Okay.
When recommendations come back that have to do with human rights, at least the treaty bodies are clear--Canada doesn't seem to be--that different levels of government may be responsible for the implementation of these rights.
For example, let's say we were genuinely going to implement recommendations that have been made to Canada about social assistance. The treaty bodies have already said it is inadequate and there should be national standards for social assistance across the country, so we don't have huge variations from one jurisdiction to another and we have some adequate standard for everyone. That requires cooperation between the federal government and the provincial and territorial governments to get standards in place that will be acceptable, to get implementation, and to get the right amount of money transferred from the federal government to the provinces and territories to do that. We need to have interaction between the federal, provincial, and territorial governments that's actually working on these issues.
Part of what's so frustrating is that we have a kind of breakdown in that relationship, so the provincial governments blame the federal government and the federal government says it's the jurisdiction of the provincial governments. It happens particularly when things have to do with aboriginal women and girls.
We can't seem to make our levels of government mesh adequately. Unfortunately, I think they're using that to say they can't do anything about these very basic human rights issues. So we've been saying that we need to have an implementation mechanism or accountability mechanism that can bring federal, provincial, and territorial governments together, not issue by issue, because that would break it up too much--to respond to you, Hedy--but with some sense that this is the meat that has come back from treaty bodies. These are the human rights flaws we have, failures, places where we're falling down. We need to have some genuine collaboration between our levels of government in order to deal with this.
Is the federation of the provinces, or whatever we call it these days.... There was a point at which I thought the social union framework agreement would give us that kind of mechanism. It has to be at such a high level that we're actually dealing with people who have the clout or the power to do something. We don't want this federal-provincial-territorial committee of officials responsible for human rights to have no power.