Hello. Thank you so much for hearing me today.
I'm here today as the coordinator of the Vancouver Citizens Against Crime. It is a new community-based organization that is non-profit and non-partisan, because Vancouver citizens are very concerned about the daily shootings, as already referenced, and they want to have a voice to Ottawa.
One of our primary mandates as a group is to provide and facilitate that voice. We are currently developing a brief and collecting input, comments, and suggestions from members of the public, which we will be tabling to this committee by the end of May. I'm currently here as a backup person to somebody who couldn't be here, so my presentation is not as complete as I would have liked had I had a bit more notice. I apologize for that.
I just want to say that, personally and professionally, I have grown up in Vancouver, worked in the downtown east side, and volunteered in the downtown east side for over 25 years. In that span of time, I have lost many youths as well as adult friends and relatives to organized crime. That is my passion and my concern in being here today. I want to say that in cutting my teeth and working in the downtown east side, I've worked for neighbourhood houses services, the Chinese Cultural Centre, the Strathcona Community Centre Association, S.U.C.C.E.S.S., and as a child care worker by walking the streets of the downtown east side with the Ministry of Social Services.
During that time, I have also fostered seven children in my home, one of whom died of a drug overdose on the downtown east side at the age of 21. Attending his funeral was one of the worst experiences I have personally gone through.
I also wanted to share with this group that some 26 years ago, as the president of the Strathcona Community Centre Association, I founded and formed the Vancouver anti-gang and youth at risk task force. As a task force, we worked quite a bit to lobby local, provincial, and federal governments for funding for youth at risk. I'm happy to say that at that time we were very successful and did receive funding. This was the basis for many of the programs that we see today both provincially and federally.
However, I'm so concerned that 26 years later many of these programs seem to continue to be ad hoc and, as Dr. Gordon said, working in silos. That is primarily what I wanted to share with you today. I believe the community can be more effectively engaged and supported to achieve better outcomes by also establishing a community-integrated task force. Dr. Boyd talked earlier about a region-wide community policing integrated task force. I believe the community has a role to play in keeping our neighbourhoods safe.
If we had these kinds of initiatives in communities across Canada—working with the law enforcement agencies, of course—I believe we could strengthen and make our communities and our neighbourhoods more integrated and safer places to be. The police cannot be everywhere. I think we have had a tendency in the last 10 or 15 years to professionalize crime in the sense that it is the police's responsibility to look after this. Average citizens do not feel they know where to report things or, if they report things, whether they're safe. These are all valid concerns.
Secondly, I wanted to share a point regarding current and future requirements for justice resources. I believe that a re-prioritization maybe needs to happen with this, because as we know, Canada's demographics are changing. New immigrants are coming here who do not know what their rights and responsibilities are, who do not know about the justice system, the police systems, etc. Again, the public education regarding this area—the translations and availability of translated materials—are very ad hoc.
It happens occasionally here and there, but there's no consistent, forward-looking view to let us reach out to these people. Maybe we need to incorporate a justice module into the Citizenship Act, so that when people go for their citizenship they can learn about what their rights and responsibilities are as citizens regarding justice. There's a number of those kinds of things that could be looked at.
I also want to say that—