Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses, especially my friends at Aboriginal Affairs who have spent a lot of time working and talking about a lot of issues, including this.
Colleagues, I want to share very briefly some of my own experience of—perhaps exposure to—violence against women and segue into some questions that I think are quite important for the departments today.
Over the course of an 18-year nursing career around North America, I had a lot of great experiences. Most of that time I spent in isolated and remote first nations communities and regions across Canada, including the Arctic. I had a lot of great times, but I saw some unfortunate things, and a couple things in my nursing career I just cannot erase.
One was an experience in a level one surgical intensive care unit. As a nurse on shift that night, I received a 27-year-old woman who was shot in the head and who passed away over the course of my shift. There was other domestic violence that I was exposed to in my capacity as an extended role nurse in the north, but another in particular was when I was on call in a northern reserve in Saskatchewan. At about two o'clock in the morning in the middle of winter, I opened the door to a first nations community member, a woman and her three children. She had been beaten seriously, not seriously enough that she couldn't walk to the nursing station, but perhaps just as alarming were her three children, who were screaming because of what they had just witnessed.
Over time, I was left with an inability to get those two—there are others—out of my mind. In coming to this committee, I've thought, as an ordinary, average Canadian guy with four beautiful sisters, not just about the complexities of violence against women, and I have tried to reconcile that, but specifically about my career in first nations communities across northern Canada. Since becoming a member of Parliament, I've tried to make sense of some of the things we do right and some of the things we could obviously do better. I share the concern expressed by my colleague just prior that there is some kind of silo effect on the go. It precedes this government. Frankly, I think it has been a structural challenge for a very long time.
I appreciate the MRP legislation that we're moving forward. In particular, the exclusive occupation of a family home and emergency protection orders—as a pragmatist and somebody who's been there and dealt with this—were probably the most important pieces of that legislation for me in terms of family violence, keeping in mind that this is an important piece of what ultimately goes to the vulnerability of women and children on reserve and leads to some other things that we'll be talking about over the course of time.
I see that we have increased investments in prevention of family violence, particularly through your department. It makes sense that although we have increased the number of shelters, the better investment is on prevention. We still have a way to go, I would submit, in dealing with the reality that more shelters could be in some communities. We are focusing on outcomes.
But my concern—and this might draw a grin from Francie—has been, as you know, in Min/DM meetings, when I talk about how these big departments are doing things focused on the same social, economic, or health challenge. And are they talking. It goes a little bit beyond the silo concept. It says, is there a coordinated exercise, or could there be, at the departmental levels that put together all of these pieces? As a senior health policy analyst while Minister Rock was the Minister of Health, we stayed largely within the health building in Tunney's Pasture. We rarely went out and talked to people on some of the files we were working on at the time.
I'm going to put that question out in the last three or four minutes here for you to talk about, whether that goes on, and if not, to inform our work as to whether we could make recommendations in time as we gather more information on how and what kinds of activities could go towards what I've expressed as a concern.
Thank you.