Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I want to give a special thanks to all of our witnesses for being with us for this important study on what I know was short notice for them.
The fact that we're commencing this study this week raises one of the concerns I've always had about our approach to victims' rights: It has been focused on individual victims and cases. I thank the chair of the committee for mentioning missing and murdered indigenous women and girls this morning. We know that many thousands of women and girls have been lost to indigenous communities, never to return. This week we discovered 215 bodies of children at the Kamloops residential school. The many hundreds of children who died in residential schools and their families are also victims.
We have some categories of Canadians who are more likely to be subject to high levels of violence and to become victims. They of course include transgender Canadians and other members of the SOGI community, like the racialized members of the Toronto community who were subject to a gay serial killer for more than 10 years [Technical difficulty—Editor] high levels of violence in Canada.
I know it's a long preface, so here's my question. Because the act and the funding seem to be focused on services for individual victims, which is very important, I want to ask about support to victims organizations, and particularly community-based victims organizations. They quite often are able to work with and serve the larger communities of victims, if I can use that term, and help communities cope with the toll of loss in the community and the challenges of the legal system in achieving justice in those cases.
Do the funds actually serve community-based and victims organizations, as well as individual victims?