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?