Status of Women Committee on Jan. 14th, 2011

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Irene Mathyssen]

Well, perhaps one of the other committee members can ask that.

Madam Simson, perhaps in your five minutes.

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Well, it isn't a question. It's a request.

Please continue.

[Chief Lorraine Crane]

Thank you.

I'll give you an example of what we face in our communities. For the Christmas holidays, we are supposed to have 24/7 coverage. Our officer left without notice. I had two domestic incidents and I was just beside myself. I didn't know what to do. I had to call the head office in Kenora. That's the best I can do to get help, and they're two and a half hours if you go by road. It's domestic violence I'm talking about, and that's a problem we have with NAPS. They tell us we have 24/7 coverage, but many times we're caught and there's no officer.

I just wanted to add that. Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Irene Mathyssen]

That's an important addition. Thank you.

Mrs. Simson, please.

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

In the course of our travels, we've heard testimony from other witnesses. You touched on it, Marlene, with respect to these women who are victimized and living in extreme poverty.

Also, we're still hearing stories about the children being taken from their homes. Do you see this as a rather bizarre mutation of the residential school system, so that in about 25 or 30 years the government of the day will be issuing yet another apology, and that if we somehow don't change the way we look at and fund this, we're just not getting anywhere? Would that be fair? Would anyone like to comment?

[Dawn Harvard]

In fact, when you read our full presentation, you will see that the comments have been out there on that. The statistics show there are more children now in the care of children's aid than were ever in the residential schools, so absolutely, an apology will have to be issued 20 or 30 years from now. This is one of the reasons why aboriginal women are concerned about full-day kindergarten in Ontario: it's often in contact with the school system--because their children are showing up without proper coats, without lunch--that they're being identified to children's aid.

It's not that the mothers are walking around at home eating filet mignon and wearing fur coats. When your family doesn't have enough food for two weeks out of the month, you can't send your child with a lunch. If the solution is to come in and tear that family apart and rip those children away because the mother doesn't have the money for lunch, it's a completely backwards thought process.

Not only is it further victimizing the women, but it's violence against those children. We will all be held accountable for that in 30 years when they are further populating the prison systems because of that injustice, and because of having their families torn apart that way at such a young age, for no reason other than the fact their families couldn't afford to provide a decent meal for them to take for lunch.

[Michelle Simson, Liberal, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

So for governments, if we don't break our own stupid cycle, we have no hope of breaking the cycle of what the first nations and aboriginal women have been going through. Would that be fair to say?

[Marlene Pierre]

I want to come at your question from a different angle.

Having thought that Indian self-government was going to resolve all our problems, I still hear out in the communities that they're scared to even entertain the idea that we can really govern ourselves. Consequently, organizations such as Dilico still have their clutches on our children, because our leadership, those 14 chiefs, maybe not all of them, won't entertain the idea that, for instance, we were the ones who said we could get rid of a lot of problems if we transferred responsibility and jurisdiction of child care to right within our community.

Why do we need a big structure that requires so much money just to keep the structure going? Rather, we should get that money into the communities, so that the four of us in here could come up with the idea of how we want to take care of our children.

What about custom adoption? What about all those things that we know how to do from our own people, from our own way of life from before? We didn't have all you people here to take care of us or our children. We took care of ourselves, and we had a way to do it. Why can't we do that again? If you get four or five women sitting around talking about that, you're going to get something going in the community, and that's what I think our vision is as an organization. We want to take all that responsibility from them and give it to ourselves. Within a framework of self-government, we should be able to do it, shouldn't we?

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Irene Mathyssen]

Thank you. I did give you some extra time.

We'll now go to Mr. Rickford for five minutes.

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I use a stopwatch, not because I don't trust your timing. I use it to guide the flow of my own questions and answers. So I apologize if it seems as though I cut you off.

I have a particular interest following on my questions earlier, and I'm going to ask a few of you questions along those lines. I made reference to the Sisters in Spirit recommendation flowing from two literature sources. One in particular was what your stories tell us, and there was a two-stream approach recommended there, a proactive or preventive stream that would increase safety and decrease vulnerability, and the second was the needs of the families and communities. I'm going to try to get to the needs of families and communities. Specifically, I'll speak to Ron perhaps about his work in corrections, for some recommendations with the perpetrators of this.

I'm going to go to you, Christine, and I'll try to get to Dawn as well. Unfortunately today we didn't hear from Sunset Women's Aboriginal Circle in Sioux Lookout, which is running a project right now to empower aboriginal women through economic and social development. My friend Millie in Dryden runs a great program. I did an announcement there not too long ago. The program is looking at the participation of Métis women in governance, and I spoke a little earlier about this at the committee meeting in Sioux Lookout.

I'm going to go to you and then to Dawn to talk about specific projects and programs--and perhaps the need for benchmarks, if they already exist--that deal with social, economic, and particularly governance-empowerment processes.

I'll stop there. We have three minutes and 12 seconds.

