Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on April 12th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

I want to welcome our guests today from NWAC, the Native Women's Association of Canada. We're very pleased you've been able to make the time to join us today. We look forward to hearing everything you have to say and to learn from you.

With us today are Dawn Lavell-Harvard, the president of NWAC, and Dan Peters, the acting executive director.

Just before I turn the floor over to you, Dawn and Dan, I want to let you know about the process we have in place. We're going to give you 10 minutes to present. We have an hour, all in all. We finish up at 5:30. You'll have 10 minutes. Then we're going to go into rounds of questions from committee members that are fairly strictly timed. The first rounds of questions are seven-minutes long. If we make it into the second rounds, they will be five minutes long.

In order to ensure fairness, I will be cutting people off, including you, at 10 minutes. I am apologizing in advance if I am rude, but it really is the only way we can ensure fairness and get people on to the responsibilities awaiting them after 5:30.

If you're ready, I welcome you to take the floor. Thank you.

[Dawn Lavell-Harvard, President, Native Women's Association of Canada]

Thank you, because that was actually my first question. At what point do you cut me off?

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

I'll show you a yellow card at one minute left, and then the red card means “Please conclude your sentence.”

[Dawn Lavell-Harvard]

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development.

I want to thank you for this opportunity to address you today. I want to begin by acknowledging that we are meeting here on Algonquin territory, the traditional indigenous peoples of this area.

The Native Women's Association of Canada is founded on the collective goal to enhance, promote, and foster the social, economic, cultural, and political well-being of indigenous women in Canada. NWAC is an aggregate of 13 native women's organizations from across Canada and was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1974.

Back in the 1970s, our women were struggling to be reinstated in their communities. Women were removed from their communities because of gender discrimination and sex discrimination in the Indian Act. When an indigenous woman married a non-indigenous man, she was removed from the community. She received a cheque from the government for $12, and a letter that said, “You're no longer an Indian”. That meant she no longer had the right to live in her community. She no longer had the right to even return to her community without permission. She lost her land, her home, and the right to be buried in that community.

It was this clear gender discrimination that organized our women. Our women have been activists at the community level for generations, starting with homemakers clubs, where to the outsiders it looked...They spread the image that they were there to trade recipes and talk about stain removal and laundry, but they were there behind closed doors to talk about how to better the lives in their communities.

This was the beginning of a very long tradition when our women went all the way to the Supreme Court over what eventually became Bill C-31. They actually lost at the Supreme Court level.

This was our experience where we realized that the voice of our women and our communities had been silenced, that Indian Act governments, band councils, and chiefs had superseded our traditional forms of government, and had silenced the voices of our women. That was why our associations were created.

We are now the modern incarnation of those traditional indigenous women's councils that happened in our traditions all across the country, those circles where our women had equality and had a voice in our communities. We're the contemporary incarnation of our traditional women's councils, our grandmothers lodges, the clan mothers, depending on which nation you arise from. We as the aunties, mothers, sisters, and daughters collectively recognize, respect, promote, and defend our ancestral laws, spiritual beliefs, languages, and traditions, but most importantly our families and our nations.

We are the voice of aboriginal women in part because many national, provincial, and local organizations do not have defined or well-developed avenues to allow aboriginal women's voices to be heard.

Since we were founded in 1974, we have fostered trust, we have listened to our women, and we have created the forms and the venues for our women to have their voices heard. Our ability to listen has generated many positive outcomes, including Bill C-31. After we lost at the Supreme Court here in Canada, we went to the international human rights watchdogs, the international human rights laws, to ensure that our women were treated with equality. As a result, tens of thousands of indigenous women and children were reinstated to their communities.

However, this gender discrimination is still continuing because they were not given back their original status. They were put back as reinstatees. Many communities still, in fact, refuse to accept the women and children back into their communities. We're still facing this ongoing discrimination simply because we're indigenous women.

We have been working since we began on bringing to light the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in Canada. We've been working to bring to light the issue of the extremely high levels of violence that our women and girls face in our communities.

