Thank you.
First of all, thank you to the witnesses for coming today. It's been a really intense day, and I'm glad we've heard everybody. I wish we could hear more people.
Kelly was just giving me a little bit of information, which I'll bring forward, but I'm trying to think about some of the common themes that are coming forward here from all of the witnesses we've heard today. I think there are issues that come forward. Unfortunately, they're things we're very familiar with and we hear over and over again: poverty, racism, discrimination, inequality, brutality, violence--the systemic issues that continue. But one thing that does strike me is what doesn't change, which is that there isn't any trust built up. I think between the institutions in power and the people who are trying to change what's happening, there's no real relationship in terms of a sense that we're working together, that things will change. I think that's a real issue. To me, that comes back to the issue of accountability.
So whatever brilliant report we come up with, as so many other reports that were there before us—and I've been on parliamentary committees where we had very good reports and we had very good recommendations—I think the challenge is how we actually take those recommendations and move them into action and actually make progress. That's what we have to grapple with, how we actually make that progress.
So I'd really like to put that forward and ask you what suggestions you have that we can build into the report. The idea is that there should be progress reports. There should be benchmarks. There should be targets and measurements. There should be ways to ensure that the accountability happens, whether it's with the police, the legislators, the social worker, or whatever it is.
Kelly, who I was just speaking with, pointed out to me that even just this last summer, in Crab Park, which those of us in Vancouver are very familiar with--it's a small green space on the waterfront that took a long time to get as sort of a public green space. There was a very important ceremony this past August at which a number of players came together, including the RCMP, including people from city hall, including the Vancouver Police Department, and there was an agreement on one little thing, and that was to provide financial support to families for the cost of memorials and funerals and for repatriation, but nothing happened.
Kelly tells me a number of meetings with the police or whoever took place even just for that one thing, to have some money so that the families could at least, with dignity and honour and respect, bury or have memorials for their missing family members and their murdered family members, but even that hasn't happened. So to me it is about a very basic level of trust and about what follow-through there is or there isn't.
So I'd appreciate any comments you have about what we need to do to ensure that in our report, in terms of accountability and making sure that things don't just get lost.... Having it be just another report that gets lost again and gets put on the shelf, and that's the end of that...[Technical difficulty--Editor]...set of recommendations. That's what I think we want to avoid.