First of all, I want to thank you very much for inviting us to appear today.
Maître Lucie Joncas sends her regrets. She was due to come, but due to scheduling difficulties couldn't make it. I'm very pleased, however, that Maître Dominique Larochelle is here to join us.
Maître Larochelle, in addition to being the president of the board of directors of the Société Elizabeth Fry du Québec, is also a legal aid lawyer in Montreal and knows this area well.
We are also most fortunate always to have the calibre of advisers that we do in terms of such members of the community as Maître Joncas and Maître Larochelle. For those of you who are not aware, they donate thousands of hours of work to the issues with which we are involved, all pro bono.
Accordingly, I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank you, Ms. Larochelle, and all the other members of our board of directors, for your ongoing guidance and dedication throughout the work we do.
For those of you who are not aware, the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies was originally conceived in 1969 and was incorporated as a national voluntary non-profit organization in 1978. We're a federation of 26 local community-based agencies that provide services to marginalized, criminalized, victimized, and institutionalized women and girls. We have both paid and volunteer staff, and they are involved in the governance, as well, of our organizations across the country. They're also involved in programs and service delivery throughout our association—our 26 members—and the programs that are developed are developed at the grassroots level and involve everything from early intervention and prevention activities to and including pre- and post-release work and interventions in institutions, whether they be forensic, mental health, immigration detention, or prison and remand facilities.
In the past year our more than 30 volunteers, including board members, have dedicated more than 6,000 hours of work to national initiatives, which supplements the work of the two of us who are staff in the national office. In our 26-member societies, it's probably of interest to this committee to know that we have more than 1,500 volunteers who dedicate approximately 110,000 hours per year, which supplements our full- and part-time staff across the country.
At the national level—the office I work out of—we focus on policy and law reform initiatives, and our work is very much informed by the initiatives of our organizations. In terms of the optional protocol to the Convention against Torture, our organization has been involved for some time, in partnership with Amnesty International and with the Association for the Prevention of Torture, by encouraging the Canadian government to implement and ratify the optional protocol related to the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
As you will note from our response to the fourth and fifth reports submitted by Canada, there is certainly significant concern for the lack of compliance, at times, with our own important, significant, and very much valued charter and human rights protections, and so we are extremely concerned also about our compliance with United Nations conventions.
One of the things we point to, in reference particularly to the issues pertaining to women, is the United Nations themselves, in the UN Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. Ms. Florizelle O'Connor was hired to do some research, and she concluded that the situation of women prisoners worldwide revealed gross violations of almost all accepted human rights principles.
The treatment of women in Canadian prisons is no exception, and on federal policies and practice related to the treatment of federally sentenced women, we have long raised many concerns regarding the manner in which these violate provisions of the Convention against Torture in a number of ways, which are discussed in our brief.
I understand it should be available soon. I apologize that because of the short notice we were not able to have it available in French for today, but it will be distributed en français aussi.
The UN General Assembly has called on states to address key problems facing women in prison in several contexts. Prominent Canadian agencies have also issued reports regarding the situation of women prisoners and have made numerous concrete recommendations about how the federal government can and should improve the treatment of prisoners.
One of the examples is Louise Arbour's report. Louise Arbour is currently the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations. In her commission of inquiry into certain events at the Prison for Women in Kingston, she provided a number of examples of the sorts of protections, of the sorts of violations that this kind of convention might assist us in detecting, and therefore protecting the Canadian government as well, in terms of potential liabilities.
As well, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, in a report entitled Protecting Their Rights: A Systemic Review of Human Rights in Correctional Services for Federally Sentenced Women, a report publicly released in January 2004, also pointed out the number of—