Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on June 15th, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thank you.

Madam Bérubé, you have two and a half minutes.

[Sylvie Bérubé, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Blaney, could you give me some information? You talked about taking better care of children.

Can you please explain to me what you mean?

[Fay Blaney]

We have a long journey to go in terms of having some autonomy over the child welfare system. The rates of apprehension are right through the roof. We often talk about how there are more children in care now than there ever were in residential schools. It's caused huge damage in the same way the residential school system has.

In my former life, I taught at the post-secondary level. I often had indigenous students coming into my classroom who didn't know who they were. They were learning who they were, in my classroom, and what it means to be indigenous: Where do I come from? That is another arm of the genocidal strategy that's been launched against us.

I hope I answered your question. You were asking about child welfare, I think.

[Sylvie Bérubé, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Thank you.

In 2018, a brief was presented to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. The Native Women's Association wrote that there is a lack of disaggregated and cross-jurisdictional data. As a result, identifying and assisting Indigenous victims and survivors of human trafficking and exploitation has been greatly hindered.

Given the importance of those statistics and those disaggregated data, can you tell me how we can fill that gap?

[Fay Blaney]

I think Hilda is a part of—and so is Diane—the national action plan. They have a committee or a table that deals with data, and I'm really looking forward to the results of their work.

The femicide observatory is involved in that process, and I'm really pleased to see that. They're speaking about decolonizing data. Hilda did, to some extent, speak about the jurisdictional problems that we have around policing, and I'm hoping that committee will be taking that into consideration.

I am looking forward to the work that comes out of the data committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thank you very much.

Is there anyone opposed to extending briefly past one o'clock?

I think I'll have the committee's support to continue on after one o'clock.

Now we'll allow Ms. Rachel Blaney to have her intervention, and then we'll hear from Ms. Redsky.

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Chair, I would like to cede my time. I really want to hear from Ms. Redsky. I don't want her to lose a minute.

I also just want to say it's nice to have another Blaney in the room. Fay. It's always good to have your sister-in-law online.

Thank you, and I will cede my time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

That's very kind of you.

Ms. Redsky, good afternoon and welcome.

Normally, we have about a six-minute presentation by our witnesses. We'd really like to hear your presentation, so can you please go ahead?

[Diane Redsky, Executive Director, Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre Inc.]

Yes, thank you.

Can you hear me?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Yes, we hear you.

[Diane Redsky]

Okay, good. We were having technical difficulties earlier.

[Witness spoke in Ojibwe]

[English]

My spirit name is Love Eagle and I'm from the Caribou Clan. I acknowledge the treaty territory that I have the privilege of living and working on: Treaty 1 in the homeland of the Métis Nation. I also acknowledge the traditional territory of my ancestors, Treaty 3, Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, which also provides the water to the city of Winnipeg.

Thank you for the opportunity to be here. I apologize for the technical difficulties and not being able to participate in the whole session, but I'm really happy to see some of the leaders working on this issue with Hilda and with Fay here. I want to acknowledge our survivor as well, who is bringing a really important voice to this really vital issue.

I'm hoping that you have learned through.... It appears that you've had a few meetings on this particular issue with a number of people who have been informing this group. I'm glad that you're getting a lot of different perspectives that are building on why this is the most extreme form of violence against indigenous women and girls, how indigenous women and girls and two-spirited LGBTQQIA are also uniquely targeted for the purposes of sex trafficking in our country, and why it is critically important to have unique resources that are available and accessible that are indigenous-led and trauma-informed and that honour harm reduction. I hope those are some key messages that you have picked up on.

The work that I have been working on, really, on this issue for over 30 years now has been to address and find solutions—to problem solve—on how to end the sex trafficking of, particularly, indigenous women and girls. My career has been focused a lot on that, including leading the National Task Force on Sex Trafficking of Women and Girls in Canada.

The organization that I work for is called the Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre. It is located in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treat 1 territory. We currently operate a rural healing lodge. It is and continues to be the only rural healing lodge in Canada for child victims of sex trafficking. This is a very unique resource that is under the portfolio of the provincial strategy called Tracia's Trust to end sexual exploitation and sex trafficking in our country. It's a provincially funded rural healing lodge.

I want to just give you some insight into that rural healing lodge and our experiences of operating a rural healing lodge. These are for girls and transgender teens between 13 and 17 years of age. These are some of the things that we have heard from girls. Again, these are minor children who are involved in the child protection system because they are girls in need of protection, and they need the support to be able to begin their healing journey.