Fleeing violence is the number one reason our women leave the communities. It's not for an education, not for a job, but to find somewhere where they can be safe. Unfortunately, many of our women, when they enter into the urban settings having left their communities, find that because of the additional racism, they're even less safe. They are slipping through the cracks because of systemic racism.

This issue has been brought to light not only in Canada but in international forums. As we all know, we are now heading into the national inquiry. Despite being consistently underfunded from our inception, we have brought to international attention this human rights crisis that we're facing here in Canada. We have done this collectively, with our history of strength and our capacity to listen, act, and inform our women.

We have many priorities. Many of the issues and challenges for our women and girls exist and are all related to this history of oppression, dispossession, and the imposition of a foreign governance on our communities that replaced our traditional role as women. It's very difficult, when we're looking at the issue of violence, to determine; there is no one, easy answer. It's a complex web of poverty that is making our women unsafe. Our women are not vulnerable; they are put in circumstances where they become vulnerable, because of broken treaties, because of communities that are living in third world conditions.

It's not about choosing a high-risk lifestyle. We've heard this conversation many times, that indigenous women and girls are going missing or are being murdered because of high-risk lifestyles. We agree that our women have high-risk lifestyles, not because they chose a high-risk lifestyle but because of lack of choice, because of lack of opportunity when you're in a community that doesn't have clean water, when you're in a community that doesn't have schools, that doesn't have housing, that doesn't have many of the basic things we see as human rights here in Canada. They're living in third world conditions in the middle of one of the richest countries in the world.

This is why ending violence against our women is our number one priority. You cannot focus on your education, you cannot write a paper, when you cannot go home at night because it's not safe. How do you apply for a job when you're trying to cover the black eyes and the bruises? How do you keep your family together when you have no housing? Children and welfare? You don't want to report, because the first consideration is that they're going to take the children out of the home because they believe it's unsafe.

All of these factors are going together and tearing our families apart, putting our women in danger, and this should not be happening. This has been identified very clearly as a grave human rights violation against indigenous women and girls here in Canada.

We need to continue to focus, number one, on ending the violence, on making sure that our women and girls have safety, so that we can focus on empowerment and building capacity in employment and education, and can begin to address the over-incarceration of our women, who are being thrown into prison and doing time for stealing food to feed their families. They are sentenced to 30 days for stealing food. Of course, you know this means that the woman's child ends up on child welfare, and the cycle goes on and starts with the next generation.

There are the mental health issues because of the ongoing issues of violence, because of the lack of follow-up and healing from residential schools, from the Sixties Scoop, from the ongoing trauma, not to mention the post-traumatic stress of living consistently with this experience of violence.

We've heard the crisis that has been declared because of the high level of suicide attempts. This community, which had 11 suicide attempts last Saturday, is just one of the many communities struggling with this issue. We have to address mental health, maternal child health, diabetes, health conditions, housing, poverty, environmental concerns.

Indigenous women have the role, since time immemorial, as the carriers of water, as the protectors of the water because of our role as women and the givers of life. We need to make sure as indigenous women and as one of the national aboriginal organizations who have fought hard to get a seat at the table, that the voices of our women and children are heard. We're very concerned right now that we have seen the potential that our voices will be silenced yet again, pushed back from the table. We say we cannot let this happen.

We have struggled too long to get a seat at the table. We have struggled too long to hold our families and our communities together. But the fact that we're still here shows that we can declare victory because we have survived, and we will continue to do so.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thank you very much for that, Dawn.

We're going to move right into the questioning. We start in the seven-minute question round with Michael McLeod, please.

[Michael McLeod, Liberal, Northwest Territories, NT]

Thank you for the presentation. You've described a condition that many communities in my riding are facing.

I welcomed the opportunity to talk to the Native Women's Association of NWT. We talked about a number of different things, and some of the issues were startling to me and we need to find solutions in a lot of different areas.

