Thank you.
Dr. Zinger and Ms. Miron, thank you and your whole team for your dedicated work for many years, and your helpful insight into what's going on in our correctional institutions.
I want to ask you about the mother-child program. I visited the mother-child program at Grand Valley, last year. The Library of Parliament did an outstanding report—I asked them to—on the mother-child program. Some of the information in that is quite shocking. In 2011—I'm sure it's worse today than it was in 2011—StatsCan said 48% of children residing in foster care were indigenous, and the majority of those children had incarcerated mothers. In that same year, no indigenous mothers were approved for the mother-child program in federal prisons, and to this day the program continues to be underused by Correctional Service Canada.
For those who don't know, this program not only connects moms to newborn infants but also—for the moms I saw—maintains their contact with older children. One of the challenges, though, is this: One of the moms I met was in Kitchener, at Grand Valley, and her children were in Flin Flon, so the ability for them to see each other was close to zero.
One of your recommendations states that CSC should “review the program requirements and eligibility criteria”. Those were changed during the Harper years, making it much more difficult for indigenous women to participate. I'm wondering whether you can talk a bit about the benefits of the program and what CSC should do to allow more women to participate.