Status of Women Committee on Jan. 12th, 2011

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

We'll now hear from Madam Demers from the Bloc Québécois.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much, ladies, for meeting with us. Your being here this afternoon is very important to us.

I will continue along the same lines as my colleague Ms. Anita Neville. The question she asked you is of great importance.

This morning, witnesses told us about the prevalent racism against first nations women living here, in Prince Albert. Unfortunately, this kind of violence is more systemic than simple family violence or other forms of violence seen elsewhere.

We were told about violence perpetuated by social services, police services and food banks, all of which treat aboriginal women harshly. We must discuss this. If this is true, we must find the source of the problem. This is not normal. I am sure that the issue is not due to bad faith, but there must be a reason for it.

I see there is someone from the law enforcement community present here. I would have liked to see this person testify today, so that police services could be represented. I am wondering why this is not the case, given the seriousness of this situation. We are talking about violence against first nations women, and I believe that the law enforcement community is also part of the solution. In other towns, members of police services testified.

I would like you to answer me and to continue answering Ms. Neville's question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Who wants to start?

Wanda, your mike is on. Does that mean you want to start?

[Wanda Daigneault]

Yes.

I would like to add to what you just said. I had a niece come here to a women's shelter. She came here because she was being abused, but then she came back home. She was crying. She said, “Auntie, guess what?” I asked, “What, my girl? What happened?” She said, “You know, Auntie, I went to Prince Albert. I went to a women's shelter to stop being abused.” She'd brought her little girls with her. She broke down in tears. I asked, “What's wrong, my girl?” She said to me, “Auntie, I went to Prince Albert to stop being abused, and at that women's shelter where we went, I got abused. I got called down. My kids got called down”, is what she said. Then I told her, “Well, we'll work it out. We'll talk.”

So I could just feel what you said about the two police officers sitting at the back of the room here. I come from a northern community, Ile-a-la-Crosse. There's not much police help. When you call a police officer in the middle of the night, when your spouse is abusing you or whatever, they don't come right away. You know, we had a youth stabbed to death in Ile-a-la-Crosse. He died there. It took police officers one hour to come there.

So I understand where you're coming from in terms of what they're saying.

That's it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Nicole, would you like to have somebody else answer? Lisa looks like she's interested.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Oui.

[Lisa Goulet-Cook]

Yes, I can answer.

She's asked why we don't get those services. I can attest to what Wanda is saying. I'm originally from Cumberland House, and I still see a lot of our people come here into the city and not get those services only because we don't have enough of our own people serving our own people. When you go in for social services, they're not very welcoming. They're not very nice to you. They don't really want to help you.

A lot of our women, when they leave, will leave, yes, with their children, but they will also leave behind financial stability. When our women leave, they leave with their identity and that's about it. They leave everything else behind, including a stable home. Even though it's violent, even though it's dysfunctional at a certain level, it's still their home. It's still their bed. It's still everything they own. It's still their clothing and their personal effects.

A lot of our women leave without anything. I've known women to be kicked out of their homes with literally only their underwear on. They've been beaten up and thrown out into the snow like that. That's the harsh reality for our women. Whether we're in northern Saskatchewan or in the city, that's the harsh reality.

Do we ever realistically get a helping hand from the police services? A lot of the women I've spoken to have been treated very harshly. They haven't been treated with the same respect as our non-aboriginal counterparts. That's just the reality of the situation. You can ask women time and time again. You can ask children time and time again.

When women do leave, they enter into that realm of child and family services. I worked in that realm for quite some time. I don't work there now. I don't believe it's a system that's made to pull families together. I think it's there, realistically, to pull families apart in order for social workers to have a stable job. That's what I really, truly believe.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Lisa.

Nicole, I'm sorry; we'll come back to you.

Ms. McLeod, from the Conservatives.

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to also thank all the witnesses. It is certainly a cold day but with a very warm welcome, so thank you. I appreciate the frankness that everyone brings to the table.

I come from British Columbia, which has a horrific history with this issue. What our committee is doing is going across Canada and really trying to determine not only root causes, but where we can go. Unfortunately, we can't change history, but where can we go that will be effective in the future?

Let's say there's no budget restriction, there are no jurisdictional issues. If you were looking at your community--and perhaps I'll leave time for each person to tackle this one--what would you do in terms of prevention? Where would you go with that issue if you had no constraints around money and jurisdiction? Also, the second part of that would be where would you go in terms of supporting current victims? I'll leave that open.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

We'll start with Angie.

[Angie Bear]

That is a really good point to bring up. That's one of the things, when I'm working in my programs, I'm looking at for dollars for programs so that I can develop some of the programs.

Some of the things I can see that would really help families, the kinds of programs.... When I was at the grand council I developed a program called “Honouring our Traditions: Shaping Healthy Behaviours”. It was an anger management program that was to be developed in Prince Albert. It went through the UAS committee and then was to be delivered out into our communities. Hopefully that initiative will continue, because that is where I believe that capacity needs to be. We need to give the education to the people so that they can deliver it to their own people. We need to provide them with services and education and programs so that they can continue to deliver those programs.

Part of what that anger management program would do in our first nations communities is it wouldn't just deal with anger management. It would deal with.... You are holding onto all this anger, but where is it coming from? Is it coming from...? And we'll go back into colonization. We'll talk about tools for how to deal with anger management. We'll talk about family violence. We'll talk about traditional lifestyles. There is so much that was put into the program. It was nine full days long, and I'm hoping that continues.

