Status of Women Committee on Oct. 26th, 2016

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

I heard about your strategic plan for Inuit violence, prevention, and healing. I would like you to talk to the specific aspect of Inuit community. Often we do not properly consider the specific knowledge of different communities. In your plan for the Inuit community, can you tell us what the specific aspect is?

[Tracy O'Hearn]

We have three broad priorities. First, are services which include shelters and services for women. I have to talk about child sexual abuse. We have recommendations for community services for children who experience or witness violence and for adult survivors of child sexual abuse. We also need interventions for children currently being sexually abused. There is the need for counselling for abusers, so again, engaging with men and boys. And we need healing centres.

Our second thematic area is education, training, awareness, and capacity building. This means ongoing outreach, violence prevention awareness, and education efforts. Building community capacity, as I mentioned previously, is part of this. Another is equitable and adequate resources for an enhanced and sustained violence prevention strategy, including targeted interventions and strategies for youth.

We know that more than 50% of the Inuit population is aged 25 or under. That's a unique demographic with clear current and future public policy implications, and urgent priorities that have to be addressed, or they will only get exponentially worse.

Our third area is housing and recognizing that the big infrastructure of bricks and mortar construction is beyond our scope and belongs within other jurisdictions. It is part of our strategic plan.

Those are our three primary areas of focus and suggested actions.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

My other questions are related to mine workers and violence against Inuit or sexual exploitation. I know that often workers try to recruit, if I can say, women for prostitution or offer them some money in exchange for services. Often it's the women of the community who are hired as a cleaning lady for a room or a kitchen worker. How can we address this specific issue to the Inuit community because it's really them that are targeted for this sexual exploitation? Could we do better, when the mine is under construction, to prevent those bad habits from ever existing? Can we do something in the cycle to prevent that abuse?

[Tracy O'Hearn]

We absolutely can. On our website, we have a qualitative and quantitative report of a project we did in collaboration with UBC, looking at mining in Baker Lake as a bit of a case study. We have fairly detailed recommendations in our report online, ranging from the negotiation of Inuit impact and benefit agreements to immediately looking at identifying social and health issues, with a view to mitigation and enhancing resources. We've considered everything from the initial negotiation of an IBA, to greater awareness among Inuit women of their human rights and in the workplace, their rights as an employee. We've just recently been approached by the Government of Nunavut. They're looking at updating their human rights legislation, which is tremendous, and they're looking at including a range of sexual orientation issues.

We have developed a number of recommendations. Please, give us a call if you have any trouble finding it on our website and then we'd be happy to talk about it further.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Do you have an idea of the number of assaults when things are not going well there that are reported in terms of mines, or most of the time do you stop sending this worker there and try to close the story without reporting it to police?

[Tracy O'Hearn]

That was beyond the scope of our project. It was really quite a small project.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Okay.

[Tracy O'Hearn]

I think we received $25,000 from the Canadian Women's Foundation and UBC, by coincidence, had received a similar-sized grant. We collaborated and, I think, got tremendous value for quite a small financial cost. That was beyond the scope and it wasn't really the objective of that study. It certainly would be worth looking at.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Since we are talking about money, I think that in June 2016 your president said that she's looking at an empty wallet all the time when it comes to financing the program. Is the situation better now?

[Tracy O'Hearn]

No, it's not at all. No. I'm quite sorry to say that we're finding the current government much more difficult to work with than the last government.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Okay. Could you explain a little bit more?

[Tracy O'Hearn]

Pauktuutit is forced to rely far too much on annual project-based activities. That involves a proposal in response to government criteria and priorities to be assessed against certain criteria. We're pretty expert proposal writers. Looking at INAC, as an example this year, the practice had been that there would be a request for proposals around six thematic priorities in 2015 and 2016. Some we weren't even eligible for, but at least we had some guidance around projects to support economic development or social policy reform. That's where violence prevention for us is an opportunity to advance our work. We knew broadly in the last mandate of the previous government that across the department, there was approximately $20 million available for a full range of projects, some on first nations education on-reserve only, so very broad....

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

I'm sorry, that's your time on that question.

[Tracy O'Hearn]

Even at this point in this fiscal year, there has not been a call for proposals. I've had to almost beg for a hint of what might be funded. We're still having to negotiate, as I said, for the best part of a year with Status of Women Canada for a proposal for funds that were committed by the previous government.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you.

We're going to go to Mr. Serré for seven minutes.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you for your presentation and dedication. As a member of the Liberal indigenous caucus, I really appreciate your hard work on this. I'm also a member of the natural resources committee. I'm a strong promoter of expanding the mining industry sector and also some of the impact and benefit agreements. I'm definitely going to take your comments back to the committee and see how best we could incorporate some of those recommendations you made, especially around the social impact. Thank you so much for bringing this up.

I wanted to also thank you for sharing your concerns about the consultation, and some of the findings have been noted. I appreciate your taking the time to highlight that. That's how we can try to resolve some of these issues.

I wanted to ask about the funding that you receive right now from the current Status of Women. What is the mandate and the scope of the funding and the service that you're delivering with this funding?

[Tracy O'Hearn]

I believe the only funding we currently have with Status of Women Canada predates this government, and we are in the second year of a two-year project looking at mentorship.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Can you expand on what you are doing with the mentorship?

[Tracy O'Hearn]

I am not the hands-on project manager, so I apologize for not having the details at my fingertips.

It's a logical progression of previous project work around supporting and encouraging Inuit women in business. When we were doing a project a number of years ago, there was great interest expressed in mentorship. There's a need for mentorship. It can be frightening for anyone and very intimidating. It's difficult to read forms. Where do you find investment capital?

We identified a full range of information needs that women had. Mentorship came through very clearly. There's also a great interest among Inuit business women, who had achieved some success, in mentoring others and helping others come along so that everyone can go forward together.

There was just a very timely call for proposals from Status of Women Canada, looking at supporting projects to encourage women's mentorship. We competed with every other organization across the country and were successful. We have developed a model; we're looking at getting it piloting, getting a good match between mentor and mentee. We'd be happy to share more information.

That's our current funding working relationship with Status of Women Canada.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Also, your association has the action plan on addressing the needs of Inuit children sexual abuse.

[Tracy O'Hearn]

Yes.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Can you explain a bit more about some of the recommendations there when we look at the families, regarding the protection of children and the justice system? You had some recommendations along those lines.

[Tracy O'Hearn]

Again that's a very big question.

We haven't been able to do any substantive work on child sexual abuse for a number of years. We don't have good evidence about the incidents. It's very difficult anywhere to get solid evidence, for lots of reasons. We know anecdotally about a lot of issues around child welfare, foster care, what happens to kids who are taken into care. We know, again anecdotally, that there's not a lot of reporting, for lots of reasons.

I've been told, again anecdotally, that there's not a child untouched either directly or indirectly by child sexual abuse, and that stays with me every day. There aren't the services in the communities that we take for granted here. There has been some reluctance around intervening and prompting disclosures without supports, which can be more re-victimizing.

Your question about the criminal justice system is very big. It's an area that really does have to be looked at. From our perspective, we have been more immediately concerned with protection, prevention, protection of the child, treatment for offenders, and trying to raise awareness. Breaking the silence.... It's a great taboo. There's such great stigma, fear of talking about it, so we're at different starting points in trying to find the best place to intervene. We work with the Department of Justice in Nunavut, to the extent that we can.

That's the most specific answer I can give you, other than that it really requires a lot more work.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

We certainly heard from other witnesses about the lack of data and that it's widespread. We have to try to find ways to get that data.

[Tracy O'Hearn]

We must.