Thank you very much.
First of all, to all of you, thank you for coming today. You're major organizations in our city, so the work you do is really important.
I'm very tempted to continue the discussion on the funding side because I think we could spend hours on that, on the lack of advocacy funding and the lack of core support, but I also want to switch gears just so we get as many sorts of responses and issues into the record as possible.
But I did want to say that I really hear the sort of level of cynicism that there is, right? You know: another committee, another parliamentary hearing, and another report.... This goes on and on. I think that's partly our challenge. How do we deal with that? I mean, we're all people who want to see change, and yet we're dealing with this culture of denial. We're dealing with these huge systemic issues that just go on, and it's about how you tackle that. I just wanted to put that out there.
The question I have--because a number of you raised it--is about the relationship with law enforcement, because that is so important. It's not the only thing, but in every single group that I've ever talked with about violence against women, particularly aboriginal women, the police come up: how they respond, how they don't respond.... For sure, there are good individual officers out there. We've met them. There are individual people within those systems who are doing their very best. But there is a bigger issue about law enforcement, and we do have a couple of fairly senior RCMP officers speaking later, so we will have an opportunity to actually question them.
There's a question I have for you, though. You guys are very active in Vancouver. What kind of official relationship do you have with the police? Is there any sort of ongoing process whereby you can actually bring forward issues of an overall nature about how law enforcement is done to deal with this whole issue of women who are already victims being re-victimized, in effect, or being charged with whatever because they're poor, because they're sex workers, or whatever their situation?
Is there any relationship you have? Now, you're all in Vancouver, so I presume that mostly it would be with the Vancouver Police Department, and of course outside Vancouver it would be the RCMP, but it's just such an important element in what we're talking about, the relationship with law enforcement overall. I just wonder if (a) you have any experience, and (b) if you have any suggestions about what you want to see changed that we can focus on, pick up, put in the report, and make sure we follow up on.