One of the things we discussed was the legal system. In the north, at least, it's very complicated and, for the most part, confusing to people who are in distress and are seeking assistance and to have the justice system on their side, to be reassured that they can deal with the issue at hand. A lot of times the system is too complicated and a woman will just throw her hands up in the air and give up and go back into a community or a relationship that, a lot of times, is not safe and high risk, as you stated. They really pointed to the need for an advocate or an ombudsman to help them as they enter into the system. They also talked about the lack of resources for programs to help individuals who come into the larger centres and to refer them to.

First, can you talk a little about your funding? Can you talk a little about the resources that you have to operate within, how they have either grown over the last years, or shrunk or been reduced? Maybe give us a snapshot of what you have to work with.

[Dawn Lavell-Harvard]

In fact, our resources, our capacity to deliver the support needed by the families, have shrunk considerably over the last years. We have been one of the hardest-hit aboriginal organizations by recent funding cuts over the last three or four years. We are well behind what we were even 10 years ago because of the cuts.

I think Dan can have some numbers.

[Dan Peters, Acting Executive Director, Native Women's Association of Canada]

Yes, we are well behind. When I first started at NWAC eight years go, we had a whole suite of programs, health programs. That was back in the time when they had NAHO. We had the aboriginal suicide prevention program, maternal child health, diabetes, and a number of other programs that really supported indigenous women. All the NAOs received that funding, but that was cut at FNIHB in Health Canada.

Right now we have some CIHR funding through the PEACE program, which is the prevention, education, action, change, and evaluation program. It's to create safety nets for aboriginal women. We also have some labour market development funding from ESDC. We have some status from the PEACE project funding.

As far as INAC goes, there's ARO funding, which is the aboriginal representative organization program funding envelope. It's a competitive process to get that money. I'm not one hundred per cent sure how much, but I think it was around $76 million over five years. That was in the budget. We haven't heard about getting that. We have a few projects, an entrepreneurship network that we've been doing for the last few years, and actually projects called Activating Social Change and Project Uplift. We have a few projects from INAC.

We also receive some core funding. As Dawn was saying, we don't really have the capacity to do a lot of things, such as to have someone in communications, especially with the inquiry going on, and the pre-inquiry. We need an increase in core funding. I believe we get $560,000 a year, which is just a pittance considering the work that we do. We need more core funding, and that's something we're definitely striving to do.

[Michael McLeod, Liberal, Northwest Territories, NT]

Thank you for that.

In the Northwest Territories, we have a few safe houses and shelters, but not very many. They are usually just in the regional centres, and we don't have any treatment, alcohol treatment centres, any treatment centres or facilities of that nature. So a lot of times individuals in the community, including women, will turn to the aboriginal organizations, their friendship centre, the band councils, the Métis Nation, or the native women's associations.

Now I've talked to everyone of these organizations, and their budgets have been cut to where they really can't function. They're almost at a point where they're looking at maybe closing their doors.

So there are still a lot of big issues out there. So what do you do in the case of gender discrimination? I heard a lot of discussion on this in my talks. If somebody goes to you and says their wages are not on par with men in the same field or sector or they are only hiring men, where do you refer people? What do you do with these people who are coming to you if you don't have the resources to deal with them yourself?

[Dawn Lavell-Harvard]

Exactly. This is specifically the problem we're dealing with. We have been cut to the point where we can't function in many of the areas that women are still coming to us for. When they don't get what they need in the community, when it's a family of missing or murdered, they will call the national office. It very often means that, because we cannot in good conscience ever turn somebody away and say we're not funded to do that...

I have been on the phone for hours with social workers trying to sort out somebody's disability cheque making sure, as the president, that it gets done. I have been with the human rights council in the province that we work with to make sure things get done. As always, it's those with the fewest resources and the least capacity who are expected to shoulder the burden of these cuts. We will continue to do what we can, but it's heartbreaking to have to tell somebody that we're trying to do this off the side of the desk or having to try to refer when there should be the resources there so that when women come forward when they're in danger, they know that they can count on us to advocate and to do something for them. And right now, if that means I have to do it personally on my time off, then that's what we've had to do.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thanks, Dawn. We'll have to leave it there.

