Lise St-Denis

[Employment Insurance, February 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, revelations by the media about mandatory savings that must be realized by Service Canada on employment insurance programs leave us perplexed about the minister's responsibility.

Can she explain how officials responsible for these investigations can remain objective if they must meet mandatory quotas? Does she presume that a fixed number of claimants are guilty?

[Business of Supply, February 14th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely right. There are dozens of committee studies and reports about this issue. Can we look forward to actual progress and a shift in attitude? The government has been producing reports on aboriginals for a long time. My colleagues may be interested to note that the Kelowna accord was signed by the Liberal government.

Still, we never did enough to help abused women. We reported what was going on, but we never seriously considered how to solve this particular problem. We talked about all of the people who were responsible for the violence. So how can we reduce the level of violence and come up with a solution?

I mentioned providing legal support to help these women talk about their experiences. They have never really had an opportunity to express themselves. They were not given a way to say what they were feeling, which might have led them to figure out solutions to the problem themselves.

[Business of Supply, February 14th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, to begin with, I did not say that the problem of violence against aboriginal women did not exist before. I lived in Vancouver in 2000, and there was most certainly a problem. That is not what I said.

I said that we have to look at the problem from a different angle. Pointing fingers at the Liberal Party for what it did or failed to do will not solve the problem now. It is an easy question to ask. People will blame the Conservatives for not doing some things, the Liberals for not doing others, and even the NDP. That is not the problem.

The real question is whether a national committee should be struck so that we can finally find a solution to this problem. It is now 2013, and as the member said, the problem has been around for 30 years. It is time to sit down and think about the problem, not time to ask why nobody did this sooner. Ask that question about any issue, and everyone would have their reasons.

[Business of Supply, February 14th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, yes, we need a national public inquiry, but I would go further than that.

What we need is an attitude shift, starting with the House of Commons, and then in the general public. Let us be honest: aboriginal peoples have always been disrespected. They have never been taken into account. In the beginning, there were three countries in Canada, but everyone studied Canada's history with two countries.

So as part of this public inquiry, people would have to start paying attention to aboriginal peoples, consider what they contribute and consider our own attitude. Aboriginal people have always been ignored. So if the inquiry does not lead to an overall shift in culture, starting with the members of the House, nothing will ever be resolved. That is how I see it. There needs to be a profound cultural and attitude shift towards abused aboriginal women and aboriginal culture in general.

[Business of Supply, February 14th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I was not here at that time.

I do not believe that the Liberal party did nothing on this issue. Things happen over time. We have never considered the problems of aboriginal women in our history. No one knows the history of aboriginal peoples. Things are changing slowly at present. Dealing with the problems of aboriginal women is something new. We have started addressing the problem, and we must get on with it.

We have to determine what we can do now. There have been many inquiries and proposals. We have to see where we are in all of this. It is no use asking why nothing was done, and I am not sure that it is true. In any event, if the Liberals did nothing, the time has come to do something. We must get to work.

That is the second time that the Liberal Party has been asked that question this morning. I can list everything that has been done, but that is not what we are talking about.

[Business of Supply, February 14th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in this debate on violence against aboriginal women on this Liberal opposition day.

For decades, we have been watching helplessly as far too many aboriginal women in Canada have been subjected to violence. Violence in all forms is perpetrated against these women who have little or no recourse to put a stop to these heinous crimes. Physical and psychological violence, disappearances, murders, rapes and assault are common occurrences for women in many communities in this country. We know these victims' faces, but we do not know what they go through every day. They are mothers, teenagers, seniors, young girls, women from all walks of life, who are victims of assault by violent men.

The perpetrators of these crimes may come from their communities or from institutional settings. They may also come from neighbouring communities—cities or towns in our provinces. They are brothers, fathers, friends, authority figures or perfect strangers. The victims also live in urban areas, where they end up falling prey to pimps and criminals of all kinds.

All of these horrors committed against aboriginal women are a disgrace to all of Canada, our justice system and our institutions.

Human Rights Watch is decrying the fact that police are responsible for some of this violence. The media is giving wide coverage to this topic and human rights organizations are speaking out about it.

But how can we really know the truth about these allegations? What can we do about this seemingly institutionalized violence? How can we understand the scope of this violence, which just keeps increasing despite the efforts of many aboriginal communities?

The number of victims is staggering in light of the proportion of the population they represent. Why are aboriginal women subject to repeated abuse while public authorities do nothing to intervene?

We all know that Canada is not free from violence against women. However, for women in our country's other communities, our streets, parks, towns and cities are relatively safe.

Every day, violence against aboriginal women underscores their economic and political impotence in a world where their pain goes unheeded. As of late, our debates in the House have focused on the aboriginal reality, because we see the fragility of certain communities as a historic injustice that continues unabated.

But these women, who are among the poorest of the poor, are even more alone. They are fighting for their lives, yet their plight is still on the periphery of our nation's worldly hurts. From west to east, first nations women are the social glue that hold these admirable, resilient people together. They are often the guardians of language and traditions. However, as in all world conflicts, they are the ones most often forgotten in treaties, conventions and armistices.

