Chairperson Cenaiko, thanks very much to you and your colleagues, first of all for your service to the nation and second for appearing in front of us to discuss some very important matters.
I'm glad that you both raised the plight of our first nations in your comments. This is an area that I would like to follow through on this afternoon.
Last week, on February 18, Maclean's magazine published an article entitled “Canada’s prisons are the ‘new residential schools' ”. The article is subtitled “A months-long investigation reveals that at every step, Canada’s justice system is set against Indigenous people”.
I want to bring one particular paragraph early on in the article to your attention to give colleagues some awareness of the numbers that we're talking about. The article reads:
While admissions of white adults to Canadian prisons declined through the last decade
—and this article specifically looks at the last decade—
indigenous incarceration rates were surging: Up 112 per cent for women. Already, 36 per cent of the women and 25 per cent of men sentenced to provincial and territorial custody in Canada are Indigenous—a group that makes up just four per cent of the national population. Add in federal prisons, and Indigenous inmates account for 22.8 per cent of the total incarcerated population.
That's almost a quarter, almost one in four people in our system.
I think we all agree that as a society, as Canadians, we are all measured and judged each and every day by how well we take care of our most vulnerable members, and I think this article disturbs and saddens many of us. The question around the table really is, how do we fix this? What's the systemic problem that's plaguing us, and what are the resources that we need to put in place to correct it?
I wanted to get your reactions to this article in particular, and to ask you the extent to which both of you were aware of this problem in your organizational context prior to the article's release.