That's great. Thank you, Madam Chair.
And thank you, Ms. Hitch, for coming before the committee. We would agree with you that the case of murdered and missing aboriginal women is a serious one, and we would also agree that it's been researched to death; there is a real need for action. I know you addressed the root causes as well as some of the other measures that are in place.
One of the things I wanted to touch on was with regard to information gathering. Without good information it's often very difficult to develop good public policy. I want to touch on a paper called “Good practices in legislation on violence against women” done by the United Nations as a report of the expert group meeting back in 2008. One of the things the report pointed out was the importance of collecting statistical data. They made a recommendation that legislation should:
require that statistical data be gathered at regular intervals on the causes, consequences and frequency of all forms of violence against women, and on the effectiveness of measures to prevent, punish and eradicate violence against women and protect and support complainants/survivors; and
require that such statistical data be disaggregated by sex, race, age, ethnicity and other relevant characteristics.
Of course they say this information is fundamental for monitoring the efficacy of legislation. Of course we don't have legislation specifically, nor do we have a national action plan on violence against aboriginal women. Could you comment? I know you mentioned the police have established a National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains, and that some data will be gathered as a result. Can you speak to what kind of data it will deal with? Root causes? Will it be divided by age, race, ethnicity? Will it look at evaluating the measures after the fact to see how effective the measures are?