I'll make it short. One is that I think there needs to be funding for family support services, because addressing violence is not all about shelters and not all about the court.
The other one is that down south the bands have band reps to represent children in court, because they're band members and they have a stake in what happens. In the north, that doesn't exist. There is no representative who goes to court to say, “We have a stake in what happens”.
The other thing that I think we need is federally established standards--that has been lost over the years--along with a gender analysis. I think it's critical that funding is available for aboriginal and Inuit women to have a voice, because it is often silence by collaborations. Collaborations are great unless you have to toe the party line. You guys know better than anyone else how disempowering that can be—not always, but it can be.
There were only two other things that I had thought about. One was having equalized financial support. In Yellowknife, for example, parents who have to feed their children get $4.50 a day to feed them. Foster parents get $25 a day—that's minimum—and I think inmates get more than parents are getting to feed their children. So we need a real federal effort around equalizing or some rationale around why children, who are the most important, would get different benefits depending on where they're sitting.
The final thing that I think would make a massive difference is to make sure that we have trauma-informed programs that are culturally relevant. From my perspective of working in the north for 30 years, we have a population that has been convinced there is no problem systemically. They've been convinced that they're drunks who just sort of can't manage. I remember that years ago the only treatment available to them was addiction treatment, because it was all about drunks. And that's not what I see. I think culturally relevant and trauma-informed programs that acknowledge the colonization that took place, and the ongoing oppression, would change the world in aboriginal and Inuit communities.
Thank you.