Okay. I haven't made any notes, but I do have five key issues. Sarah may step in and help me if I bungle this.
The first thing I would like to see is affordable housing. The current situation for a woman coming to Transition House, especially when they have to leave their community and come to an urban area--most of the women live in rural communities--is that they have to go back to their same situation, to their same community, because there's no affordable housing for them. The only aboriginal housing unit we have here in Fredericton is Skigin-Elnoog, where there is never enough space.
That leads into why we need second-stage housing here in the area. We are putting our women who want to get out of the situation they're in, who want help, back into a unit where there's no one who's able to work with them and continue to work with them. We find that when we put our women in with non-native second-stage, it doesn't work. They are not fitting in, because people don't understand the life of a first nation woman living on-reserve. We definitely need to look into affordable housing and a second-stage unit for New Brunswick.
This leads me to having our own outreach worker. I'm not sure if you're aware, but the Province of New Brunswick, in the past year and a half, out of their blueprint, has hired outreach workers who are all non-native. They do not work with aboriginal women. I think if we could have a partnership with both the federal and provincial governments and the chiefs and council on where changes need to be made, maybe there could be a cost-share for our own aboriginal outreach worker in each of the 15 first nations here in New Brunswick. They should not rely on Transition House staff to be the ones who are instrumental in helping women cope. I think if we had our own outreach worker who understood aboriginal issues, perhaps part of the health and wellness centre on first nations, or child and family--just someone who was trained and able to help us do the family violence prevention work--that might help us with the teen dating violence that's happening, with the aboriginal women who are going missing. Right now they do not have anybody working, and they rely on us to do it. I think New Brunswick is too rural to have one person in charge of that.
This brings me to partnerships. I think our biggest problem here in New Brunswick is the jurisdiction issue. Everybody always says that's the feds, or that's the province, or that's your chief and council. I think it's time--we're in 2010--to sit down at the table and work at these issues. We shouldn't lay blame on which government officials are responsible. I think we should have partnerships that are woman-centred, because that's where we need the help; we're ultimately helping the woman in aboriginal family violence situations. It shouldn't be the responsibility of the feds or the province or the chiefs and council: it should be woman-centred, it should be focused on her, and we should all sit down and work together, not in silos.
That is why it's important that you look at our Strategic Framework to End Violence against Wabanaki Women in New Brunswick document. Some of the people sitting in this room sit at that committee, which I co-chair with the province. It's the first step in a process to address violence against Wabanaki women in New Brunswick. There are 49 recommendations spanning various areas to address violence against Wabanaki women.
The Advisory Committee on Violence Against Aboriginal Women identified three areas for action--capacity building, prevention and education, and service delivery. Right now at the table we do have the province; we do have community members sitting there from across New Brunswick; we do have chiefs who are for this, who are going to stand behind us; but we're missing the federal government. I think it's time we come together as a unit to help our women, because it is time. There should not be jurisdictional issues. We have to think about the women, because that's why we're all here. And that's why our statistics are so high--because we're all working against one another instead of with one another.
Thank you very much.