Status of Women Committee on June 11th, 2010

[Guy Duchesneau]

I would just like to make one clarification.

Ms. Brown, you talked earlier about skills among people with certification. People in our community are educated and skilled at their job. However, the salaries we are able to offer in our community are not the same as what is available outside. In spite of that, people want to work for their community and remain on staff. That is not necessarily what you seemed to have understood when you were saying that, in terms of certification, people are not recognized for their skills outside their communities and want to leave them. We do not want to leave. We want to stay in our communities, but we also want to be paid the same wages as people in neighbouring communities in Quebec.

For example, a social worker in our community is paid $50,000, whereas that same person would earn $69,000 under the provincial system. We do the same job, we have the same skills and the same certification. Furthermore, we have experience in the community. Because of the budgets allocated to the communities and distributed among all the different services, the communities are not able to offer more than that if they want to be in a position to provide a range of services to their people and ensure that those services are of high quality. That is what I want to clarify. It's not a question of certification. That may be the case in some communities, but our goal is not to go and work somewhere else. We want to earn the same salary as people elsewhere and continue to work in our community.

[The Acting Chair, Bloc, Nicole Demers]

Ms. Brown, I am going to let you ask a very brief question. We will soon have to wrap up the discussion, but I would also like to ask a question.

[Carol Hughes, NDP, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Madam Chair, I appreciated the comments, but I would like to point out that many of the answers were addressed to Ms. Brown.

There is one issue that is sure to interest our witnesses, it seems to me. It is causing a lot of controversy in the House right now: the Canadian Firearms Registry.

Would you agree to let the witnesses answer the question I asked earlier in that regard?

I would like to know whether they agree that the Canadian Firearms Registry should be maintained. I would also be interested in hearing their comments with respect to the registry.

[Renée Brassard]

With respect to the registry, I think it would be a little silly to say that controlling access to firearms and ammunitions… I think you would receive a better response if you talked to the police. They have raw data on cases involving violence or the use of firearms.

However, there is one thing I do want to say. Even if we got rid of all the guns, that would not put an end to the violence. Other means are also used. As I see it, it's a non-issue. Certainly, some women are killed with guns and the possibilities of that happening are higher in Aboriginal communities, since they use guns all the time for hunting.

At the same time, do you think that if we got rid of guns, there would be no more violence against Aboriginal women? Unfortunately, I don't think so.

[The Acting Chair, Bloc, Nicole Demers]

Thank you.

Mr. Savard, please.

[Stéphane Savard]

Yes, if it's not a gun, it will be something else. Suicides in the communities are not committed using guns. In every case, the victims hang themselves. And people don't hang themselves using ropes they have bought; they use anything that is at hand--

[The Acting Chair, Bloc, Nicole Demers]

Thank you very much.

My apologies, Ms. Archambault. Ms. Brown has the floor now.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Mr. Duchesneau, may I just go back to your comment?

My question came from Ms. Desnoyers' comments about skills that were being acquired in the prison setting. When an aboriginal man is incarcerated, assessments are done. Bear in mind that in my job before I went into political life, we did assessments of injured workers to help them find the best place to contribute. We did assessments to help them gain employment that was going to give them a reasonable income in order for them to provide for their families, and also for self-satisfaction and to build their skills levels in other areas. We did those assessments on a regular basis.

Hopefully, the skills that are being provided in the prison setting right now will help individuals--and not just aboriginal people--who have been incarcerated find employment when they return to their communities and will help them build their abilities and contribute to their communities. Not everybody is going into social work, so other skills are being acquired.

I guess I'm asking which skills are going to be valuable. We need to be providing them to our aboriginal people so they can find success when they leave the prison setting. My question was specific to that issue.

[Guy Duchesneau]

We are talking about skills, and it seems to me that people who have been in prison are already labelled. When they return to the community, employers do a check to assess their credibility and find out whether they have committed robbery, for example. There are inquiries made, so that employers know whether an applicant has committed a crime. Any applicant who has been involved in robberies will obviously be convinced that an employer will never hire him.

That's why people who have been in prison very often think that their only recourse is to continue to do what they were doing before, rather than try to develop skills. Despite that, they are labelled and they very often wear that label for the rest of their lives. We are only able to rescue a few of them. And here I am not talking only about Aboriginal communities; this is the case for everyone who lives in that environment. Some manage to escape, but most of them continue to suffer the consequences.

Before placing people in these environments, we should work with them and try to ascertain the skills they could acquire and some way for them to restore their dignity, or see how we could help them to live better in today's society while still respecting them for what they are. If we work with people on the ground, in their environment—with people who are part and parcel of their communities, in Quebec, Canada and elsewhere in the world—we will succeed.

In terms of child protection and family services, children are placed in foster homes, but we don't work with either the children or the family. When the children are returned to the family, no work has been done. What happens then? Well, the cycle starts all over again. Right now, we are trying to do the opposite. The Aboriginal communities have asked the government to consider their vision, so that it is possible to develop close relations with communities and families, and work directly with the parents to help them fulfill their responsibilities to their children. The goal is not for children to be placed in foster homes or, under the new regulations, that they be taken from their communities again and adopted by other societies.

