Special Committee on Indigenous Women Committee on May 2nd, 2013

[Françoise Ducros]

Absolutely, we are working with the other departments. I can't underline enough that we are working with the provinces as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Stella Ambler]

Thank you very much.

Now, for seven minutes, we have Ms. Bennett.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Thanks very much.

Madam Chair, just because of the timing of this committee, is there a reason we're not televised this evening? I think that was the preference of the committee members.

[The Chair, Conservative, Stella Ambler]

Why don't we discuss that at the subcommittee meeting next week?

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Okay. I think the understanding was they would all be televised.

[The Chair, Conservative, Stella Ambler]

I know it was discussed, but I don't recall coming to a decision.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Okay.

We have all this expertise here. We'll have a chance at the ministers later, as to why we don't have enough money for shelters, policing, whatever.

I'd like to know how you can help us design a study, and where we should be looking. Some of you have cited in your briefs certain places where things are working, that you funded them and they seem to be getting results. I understand that in New Zealand there's a good action plan on violence against women that includes, in a good way, indigenous women, and I would like to know if you think those are the kinds of things we should be looking for. Obviously, in New Zealand there's much better police data on statistics. If a strategy or a national action plan is to say what, by when, and how, we're going to have to figure out how we do this and how we design a study that will come up with some real recommendations and deliverables, that actually is, as Greg said, working together across government departments and across jurisdictions on how we get on and get this done.

We heard last week from Justice that there isn't a cabinet committee dealing with this, that this has been dealt with mainly by officials, in terms of trying to develop a strategy. How would you suggest that the committee...? Are there people you want the committee to listen to, the experts who you know? Certainly last week, our witness was clearly encyclopedic about everything that has ever been written on this topic.

Where would you advise the committee to go in trying to develop at least the ingredients for a national action plan, let alone the recipe?

[Sheilagh Murphy]

Just off the top of my head, we fund the National Aboriginal Circle Against Family Violence, which is a network for the 41 shelter directors. I think they have a lot of expertise and reflection on what works and what is not working in those 41 shelters. I would suggest certainly that they be invited to present on behalf of the shelters and even shelter directors. I think there's good on-the-ground information about their realities that would certainly be of interest to the committee.

I would also say that it would be important to look at the interconnectedness of services. I think one of the challenges in communities is capacity. A shelter may be there trying to provide services, but if it's not connected to the child and family services agency, which also can provide services, and it's not connected to health services and education services, then you get some disconnects within communities. That's a challenge capacity. Finding ways to see whether there are good examples and best practices there that can be translated into programs and services in other communities is another area of interest that you might want to look at. We can certainly look to see.

In that program review that I spoke to you about, there are some case studies in there that might be helpful to the committee to then look at lines of exploration based on that work. So we'll be providing that, and you could look at those as “some suggestions”.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

I'd love to hear from all of you, but maybe Shawn, in terms of the strategy on trafficking, how would that fit into a national action plan that would actually deal with and stop this sort of...?

[Shawn Tupper]

I guess part of my advice is that I think the committee wants to pay attention to the amount of work that's already going on, as we look at the economics of policing and at the work that's going on around victims and our efforts to find ways that we can better support victims within the criminal justice system. Specific investments are being made within the context of the criminal justice system to reflect on the overrepresentation of aboriginal people as offenders and as victims.

Frankly, I could spend all of the program dollars I have in aboriginal communities to address just the challenges we have in aboriginal communities, and of course I need to do that across the country, but I think there's a huge amount of work going on. The things we're seeing in all of that work are interconnected,

We're seeing the interconnectedness of all of our work. We and Health Canada, PHAC, and INAC have partnered recently on a couple of pilots. This is not necessarily focused on addressing issues; it's focused on being more efficient and effective in how we do our business. For instance, the ability to come together and to sign with communities single agreements that reflect four different departments is an effective way to cut through red tape, but it's also an effective way to make departments talk to one another about the kinds of things they're doing. You learn so much about what we're doing on the same kinds of issues.

I would stress to look not just at the problems but at the best practices as well, because there's a whole lot of stuff going on.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Internationally, like Australia and...?

[Françoise Ducros]

I should tell you that Status of Women Canada actually has a compendium of international best practices, particularly as they relate to culturally sensitive best practices. There are a lot of best practices that are being gathered, I think particularly on the prevention side of things, by the various provinces. We can certainly dig deep into that—

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Fleeing foster care is something that we've been hearing about. Cindy Blackstock.... Are there other—

[The Chair, Conservative, Stella Ambler]

There's no time to answer that question. I'm sorry.

We'll have to move on to Ms. Glover for seven minutes.

[Shelly Glover, Conservative, Saint Boniface, MB]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses.

I want to thank you, first of all, Mr. Tupper. I'm just thrilled to be here. I spent an awful lot of time in the aboriginal community. I spent 19 years policing in the city of Winnipeg—I hope to go back at some point—and I've investigated some of these cases of missing aboriginal women.

