Status of Women committee  Okay. That's the case in a lot of missing persons cases. It's the tragic aspect. One of the things we're working on is trying to put together a little bit more of a coordinated effort at making information available to victims and communities, so they can access in a central l

Status of Women committee  I'll give you maybe a 15-second description of Smithers, and then perhaps I'll ask my colleague to give you a description of another area he policed in northern Saskatchewan. Smithers is a fairly good-sized town. It's a logging community. It's policed by approximately 20 office

Status of Women committee  First I'll answer why I think the offenders haven't been caught yet. It's somewhat speculative on my part, but when a lot of these crimes are sexually motivated...and a lot of these crimes have no background connection between the victim and the perpetrator; they're what we refer

Status of Women committee  It has been done in many respects. In the case I spoke of, it was the murder in Smithers of Ramona Wilson. I remember--

Status of Women committee  I remember it as if it were yesterday. She was a missing person for months, and she was found in a remote area by the airport with hardly any forensic evidence to pursue. It's very difficult. In those days we worked on that very aggressively. We had the regional major crimes sec

Status of Women committee  Yes, I can. What we're referring to is the Highway of Tears investigation, along Highway 16 in northern British Columbia. I believe that 13 young women have been found murdered and five are missing. In fact, I investigated one in Smithers when I was a corporal investigator in nor

Status of Women committee  That is not what I said, Mr. Desnoyers. I said there are two dimensions to recognizing the magnitude of the problem, as evidenced in the study you started speaking of. When you realize that someone is preying upon vulnerable areas of our society, you want to try to stop that imm

Status of Women committee  We're very careful about the information we collect with respect to people's ethnicity or their race and so on. By way of numbers, though, I wanted to share with the committee that, as recently as March, we had 10,477 missing people reported in Canada, of which 5,824 were chara

Status of Women committee  In respect of your question around prevention, I think I've already spoken of our training, starting from an officer's entry into the force and ongoing throughout his or her career, but also in terms of localized efforts among our detachment commanders and the people who make up

Status of Women committee  Personally, I am not aware of that study, but that is not to say that...

Status of Women committee  I am aware of that study. I'm aware of the study of the 582 missing women; I've read that study. I understand all of that. Is that the study you are talking about?

Status of Women committee  Okay. I'm aware of that study. In terms of our responses to missing women and murdered women, I also wanted to give you some examples of some task forces that we run right now in northern British Columbia along the Highway of Tears and the current study that's going on in Manit

Status of Women committee  Yes, there would be, and it would vary from detachment to detachment. But it would be consistent in the sense that within the six months following the transfer or posting of recruits to a detachment, they would do recruit field training, which is the development of skills that th

Status of Women committee  Yes, but I'll pare it down for you. In addition, there are probably 14 or 15 classes on aboriginal cultural issues and issues relating to aboriginal communities. Depending on where the officer is stationed, almost without exception, additional training is then given to the offic

Status of Women committee  Thank you for the question. I can speak about what we would refer to as regular members of the force and their training at Depot, which begins with about 35 sessions on family violence or domestic violence.