We have yet to integrate the history of first nations into our national history. Imagine what it is like for these women, who have been stripped of their rights by invaders. We are perpetuating the colonial cynicism about these women and girls, who leave elected representatives indifferent to their plight, to say the least.

If these women were from our communities, we would have acted with 10, 100, 1,000 times more urgency, but we feel they are far away and out of our reach. But our collective history is made up of these inequitable relationships that still exist today.

We should take a few moments to think about these battered women. Our thoughts must lead to actions, and those actions must repair the effects of past stigmas and give meaning to justice and equality.

Statistics on this type of violence have been compiled by many Canadian researchers, and it is important to recognize the enormous gap that separates aboriginal communities from other communities in Canada.

A 2009 study by the Public Health Agency of Canada found that aboriginal women were three times more likely to be victims of violence than non-aboriginal women in Canada. According to Statistics Canada, aboriginal women are also seven times more likely to be murdered than non-aboriginal women in Canada.

Clearly, these are the cases of violence that are reported to the police; however, it seems that, given the circumstances, many of these crimes are not reported. Many of these victims live in isolated areas, even within cities. The lack of social services and medical care in many communities seems to indicate that, through no fault of their own, victims of such violence are caught in the vicious circle of victimization, which inevitably leads to recurrent mental and physical health problems and poverty.

The same study shows that this problem often affects young aboriginal women, who are overrepresented in the 15 to 34 age group.

The violence against these women slowly came to light in the Canadian media as a result of the high number of unsolved cases of missing women from these communities.

Since the summer of 2012, the Assembly of First Nations and other groups have been calling for a national inquiry on missing and murdered aboriginal women. The Assembly of First Nations estimates that 600 aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered in Canada over the past two decades. There is a link to be made between the high number of disappearances and our decision-makers' disinterest in this regard.

Ignorance of the reality of these women continues as a result of the paternalistic system that the federal government uses in dealing with first nations. The endemic violence that these women are experiencing is no longer confined to remote communities; it concerns all of us. The violence against Métis, Inuit and first nations women goes hand in hand with the pervasive racism and sexism that continue to plague our relationship with first nations.

We could reference countless criminal investigations that would reveal another aspect of the public's indifference to the fate of these women, but we must work diligently to find the causes of and solutions to this violence by showing our support for a commission of inquiry that will no doubt expose our lack of expediency in administering justice for these aboriginal women.

Like the Native Women's Association of Canada, we believe that a national public inquiry and a committee, as my colleague has proposed, are crucial in order to document the disparities that exist in our justice system regarding these women. We are very concerned about the lack of judicial resources available for these abused women.

We are outraged that many criminal investigations have gone nowhere and that the list of missing women continues to grow, while we still have not been able to find any solutions.

These disappearances and all this violence will only get worse if we cannot come up with any ways to achieve social justice and defend the rights of these women. We must give aboriginal women the means to express their grievances in a public forum and provide them with legal and police services tailored specifically to them. The lack of lawyers, social workers and police officers trained to deal with the reality facing aboriginal women helps perpetuate this cycle of systemic violence.

We cannot help the cause of aboriginal women without providing them with the services they need to file complaints and, more importantly, without protecting them from potential abusers.

A public inquiry with no assurance of support from the political forces across the floor would be doomed to failure. Documenting the reality facing aboriginal women is one thing; following through with meaningful proposals on how to provide justice is another.

[Business of Supply, February 14th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for Vancouver East for her speech and her comments. She is very familiar with the issue.

I would like to ask her how she interprets the fact that there was no outcome to the inquiry. At one point, she said that society has abandoned these women. In light of all the studies, research and reports that are out there, why does she think that society has abandoned these women and that nothing happened in the end?

[Government Services, February 13th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are aware of the government's cuts to the federal public service.

Many have legitimate questions about access to government services.

Given the reduced number of public servants who can answer Canadians' questions in person now, does the government have any plans to divvy up its workforce across the regions to help people who do not have a computer or access to computer services?

[Child Care, February 8th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, several members have spoken this week about the government's abandonment of the universal child care program. In 2006, the Conservatives promised to replace this program with tax credits to employers who would create new child care spaces. They promised 125,000 new spaces in five years.

How many spaces have they created so far? Have they enabled women, some of them heads of single-parent families, to have access to a system of affordable child care?

[Child Care, February 6th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, seven years ago, the Prime Minister of Canada tore up bilateral agreements with the provinces to create daycare spaces for our country's children. Instead, the government chose to create a tax credit program that has cost taxpayers over $15 billion. What is more, daycare fees did not drop by a single penny.

The government also failed to deliver on its promise to create more spaces in regulated daycares. Only 20% of children have access to regulated daycare despite the fact that the number of children under the age of four has increased by at least 11% since this government came to power.

Canadian families are in desperate need of new child care spaces to deal with the challenges of raising our country's children and keeping them healthy.

Not only has this government turned its back on Canada's children, but it has also failed the women and families that have to cope with this disgraceful situation.