If I saw an opportunity where we could deliver programs to people and address those issues, that's where it would come from. It would come from programs coming from our grassroots people and it would be deliverable to our community so that it would be like the trainer type program so that people can take that program and run with it. If they are from a Dene community they can put a Dene cultural component to it, and it still sticks with the program so that they can kind of tailor it to their needs as long as they have the basic tools.

That is where I would really like to see a lot of funding and initiative go toward, to develop something really powerful like that. Part of being in a family violence situation is women have no self-esteem. If we can empower these women and give them some tools so that they can understand where they have come from, what has happened to them, and where they want to go, give them some tools on some child programs so that they can do some parenting, so that they know themselves and can feel empowered that way, that's the way to go. That's what I would like to see.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

Does anybody want to add to that? We have three minutes left, so if you wanted to be very quick about what you're doing, everybody could get a chance.

Lisa, do you feel you want to add something?

[Lisa A. Goulet-Cook]

I want to add something.

I do agree with that statement that we should be adding a traditional component onto teaching our current families, especially the women and children, but I'd also like to see a traditional family one. I mean that help should be brought to the perpetrators as well. They need help as much as the women and the children do. Without helping all facets of the family, all members of the family, how are we going to truly say that we've helped them to heal from their past?

And not only that, but having traditional programming in with very contemporary counselling practices as well and getting to the root causes of those issues is really important in order for a family to really heal, and getting them educated enough to not only improve their life skills but to improve their educational levels as well. That's really important in order for them to start taking further steps toward independence.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

Wanda, do you have anything to add?

[Wanda Daigneault]

Since we're focusing on women and children being educated about violence, why not men? That's what I'd like to ask. Why not men?

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Shirley.

[Shirley Henderson]

I agree with what the lady said. I think the main focus has to be that we have to heal the whole family. Everybody needs counselling--the husband, the wife, and also the children--because in a domestic violence situation everybody suffers. The man suffers. He feels guilt after the incident occurs. After the honeymoon stage has come, he's sorry for what he did. He's sorry to the wife. He's sorry to the child. Everybody's involved. So I think we need to focus more programming on healing the whole family.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

We have 30 seconds left. Eva, do you have anything? You haven't spoken. Do you want to add something or are you in agreement?

[Eva McCallum]

No.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Okay.

Cathy, you have 30 seconds. What do you want to do with it?

[Cathy McLeod, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

I'll leave it for my next round.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

All right. Thank you.

Now we're going to go to the second round....

Oh, sorry, Irene. We have Irene Mathyssen from the NDP.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Clearly I've been far too quiet, and I will remedy that.

I want to say thank you to all of you for being so candid. We're hearing some very difficult things. People have been very forthright in terms of speaking to us, and I appreciate that very much. So thank you for that honesty and clarity.

At the end of the Sisters in Spirit campaign, or when NWAC came to their conclusions, they said that in the course of the work they did across the country, they came across some real ways to resolve a good many of the issues that face first nations women and their children. It seems to me that's what you're talking about here today.

I want to touch on some specifics in terms of what you've said. The first one is the issue of child apprehensions. In my community, which is largely an urban first nations community, we hear over and over again how profoundly destructive that is. For a very brief time the province provided some funding, a small modicum of funding, to the local community to address that so that first nations families could take in kids who needed help and support, so that they had that balance, that cultural support. I'm not sure where that program is. I think the funding has fallen off.

Is that a solution? I'm assuming that here the province is responsible for child welfare and that there needs to be some discussion with the province in terms of a way for first nations to nurture your own children. Do you see that happening, and how could that happen? Is there a possibility of that being something you could take to the provincial government and get action on?

[Lisa Goulet-Cook]

Thank you for that question, Irene.

I've worked as a social worker both in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. When I was working in Manitoba I saw a system that was much more sensitive to the needs of first nations individuals, Métis individuals, and non-aboriginal counterparts. There were four authorities at that time made to be sensitive to all four, because they had a first nations north and a first nations south.

With the diversity in Manitoba, in the first nations northern authority many communities are fly-in or train-in only; they don't have any roads going up there. Those authorities were more sensitive on how we dealt with first nations children. If you were a Cree person wanting to adopt, let's say, a Dene child, you could not do that. A Dene child had to be adopted by a Dene family, and so on and so forth.

Here in Saskatchewan it's a little bit different. A lot of the first nations have their own childhood family agency, but still there are a lot of non-aboriginal caregivers. Basically, you're tearing a family apart during the apprehension stage, and placing them outside the community in a non-first-nations home or putting them in a group home that is run by non-aboriginal people. Basically, you're separating the family, and we workers didn't really have much of a choice in saying we're going to tear your family apart and put you back in the 1960s again and show you an entirely different educational system away from your family and an entirely different family system away from your family. It is not constructive.

Actually the Saskatchewan government is going through harsh criticism because of it at this point in time. It's in the news. It's in our newspapers. Everybody knows that this system we have here in Saskatchewan is not good right now. It is so harsh to take a child away from their family. I know that because I was adopted. Right now, I don't speak to my biological parents only because there was a system there that tore me away from my family. I was very fortunate to grow up in the same community, but it still tore me away from my family. Children are going through this over and over and over again, which is what's happening here in this city. When we see our moms going through violence or something that's happening in the home where the children have to be apprehended, it's one of the worst things to place a child in a different home setting. They don't know anybody. There are no familiar faces. There's nothing familiar about that home. It is one of the worst things to hear a child cry or hold onto your pants because they don't want to stay there. That is one of the worst, most gut-wrenching, heartbreaking things you'll ever hear.

To say that we need more aboriginal people in the workplace, yes, we do. Yet when we apply for those jobs the door is always slammed in our faces.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

We've got about 30 seconds left, Irene.