Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Good morning, honourable minister. It's good to see you back at the Justice committee.
I want to pick up where Mr. Garrison left off with respect to the main estimates and the victims fund.
In your reply to Mr. Garrison, you noted that a part of that has to do with the sunsetting of funding under the measures to address prostitution initiative, or MAPI. Minister, you noted that there is funding under the national strategy, but when the MAPI funding was sunsetted, organizations on the front lines to help women and girls who are at risk of sexual exploitation and human trafficking were literally left in the dark and forced to scramble.
Megan Walker, who is the executive director of the London Abused Women's Centre, said, “We never received anything from the government officially—no thank you for serving women on behalf of MAPI, no official notice MAPI was ending, no notice that we weren't funded through Victims of Crime, just no correspondence.”
How do you justify that?