You mentioned the canadasmissing.ca website, and God bless you, because we're not here just to try to figure out ways to better protect these women and to find them and to solve some of these problems; we want to raise awareness as well. For those who might be following this, I want to encourage them to visit that website. If we can find just one of those missing girls.... Their families need closure.

I'm going to repeat it: canadasmissing.ca. It's a wonderful website that's been developed. I thank all of the officials and people who worked on it. It's a tremendous tool. Again, if we can find even just one of these missing girls for these families, it would be incredibly valuable.

I have to say that when Greg Rickford was talking about some of the incidents that he's lived through, boy oh boy, I started to have flashbacks myself of homicides of aboriginal women that I've been involved in investigating, and the homicides of their children, and so on.

When I was working, particularly in Winnipeg's north end, many of the women would tell me, when I saw them being exploited in the sex trade and was stopping to discuss things with them, that they had been kicked off reserve. Many of them were kicked off reserve and had nowhere to go, so they came to the city. They didn't know what to do, because they didn't know how to support themselves. They would get into prostitution and be exploited, with vicious, vicious beatings—absolutely vicious beatings—yet they had no voice in their communities, so they would come out and do this. I still suspect that many of those women are missing and murdered aboriginal women.

Actually, the stats provided by Stats Canada today seem to support.... In their eighth slide, they say, “Aboriginal women's disproportionate representation [is] greatest in non-spousal homicides.” It's dating, etc. We need to do something to give these women their rights. I've been dreaming of Bill S-2 for many years, but when it doesn't actually work in the communities, where women are not reporting....

You're coming up with these safety plans in conjunction with these communities, but how come we only have 190 in your dissertation? Is that the correct number? Out of the 600-plus communities, why do we only have 190?

[Kimberly Lavoie, Director, Aboriginal Corrections Policy Division, Department of Public Safety]

In actual fact, it's a smaller number than that. We have one completed safety plan, and we have five in the works. We have done community mobilization in 25 communities that are gearing up and getting themselves organized and developing a community vision to move forward. We've trained 190 people to be either community facilitators or community champions to work in their communities.

[Shelly Glover, Conservative, Saint Boniface, MB]

So why don't we have more?

[Kimberly Lavoie]

Because we're new. This is an initiative that just started in 2010. We need the buy-in of leadership before we will go into a community, and sometimes that takes time.

[Shelly Glover, Conservative, Saint Boniface, MB]

When you say “leadership”—I want to understand this—is there pushback on the government side, or is there pushback in the aboriginal communities? Which leadership do you need buy-in from?

[Kimberly Lavoie]

We need buy-in from aboriginal leadership in aboriginal communities before we go in and work with those communities.

When we started doing this work, they didn't know what we were doing and they didn't know what it was about. We would send them a letter and it would be filed. Now we've gained a little bit of momentum and people are dusting off those letters and saying, “Can we still engage with you?” We're getting folks who we have not dealt with in the past, who are calling our office saying, “We understand that you do this work.”

The beauty of this is that it's community driven. The communities get to decide, which is not typical of government programs. The communities get to decide their priorities, and they get to decide what community safety means to them. We then work with them. We support them and build on the existing strengths within the community.

Far too often we hear statistics that indicate that communities don't have, or they're lacking...whereas this approach is asking what they do have. There are inherent strengths there. There is a resilience. Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to exist this long.

It's a small number now, but it's gaining momentum. I expect there will be a lot more.

[Shelly Glover, Conservative, Saint Boniface, MB]

But I hear from you—and I've heard this before—that there are communities that don't want the help. We need to somehow help them, but if they don't want the help, how are we bridging that? There are women who, as we speak, are being beaten. Unfortunately, they are not getting the help they need.

Government cannot be solely responsible for all of that. How do we help them when they say, “We don't want help”?

[Shawn Tupper]

That gets back to the word you heard earlier. It's about capacity within the community. Oftentimes when we get that pushback it's because the communities just aren't prepared and they don't have the capacity to deal with the issues.

I spent 10 years working with the survivors of Indian residential schools. It is a slow process because of the nature of the very issues you're describing. You can't force people to leap ahead in the healing journey when they're not ready, when they're dealing with these kinds of issues.

It really is about helping the communities create the capacity for themselves. In the general policy context we call it place-based or asset-based policy-making, where you really are looking at the ability of the community to move forward. It is the sort of thing we hear oftentimes about seven generations and what not. We are dealing with issues that are going to take an awfully long time for people to work their way through.

You'll also find that it's going to vary across the communities. In my experience, Inuit communities are often much slower on the uptake, slower to get involved in some of these issues than are a lot of first nations communities in the south.

I would offer to the committee that you want to make sure you're not looking at just one singular solution or plan, because it isn't going to work. It has to be varied and reflect the needs and the capacities in the communities.

[The Chair, Conservative, Stella Ambler]

You have 15 seconds. I'm sorry.

[Shelly Glover, Conservative, Saint Boniface, MB]

Thanks.

No one will disagree, but having heard all of this, I hope the leadership of those communities will call us. We're offering a hand. Please take it. Get 650 of them phoning us to get help, because their women need it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Stella Ambler]

Thank you.

We go over to Ms. Crowder for five minutes.