Thank you.
My name is Annetta Armstrong. I'm the Executive Director of the Indigenous Women's Healing Centre.
We operate three residential facilities in Winnipeg for urban indigenous women.
Our North Star Lodge is specifically a transition centre for indigenous women who are trying to start making some positive choices in addressing some of the tremendous systemic issues that urban indigenous women have to face.
A lot of young ladies who are coming to stay with us are trying to fight these systems and navigating through them. They're getting their kids back from care or trying to solidify their steady footing if they're struggling with addictions issues.
We also run a building called Memengwaa Place, which is a second-stage facility for women who have managed to get their kids out of care, who need some extra support so that they can live in our building and still have some case management and access to my staff as resources.
Our third facility is Eagle Women's Lodge. This is our newest building. It has three storeys. We are operating a Correctional Services of Canada CRF. It's essentially a halfway house for women who are coming out of the correctional system. We are also taking in women who are coming out of the provincial system.
I'm excited about our section 81 because we currently have an application in Ottawa to open a section 81 facility. Rumour has it that it's sitting on the desk of probably Treasury Board at this time. It's just a matter of time before it gets approved. For those of you who don't know why this is important, if a woman gets sentenced federally in Manitoba right now, there's nowhere for her to go. She has to be shipped out of province. This, I'm sure, is very costly. There are a lot of Manitoba women who are waiting in institutions across Canada, waiting to return home. My section 81 facility will allow minimum-security women to come home and finish their time in my building, with my staff, and get the proper resources, trauma counselling and services that they need. It will also repatriate these women back to their families and hopefully reunify them with their children before they're even done serving their sentence. I'm very excited about that.
My recommendations today are relevant to all kinds of systems that I and my ladies have to deal with on a daily basis.
The first recommendation is in regard to the MMIWG inquest. I firmly believe that inquest needs to continue to be supported in time and in monetary support. The issues that are coming to the table in the MMIWG inquiry are so big that we can't take the time away. They need to start figuring out what the solutions are and what these families need to do to move forward.
My second recommendation involves indigenous families and keeping them together. There needs to be significant investment on working with parents to keep their children out of care. Again, if necessary, wherever possible, children should be placed in culturally appropriate environments.
My third recommendation is that all funding agreements that the Government of Canada is working on with non-profits include a guaranteed living wage, with consideration given to actually providing competitive wages.
My fourth recommendation is as cited in the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that the Government of Canada ensure that indigenous healing lodges be a priority in housing indigenous offenders. I would just add that they be perhaps indigenous-led healing lodges, not led by Correctional Services of Canada.
My fifth recommendation is that the Government of Canada should immediately expand the resources to Housing First models, with priorities given to meet the special needs of women who are homeless. Homeless women mean homeless children. The issues that homeless women face are very different from those of homeless men.
My final recommendation is that the Government of Canada partner with 100 women centres across the country to establish social enterprise so that marginalized women have access to that training, employment and income.
In the spirit of true reconciliation, I think it's time we start to look at these issues and address them.
Thank you.