Status of Women committee  I would add that it's not just housing for women. It's housing for the shelters themselves. It's the second-stage shelters, which are shelters that women need to go to if they have a high risk of lethality or of post-separation violence. They don't exist in a lot of rural and remote areas because there's no housing for second-stage shelters to purchase in order to exist.

Status of Women committee  We've seen that, because of COVID-19 and the social distancing requirements, fundraising for shelters has taken a huge hit. As I said in my remarks, the majority of shelters rely on fundraising because the funding they get from the government, usually from provincial and territorial governments, are, yes, project-based.

Status of Women committee  We don't work specifically on human trafficking. I believe that Amnesty International Canada just put out a brief about sex workers and not having CERB accessible to them. I would recommend looking at that brief. I would not be surprised that social isolation has made things easier for women to be trafficked.

Status of Women committee  This would definitely help. One of the things we heard was that women were nervous about moving into shelters, into the communal space of shelters, because of COVID, because of the virus. Shelters that are already set up to be apartment-style units that are self-contained did not see that decrease in women coming to their shelters.

Status of Women committee  The priorities are around funding and around securing other means of housing women—whether that be hotel rooms, university campuses or anything else—for the increased number of calls that are coming in. As we've been saying, we also need a national action plan to ensure that things are equitable across the country, so that a woman in P.E.I. can have the same high standard of care that a women in Alberta can have.

Status of Women committee  Sure. Just a clarification, the $10 million given to indigenous shelters was only given to on-reserve shelters. It did not include urban indigenous shelters or Inuit shelters. The other money that we distributed did go to those shelters. We've heard from different shelters saying that they were able to offer their staff “hero pay”.

Status of Women committee  From a shelter perspective, I think it would be very important to have priority COVID-19 testing. Something we saw was that when women were able to make the call to a shelter to leave the violent situation, they had to go into two weeks' isolation within the shelter. That is very hard for a woman who is coming out of a violent situation and has to be put into isolation.

Status of Women committee  That's a very good question. I think every level of government needs to fund and give core funding to shelters, because there is going to be abuse against women no matter what happens and we need shelters to be able to support those women. We also need to try to prevent the violence.

Status of Women committee  Good afternoon and thank you for this invitation. My name is Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, and I am the communications and development manager at Women's Shelters Canada, or WSC. WSC is a national organization representing over 550 shelters and transition houses serving women and children affected by violence against women and intimate partner violence.