Status of Women committee  No. I would not say urgent is 25 years, the same as I felt that 31 years was not a temporary measure for the inclusion of section 67 in the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Status of Women committee  I would say that we would always support first nations leadership and first nations determining their own future as to the way in which they would provide services for their own people. That includes doing so via a human rights commission. We would welcome a first nations human r

Status of Women committee  I would say that during the discussions and debate around section 67, a similar question was asked of me. I said that the Canadian Human Rights Commission, of course, does not undertake to discharge the honour of the crown and conduct the consultation; we're engaged with the comm

Status of Women committee  In the Canadian Human Rights Act, even as a quasi-constitutional statute, there is the non-derogation, non-abrogation provision in our legislation, with the repeal of section 67, and there is provision, as you know, in the interpretive provision, which says that we have to give d

Status of Women committee  Yes, absolutely, and I'm happy to. One of the issues, as an example, in the child welfare case is that too much money is pointed towards protection services, towards apprehension, as opposed to support services to allow children to remain in their own home. I can say, certainl

Status of Women committee  Yes. Thank you for the question. Maybe it's not so much a finding, but what we've heard in regard to a number of issues that have been raised by aboriginal women. The reality is that they're living oftentimes in isolated communities. There are issues over leadership, of whether

Status of Women committee  I would again draw an analogy. When I told people that before June 2008, 700,000 aboriginal people in this country did not have access to the Canadian Human Rights Act, did not have equal access to human rights protection and the ability to seek redress for abuse, they also were

Status of Women committee  I don't feel I am in a position to be able to speak to that, only because, apart from a limited jurisdiction that we may have in terms of dealing with transfer of certificates of possession and the like...if we received a complaint on that. But beyond that, in terms of the lack o

Status of Women committee  Sure. I'll answer that in a couple of ways. The first way is to reference, which I haven't done yet, the child welfare case that is currently before a tribunal and that has been through the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal. It now is being heard on the merits. We re

Status of Women committee  In like manner that we have received complaints alleging discriminatory funding in terms of the child welfare, we also have received and referred to tribunal complaints on the very same...but for police services. We receive complaints, which I would describe as systemic complaint

Status of Women committee  Certainly. A victim of domestic violence who is afraid to be in her own home will, on an emergency basis, need to seek out for herself, and oftentimes her children, a safe place to go, a safe house, which would be a domestic violence shelter. The difficulty, of course, of not ha

Status of Women committee  I'm not sure about that, again because of what we've heard from aboriginal women, not just for me. You're absolutely right that a woman would have every right to go to court and get an order of sole occupation in an urgent situation, or the police would come and remove the husba

Status of Women committee  Again, from the experience we had, we welcomed the 36 months. We found it very helpful to be working with first nations, both people and governments, in providing the information and so on. In terms of providing capacity, capacity, of course, is a very broad catch-all, if you w

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. Certainly that's been identified in the cases that come now, with the existing ones, where there's an alternate dispute. Oftentimes, because of a particular vulnerability, whether because of mental health issues or a sexual harassment or sexual abuse complaint, we wil

Status of Women committee  If I may be permitted to put on the hat of my past practice, family law, I would say yes, certainly. I was assistant deputy minister of Child and Family Services in Manitoba, which had responsibility for child welfare, domestic violence prevention programs, child day care, and