence can be prevented. For every perpetrator, there are hundreds of Glen Cannings, Paul Lacertes, and Max Bryants. We're engaging them and we think we can do better.

Thanks.

[The Chair, NDP, Hélène LeBlanc]

Thank you very much. You make my job very difficult when I have to cut off people, but I hope that during the question and answer period you will be able to continue to raise in your answers the issues that you would like to raise. I'm sure the questions will be very interesting.

Ms. Truppe, you have the floor for seven minutes.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Welcome. Thank you very much for all of your testimony. It's very helpful to us when doing the study on best practices, so we can gather up things that are actually working and hopefully share them with other organizations.

Seven minutes goes so fast, and I never have enough time to ask all my questions, but my first question is for Todd in regard to White Ribbon.

White Ribbon is so well known, certainly across Canada and, as you said, across the globe, so congratulations on making that happen. It probably started out, as you've said, around a kitchen table, but with very few people knowing about it. When I ask anyone if they've heard of it, I don't think I've ever had anyone who has not. Whether or not they wore a ribbon, I don't know, but they all know about it.

You received some funding from Status of Women. Did you say it was the national community of status or...?

[Todd Minerson]

It's a national community of practice.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Do you know off the top of your head how much funding you got for that?

[Todd Minerson]

Yes. It's $300,000 over three years.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Okay.

Where do you get most of your funding? Is it from donations or from other organizations?

[Todd Minerson]

At White Ribbon, probably about 25% to 30% of our funding is project-related funding from different levels of government across the country. Another 10% to 15% is traditional fundraising, non-profit fundraising. We do an event called “Walk A Mile in Her Shoes”, where we have a thousand guys in high heels walking through downtown Toronto.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Yes.

[Todd Minerson]

The remaining 55% or 60% of our funding actually comes from what we bucket as social enterprise, which is essentially consulting work for other NGOs, for multinational corporations, and for post-secondary institutions, where we're developing projects and interventions both here in Canada and around the world.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

That's great. It's very well spent.

I'm quite familiar with the “Walk A Mile” day. My husband does it every year. It's nice that I sit on the sidelines and he gets to dress the part.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Todd Minerson]

We encourage all women to wear their most comfortable shoes.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Yes. He knows how it feels.

To go back to that Status of Women funding with the project you're doing, I think you said that there are nine projects and there's going to be a tool kit that comes out. Did you say that would be in November?

[Todd Minerson]

Yes. There are nine projects being funded by Status of Women that are separate from this. They are independently funded projects happening across the country—

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Separate. Okay.

[Todd Minerson]

—on violence prevention work with men and boys.

We are facilitating a community of practice with those nine projects and bringing them together to collaborate and to identify training and capacity-building needs, but then as well to build what we've called a national evaluation framework. Each project has its own evaluation model, and we've layered on top of it a national evaluation model so that we can take all that data from those nine projects, understand what's working and what's not, where the gaps are, and where the challenges are. In November we'll be issuing the first analysis of that evaluation data. We're going to take those results and build a tool kit so that other organizations and communities can take those made-in-Canada real-time best practices and initiate programming in their communities.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

That's great. That will be very helpful.

I think you mentioned that you do training and presentations for educators and teacher candidates. I think you're talking in the classrooms too. Are you speaking to the boys and the girls, or is it a special class just for the boys?