Thank you.
First of all, thank you very much for coming today. I know it's hard to have a discussion and answer these huge questions when you have seven minutes or ten minutes, but hopefully we can have some discussion.
Based on what you've said, I wanted to get at the idea that the lack of information is an issue. I know that when Hedy and I were on another committee looking at the issue of the sex trade as it pertained to adults and not children, it was very difficult for us to even get information about what was going on in terms of the sex trade, who was being arrested for what, what violence there was, and how that was being reported. So I do think that's an issue, and I do agree that better information-gathering systems are really important.
I think what's underlying this--and Madam Demers asked this big question--is that we're in this culture of denial. When I think about a culture of denial, it is not so much from a community point of view, because I do think there is a lot of information out there. The cases you've spoken about were very explosive cases that hit the media for days if not weeks, but then they disappeared. So the culture of denial is more among police or different ministries or governments themselves.
I know back in 1999 when I first started raising the missing women issue in Ottawa, I met with the Minister of Justice, who is a very decent guy, and he actually didn't know about the missing women, the biggest case in Canada. So that's in response to your question about why it didn't hit back east or somewhere.
I do think this issue of denial is a huge part of what we're dealing with here. I just wonder, to throw that out there, how we deal with that. How do we get past these individual situations, whether we're talking about the Pickton trial...and then everything just goes back to what it was? To me it's very much about this being a systemic issue and trying to focus attention on that.
I just want to give you some opportunity to respond to the idea of how we draw attention to these systemic issues so we can get out of this culture of denial.