So, there is a great deal of work to be done with respect to individual responsibility and dignity. We very often forget those things. It is easier to move people around and camp them in specific places than it is to work with them. It is easier to put people in institutions than to work directly with the communities to try and help them.

[The Acting Chair, Bloc, Nicole Demers]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Brassard.

[Renée Brassard]

I would like to come back to skills development and the penitentiaries. In Quebec at least, there are no programs. There is no attempt being made to develop inmates' skills in prison. There is no money. So, inmates serve their term and there is nothing else. It is kind of a parking lot for human beings.

At the federal level, if you are Aboriginal, they already know perfectly well where you are from—which community. They don't offer you any programs because they consider the risk to be too high. Therefore, prisons or penitentiaries, which should allow for certain skills to be developed, are discriminatory towards Aboriginals, because they have too many needs and represent too high a risk of recidivism. In Canada, there are obviously correctional programs offered to drug addicts. They deal with the use of substances. There are also anger management and sexual abuse management programs which are aimed at controlling sexual deviance among Aboriginals.

However, even if we work at developing skills at the individual level, these people return to their communities afterwards, where the unemployment rate is 90% and the rate of sexual violence and abuse of all kinds is as high as 80%. So, how can you expect time spent in a penitentiary to have any preponderant effect, in a living environment such as that?

[The Acting Chair, Bloc, Nicole Demers]

Unfortunately, Ms. Brassard, I am going to be the one to ask you the final question.

However, I would first like to thank our witnesses.

Ms. Denis-Damée, you worry about the contribution you can make, but your testimony was the most effective of all. It reflected the experience of a person who helped us to understand the realities of her community. I want to extend my deep thanks to you for having the courage to do that.

I would also like to express my sincere thanks to the other witnesses for telling us what is needed. You particularly focused on the need to work in cooperation and to set aside the paternalistic approach, which we have used for far too long.

I would like to ask a question which deals with my favourite topic. I now have a great deal of respect for the Aboriginal communities, but I did not have much before I actually got to know them. I was one of those people who believed that members of these communities don't pay taxes and spend all their time selling cigarettes. Before I got to know Ms. Gabriel, I did not know much about the Aboriginal communities. Fortunately for me, I got to know them. I was wondering whether we should be educating the non-Aboriginal communities about their culture and history. Perhaps that would allow us to get out of the straightjacket that has existed now for hundreds of years.

Ms. Archambault, I would like to know whether you are familiar with the Akaitcho First Nation in the Far North. It negotiated a special agreement with the Government of Canada with respect to its diamond mines. We passed a motion in Parliament on that several years ago. I wondered whether the results had been positive.

[Grand Chief Anne Archambault]

At the Viger Maliseet First Nation, we are currently trying to reach an agreement on a modern treaty. We relied on the 1760 treaty and the Supreme Court of Canada ruling in the Donald Marshall, Jr. case. My belief is that we have to give future generations an opportunity to succeed and create a future for themselves. In our case, we are already in it up to our teeth, as they say.

I also wanted to thank you for being so frank about your opinion of us previously. As far as we are concerned, that is one more person that we have won over. At the same time, it is important to say that this is an opinion that prevails even today.

[The Acting Chair, Bloc, Nicole Demers]

Thank you.

[Renée Brassard]

At university, I teach 400 students a year. And the first exercise I assign to them involves naming the Aboriginal nations in Quebec. Unfortunately, only about 10% of students are able to name some. So, I invite members of Aboriginal communities to class. We start from the bottom up to raise awareness.

Mr. Pomerleau asked us earlier how it is that these people remain invisible. The answer to that is that as far as their reality is concerned, there is still a great deal of work to be done in terms of educating and raising awareness among Quebeckers and Canadians. There is no need to go and visit favelas or the like abroad: we have our own favelas.

[The Acting Chair, Bloc, Nicole Demers]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Denis-Damée, please.

[Mélanie Denis-Damée]

I simply wanted to thank you for hearing me out. As far as I'm concerned, it was a real treat to be able to share my thoughts with you today.

[The Acting Chair, Bloc, Nicole Demers]

Thank you.

[Ann Desnoyers]

I would just like to add that organizations like the Quebec Provincial Police are increasingly calling on anthropologists to recount the cultural history of the First Nations. Mr. Serge Bouchard, in particular, has given a lot of lectures to police with respect to what the First Nations have experienced and the myths surrounding them. That is a great resource. We see an improvement in that area. I know that non-Aboriginals are very pleased to hear that, because their attitude will change. We have to get rid of our prejudices.

[The Acting Chair, Bloc, Nicole Demers]

Thank our very much for being here.

Mr. Duchesneau, please.

[Guy Duchesneau]

In closing, I would like to thank you for giving us this opportunity to express our views on this. Very often, non-Aboriginal Canadians talk about things like cigarettes and alcohol. But that concerns only a small number of Aboriginals, and they hide another system underneath. We have to be careful when accusing Aboriginal people.

[The Acting Chair, Bloc, Nicole Demers]

Thank you very much.

I need a motion to adjourn the meeting. Thank you.

The meeting is adjourned.