[Christine Simard]

The NAN women's council undertook a major NAN women's development project. We went to the communities. We did personal capacity workshops and leadership development. Personal capacity workshops were about empowering women, building self-esteem, getting women confident and upright, to know what their rights are and to talk about violence, talk about residential schools, start developing leadership, so that they're able to go out and run for chief and council or apply for jobs in the band office, and that sort of thing.

Our funding came to an end. We're in the evaluation process, but there are so many different recommendations that came out from that project, because it's a pilot project. Government is famous for funding pilot projects, but the recommendations afterwards don't get followed up on.

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Could you make sure that the committee gets a copy of those recommendations? Thank you.

[Christine Simard]

I will, for sure.

Yes, our development project, that was really important.

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

What are some weaknesses and barriers? Very briefly, please.

[Christine Simard]

The remoteness and the high cost of travel.

I don't speak Oji-Cree or Cree. I had some of my facilitators who did speak Cree. They helped us out. The language is a big issue. When it comes down to legislation like matrimonial real property, a lot of the women in the community, the elders, have no clue what's coming down the line. And language, remoteness, and the housing factor--

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

We appreciate that.

For my purposes, and it's been raised before, regarding governance, social and economic, I'll go to you, Dawn, and hear from you, with a national organization.

[Dawn Harvard]

With regard to governance?

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Yes, those exercises, the need for benchmarks, do they exist, and what are the barriers that you see there?

[Dawn Harvard]

Certainly within the Native Women's Association of Canada I would have to allow you to go and I would not dare usurp the speaker's position over there. But certainly here in Ontario, one of the biggest barriers, as Christine has mentioned, is language, remoteness, and bringing our women who very often can't afford a taxicab or bus fare to get to your workshop. Especially in unique gender situations, let's look at child care. That's something that I know all of these women always have to look at when you're looking at aboriginal women's programming. They can't come forward to access services, to access treatment, and to access any of the programs you're offering if they're worried about who's taking care of their children while they're trying to do this, so often they don't.

[Greg Rickford, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

We heard earlier today, Dawn, about early childhood development as one of the approaches from one of the witnesses, the Equay-wuk Women's Group, out of Sioux Lookout. I'm cognizant of that.

Just very briefly, what are some real strengths about these governance exercises, some positive strengths?

[Dawn Harvard]

Some of the real strengths, absolutely. We are working to reach women at the community level. Often people are not seeing them as women who are looking at governance or looking at what we see as higher-level issues, but it's those women at the community level who need to be reached, who need to have the information, so that they can understand and have meaningful.... We talk about informed consent. If we talk about consultation, we should have informed consultation, because if you can't understand what people are coming forward and talking to you about, how do you provide meaningful input? There are a lot of well-educated people with degrees who can't foresee impacts or understand effect, so how is that possible without real education?

That's one of the things that groups like all of the women around this table here have been working on, which is to make sure that our women are coming forward, that they have the understanding or at least a basic idea of what they're going to be asked to talk about, so that they're not being used to support something that may not be in their best interests through a lack of understanding. That's what's fundamentally important about empowerment. It is having the knowledge to act in your own best interest.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Irene Mathyssen]

Thank you.

Madame Demers, for five minutes.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

A little earlier, you talked about children who are taken out of school or from their family because they don't have a lunch. I would like to know if social services lacks some vision or if it's simply racism. Is it because of ignorance, a lack of knowledge or a lack of education?

I find it very unusual that children are being taken from their family because they don't have enough to eat. I have difficulty understanding that. These kinds of situations exist elsewhere, mainly in cities, but campaigns are organized to collect food so that children can eat at school. Religious organizations make sure that children have breakfast and lunch at school. Children aren't taken from their family; instead, they're given something to eat.

I don't understand. Can you explain this to me?

[Dawn Harvard]

I think it is all three things that you've said. It absolutely is ignorance, a lack of understanding of the situation that many of our native women are in--the extreme poverty they're facing, the barriers they face in getting education and getting access to a real means of providing for their families.

Absolutely it's racism. When a social worker looks at a native child in a classroom who doesn't have lunch, the automatic thought is that this is neglect, not that this is a family in crisis.

It also is the perspective that we have child welfare to protect children from their parents, and we have Status of Women over here to improve the circumstances of women. We're not looking at things as a holistic perspective, as a whole unit.

The best interest of the child is to support the family they're in, not to pluck them out and put them in a group home or in temporary foster care. It's to support that family to do what they can to support, because they're going to be the best advocates, the best support, for that child.

There's this automatic perception that it's neglect rather than a family in crisis. Rather than looking at how we support the family, we tear the family apart to save the child. It's completely backwards thinking. We pull families apart when what we need is what a lot of our communities have talked about, a wraparound approach, whether it be treatment for the mothers, if they need treatment, but also moving that family into a place of safety and food security as a whole family unit, not as fragmented members who are put in different places in the hope that they'll have a better outcome.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Can someone tell me why there is no communication between social services, police services and organizations that work with aboriginal communities to provide education and understanding about the situation? I don't understand.