Status of Women committee  No, there is not. Speaking of my area, there is no transportation provided. A lot of the agencies operate on shoestring budgets, and they cannot afford the extra cost of transportation. It becomes a very vulnerable situation, especially if you have children involved. In some cases, when you're talking about indigenous, you also face discrimination in some of the neighbouring communities.

Status of Women committee  Madam Chair, I concur with the previous witness. There's a definite gap with statistics. I just want to talk to you about a project that we have going on in Alberta on building capacity in rural crime prevention. To build a framework—for which we thought it would be quite easy to gather some of this data—was very, very difficult.

Status of Women committee  Thank you for the question. Yes, I agree with the previous speaker. Connectivity is a broad topic. We could spend a lot of time on it. In education, we've seen with COVID restrictions how chaotic school has been with teaching children online. Supports, resources, education...it's numerous.

Status of Women committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I would agree. We need the resources. We need to make sure we have the proper people and infrastructure in place. I agree with the previous speaker that one thing we've found through COVID is that we are definitely not taking care of our seniors. It's almost like we want to shove them away in a corner and just leave them there.

Status of Women committee  I agree that we have to go deeper. We need to start looking at the root causes. Why is there domestic abuse? Why is there elder abuse? Why is there physical abuse in these homes? The resources, education and funding capacity have to be there.

Status of Women committee  Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the committee for the opportunity to speak this morning. My name is Jean Bota. I'm a Red Deer County councillor. For anyone not familiar with Alberta, Red Deer is halfway between Edmonton and Calgary. In addition to being a councillor, I also sit on the Red Deer/Lacombe rural crime watch as a director, and I chair the Alberta Community Crime Prevention Association, which is a provincial board with representation from around the province.