Here are some of the key points that they have shared with us over the years of operating Hands of Mother Earth, the rural healing lodge: Their sexual exploitation started young, as young as nine. They are groomed and lured online and in person. Girls from northern first nations are particularly at risk, in that a lot of it is online, and sometimes other girls are manipulated and forced to go into northern first nations communities to also do recruitment and luring and bring girls back into Winnipeg or larger urban centres.

The control by the trafficker can take on many forms. He can pose as a boyfriend or a drug dealer, an older man supplying them with drugs or a place to stay. He can pose as an uncle or a father figure, even “daddy” in some cases, so how traffickers are targeting indigenous women and girls is very relationship-based. They are coerced to perform sex acts as many as six to 10 times a day, continuously, seven days a week, and hand over their money.

They're often on some really harmful drugs as well—for coping, as well as what is given to them—such as meth, heroin, crack and those types of drugs that can really impact their ability to give proper consent to anything. Meth is continuing to be a huge factor in controlling girls. A girl is more profitable to a trafficker than an adult woman, but the trauma-bond component to the trafficker is making it very hard to intervene. The target is primarily girls who are in child and family services care. Depending on where they are across the country, sometimes that place is more dangerous than others, such as Ontario and Saskatchewan, where the CFS age of majority caps out at 16. There's that period between 15 and 18 where there really aren't any adults who are actively responsible for their care and protection, which leaves them very vulnerable to traffickers.

We know that many men are buying girls to sexually abuse them—and that is the correct language to use. It's pretty diverse as well, so if we're looking for who the typical abusers and offenders are, it's men of all ages, from different cultural backgrounds and socio-economic situations.

What is also important about what we've heard from our young residents is that this is a long journey on their healing. Their healing journey will take forever, and that's not meant to be a bad thing, because with proper supports, indigenous-led supports and opportunities to continue to heal, this journey is a really important investment in their long-term healing journey. It does take a lifetime to heal from the most extreme form of violence against women and girls, so having that safe place to start the healing journey is critically important.

I have some recommendations for this committee. Within the federal national action plan to combat human trafficking, I'd really like to see an emphasis on it being indigenous-led, and then having an indigenous stream that is really focused on making those strategic investments across the country. We have to outsmart what is already out there.

I would agree on how critically important data collection is, because there is no common data collection, so we don't have an accurate number of what's happening across the country. Women and girls are presenting themselves in shelters and they're documented as cases of domestic violence instead of sex trafficking, so there's a lot of complexity around data collection, but there still is a really important opportunity for this across the country.

We really need to have and develop a victim service strategy that is directed to their life-long healing, and not contingent on their being involved in the court system. Many of our girls from the Hands of Our Mother Earth Rural Healing Lodge have participated in the court system. It has been just a terrible experience from beginning to end, so we really need a victim centre, a victim service strategy, to ensure that we are really giving a strong level of support to young girls, and anybody, any victim, who is impacted by sex trafficking while they're going through the court system. Just in one case, where there were multiple victims, we had several girls who participated in that court system who made several suicide attempts, some of which succeeded. We really need to ensure that we're creating that strong safety net as they go through the court system.

It is critically important—as it relates to what we have now overall and which could at least help and not make anything worse—not to repeal Bill C-36. This is the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act. It is a really critical piece of legislation not only for the community, but for policing agencies to be able to intervene at times, so that they have a full venue or a number of tools they can use to intervene between a trafficker and those they are abusing and sexually exploiting.

I'm going to say two more things. Advocates like me and many others really want, need and encourage the investment in the voices of survivors. It is critically important because that is where the answers are. That is where we need to support survivor leadership. We need to be investing in those survivor-led voices and in those survivor-led organizations because those are where the strategies and the solutions lie. There's a critical need to make investments into survivor voices and particularly indigenous-led voices.

The last thing I'll say is that any form of buying sex from women and girls is violence against women—bottom line. We need to stop normalizing this form of violence and saying it's okay because there's money involved.

That is what I'd like to bring to this committee. Thank you again for the opportunity to be here.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Ms. Redsky, thank you so much.

I'm glad that we had the opportunity to hear those points. I want you to understand that this committee has been working—the four parties together—toward a common objective of resolving the problems that we've been hearing. I'm very proud of the way we have been able to work.

Also, we have outstanding analysts. Nothing is going to be missed in the material that's prepared for us from the conversations, questions and answers we've had. This has been a brilliant, although somewhat sobering, couple of hours.

On behalf of all our committee members, thanks to each and every one of you for sharing your life experiences, but offering us a pathway to a better future.

With that, I'll take a motion to adjourn.

[Lenore Zann, Liberal, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

I move to adjourn.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thank you, Ms. Zann. All in favour of this motion?

(Motion agreed to)

This meeting is adjourned.