David, you're to go, please.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Thank you for being here today. Obviously this is a great concern for everyone around this table, actually everywhere in Canada, because this is a significant issue that we have to address.

What role does the NWAC play in supporting provincial and territorial aboriginal women's organizations? You guys have a lot of organizations underneath you, so what role do you play? Is it financial support? Is it also a knowledge-based support, and how is that broken down?

[Dawn Lavell-Harvard]

Actually we would like to provide more support for the provincial associations. Right now, we have been working on trying to foster partnerships when we're at the Council of the Federation, for example, when the provinces are talking about their commitment to indigenous peoples and their commitment to ending violence against indigenous women.

I was starting to ask, “What are you doing in your province or territory to support your provincial association?” How do we build that partnership and try to foster that? We have consistently applied year after year after year for funds and resources to be able to support provincial associations. We have consistently been denied, but we have tried to work around that with knowledge sharing to help the provincial associations.

If it's a competitive process, we can help them to develop better proposals because we know proposal processes always end up with those who have the money. They continue to get more money because they have the capacity to write the good proposals. Those who have not had a chance to get into the door never get a chance to get in the door because they don't have the capacity to write their proposals.

This is creating severe inequality province by province, and when you see provinces that have a commitment to ending violence, a commitment to supporting indigenous people.... I know Ontario has made huge commitments to ending violence. There was a recent announcement of $100 million. They provide core funding for their provincial association, they have a facility, they have tremendous support, but then you'll see other provinces where there's nothing, where they're struggling and we're supporting them so that they can have an office. This is clear inequality across the provinces.

With this inquiry, we need to make sure that the provinces and the federal government... When everybody is talking about genuine relationships and genuine collaboration, that means we have to make sure that all of the partners have the capacity to participate in that relationship and not be the poor cousin who has the right to be at the table but doesn't have even the gas money to get there.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Another thing we talked a bit about was inadequate funding. The ability to do a good job requires a certain amount of money. I don't know what your current budget is, but what would be your ideal budget to carry out your mandate? Is it short by 50%? Give us an idea exactly what the shortfall is.

[Dawn Lavell-Harvard]

We would have to be at least double where we are at now. We have been cut back so much that we are operating at less than half of what we need, and that is just to meet minimum standards, minimum emergency crisis standards, when people come to our door, not to even get to the kind of larger long-term, capacity-building or sustainability. Talking about advocates in the system, this is one of the fundamental problems. There are many resources and supports out there, but even for well-educated people who have significant resources—phones, the Internet, and all of these things—it's difficult to navigate all of the many systems. Often dollars go unspent, and resources are not accessed, because of the number of hoops they have to be get through.

We have a centre in Thunder Bay where they have brought together workers in one building, where one worker is for housing, one worker is for child welfare, one worker is for the healthy babies initiative, and it's a model.... We've had these community hubs where when a woman and her children come in, and if she comes in for employment, but then we find out she has nowhere to sleep tonight, and then we walk down the hall together.

Having this kind of wraparound care in every province would help us to work to end the violence, to build that capacity, and to make sure that an investment in a woman always results in long-term improvement for the entire family and community, because that increases the chances of those children having a better outcome, of having increased education, and for employment later in life.

Significant upstream investments, for us to be able to just meet the demand that's out there right now, would require double our current budget. To start making improvements and significant long-term improvements in the lives of indigenous women and children, we would have to be at minimum four times what we're at now. With that we also have to build the capacity in the provincial associations.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

I understand that a portion of it is federal and a portion of it is provincial. Do first nations play any part in financial contributions to your organization?

[Dawn Lavell-Harvard]

Just to be clear, the Native Women's Association of Canada only gets federal funding. Our provincial affiliates get provincial funding to varying degrees. To my current knowledge, we don't get any funding through any first nations for any of our provincial affiliates or programs at either the national or the provincial level.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Thank you. That clarifies that for me because I didn't know how you were funded. So it's strictly federal and—

[Dawn Lavell-Harvard]

For the National Women's Association of Canada, yes.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

I have a quick further question.

Your organization has been very active since 1974. Can you highlight some of your accomplishments that we can take back and say this is what you have completed, these are some of the programs you have instituted to make the lives of our aboriginal women better?

[Dawn Lavell-Harvard]

I think Bill C-31 was one of our first and most significant accomplishments. That was our rallying call, where women got together so that indigenous women had the right to be indigenous, that we had a right to be members of our communities, to be who we were, and to regain that. That was carried on to the next generation, with Sharon McIvor and the McIvor decision, which allowed the next generation to have the right to be indigenous and to have a right to be members of their first nation communities.

That's a huge accomplishment, but also I think one of our largest accomplishments, as a result of 30 years of struggle, has been to bring attention to the issue of violence, something that nobody wanted to talk about and nobody wanted to hear. There was the notion that once economic development was dealt with, the violence wouldn't be a problem. It was a struggle just to start having those conversations and the fact that the Sisters in Spirit initiative—even if we had to go to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to get an investigation, to have them here in Canada, to have the human rights violation identified, exposed, and hopefully dealt with.... It's the same thing with the United Nations. We are using those kinds of international human rights protocols to shine a light and expose the human rights violations here in Canada. That has made a significant difference and has catapulted us into this process, and we are now at the first steps of making long-term change by addressing that violence.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thank you.

We'll hear from Niki Ashton, please, who is substituting for committee member Charlie Angus.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, MB]

Thank you very much, Ms. Lavell-Harvard, for joining us today to speak to the important work of the Native Women's Association of Canada. You gave a very powerful synopsis of the extent of NWAC's contributions not only to indigenous women and indigenous communities, but also to Canadian society.

I do want to highlight the work of Sisters in Spirit as well. Despite the fact that its funding was entirely cut, it continues to be an effort that is in people's psyches, and certainly brings people together. It continues to bring people together. Families that were first reunited through the work of Sisters in Spirit continue to come together and be powerful voices on the ultimate need for justice for indigenous women.

I know that your presentation touched on this a bit. Obviously, we're all very supportive of the work being undertaken to bring forward a national inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women, but one of the things I hear a lot from indigenous women, and from indigenous men as well, in communities across northern Manitoba and across Canada is that while the inquiry is critical and needs to take place, there are certain actions that can take place prior to the inquiry.

One of the words you used to describe the reality that many indigenous peoples face is “poverty” and how it really is linked to the marginalization and the vulnerability that many indigenous peoples experience right now. Do you agree that fundamental actions need to take place in parallel to the inquiry? Do we need wait for the inquiry to tackle poverty in indigenous communities, or can and should we be going forward on that front as soon as possible?

[Dawn Lavell-Harvard]

I think we've made it very clear on a number of occasions that while it's absolutely important that we have this inquiry to articulate and identify long-term upstream investments and the nature of the racialized, sexualized violence, and systemic discrimination that have put our people in danger, we've been very, very clear that there are many things we can do right now, and that should be done. We cannot afford to wait two, three, or four years for recommendations down the road while girls continue to go missing every week and women continue to be murdered every week. We can't afford to wait.

There were plenty of recommendations. There are many things that we know we can do right now. Transportation on the Highway of Tears needs to be dealt with right away.

We need to look at pilot projects for exiting programs for women who want to get off the streets. We have women in B.C. who have come forward wanting to have these kinds of supports so that it's not a perpetual revolving door.

We need improvement in child welfare and, very clearly, in equality issues. We're talking about generations over the time frame of an inquiry. That's an entire childhood in a community. That is an individual human being's entire childhood while they wait for incremental equality. Children deserve better now—and absolutely, it has to start right away.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, MB]

I also noted in the NWAC report with regard to the inquiry that one of the recommendations was for a comprehensive national action plan. That's a discussion that I've been involved with for years, and in the previous Parliament I certainly was very closely involved; but, of course, the discussion continues as to what that comprehensive national action plan ought to include. I'm wondering if you could speak to that from NWAC's position.