Status of Women Committee on Jan. 20th, 2011

[Dona Cadman, Conservative, Surrey North, BC]

All right. If you have this woman who has gone through it and is willing to go through an education program, would you help her? Is it your mandate to help her? Or is there another organization that would help her go through the steps and maybe help her with the money and help her with her children, if she has children?

[Sheila Nelson]

Well, she possibly could be eligible for a student loan--

[Dona Cadman, Conservative, Surrey North, BC]

Okay.

[Sheila Nelson]

--if that's what you're speaking about, but our organization does not.... We would be there to support her, but financially we would not be supporting that person through that process. There are other opportunities.

[Dona Cadman, Conservative, Surrey North, BC]

Do all the organizations up here work together, or are you individual...? Is it that you're here, Sandra is there, and Lyda and Lorraine are over there? Do you work together? Do you join together? Do you communicate?

Because working alone is harder than working together. You share your experiences and your education--just everything--and it's a stronger group, instead of working alone.... How does that work? Do you work alone?

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

We only have 30 seconds, and Ms. Lacey had her hand up.

Would you go ahead, Ms. Lacey?

[Barbara Lacey]

I know I'm the newcomer, but having adult services, mental health, and family counselling, I have to work with Lyda. I don't have a choice.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Barbara Lacey]

I have to work with Sheila. I don't have a choice.

If you're asking about what it is that we have to bottle, well, we need to have good relationships and work together, because we're it.

[Dona Cadman, Conservative, Surrey North, BC]

Okay.

[Barbara Lacey]

There aren't other options, so we have to get over ourselves, work with each other, and negotiate.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

I'll now go to Madame Demers again.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

The question my colleague Dona asked is very important. The day before yesterday, we met with a few young women and one man. He told us that aboriginal women were victims of the “buckskin ceiling”, rather than the glass ceiling. These women cannot get beyond that ceiling because most of the time they are condemned to work at lower levels even if they have degrees that would allow them to go further. It is very important to point that out and to try to determine why that is.

In my opinion, Lorraine, your organization can make great strides in solving that issue. You talked about shelters and first, second and third stage transition houses, where aboriginal women are taught various ways of taking themselves in hand in order to get out of this vicious cycle, homes where they can learn a trade or a profession.

Currently, there are shelters, or transition houses, but I presume that this is a first stage transition house. How long does that first stage last?

[Lorraine Phaneuf]

What we're really trying to do at this point is to stabilize the shelters, because if we don't have shelters, we have nothing. We don't have enough shelters.

I'll regress a bit. in order to offer training for aboriginal women and women of the territories we have just launched and finished a three-year project, which I actually presented to this committee maybe a year and a half ago, about how we work with marginalized women--that is, women who were in the shelter, women who were in a homeless shelter, women who were couch-surfing. They were brought into a three-year program to learn how to do non-traditional trades.

What has happened is we've had a funding lapse and this project has come somewhat to a standstill. When the government has given us the three years to work with marginalized women, those women are now in the system with us. We advocate for them. We have no staffing dollars, but we still have the women in the program and we lead them through. When they come with us they are surrounded with services. So if they need a place to stay or day care, or if there's any kind of barrier that would have prevented them from becoming successful, the project had dollars through HRSDC and INAC to follow through.

We have had some great successes. We have had women who were in the shelters. We have women who were couch-surfing who got jobs at DeBeers who are now in apprentice programs. The numbers may not have been huge, but in fact out of 30 women, five women are now in apprentice programs and are now working. Perhaps they're not working in trades, but one of them is a librarian in her community.

It's very important that if we are going to help people, we have to surround them with the necessities for them to be successful. If it's just little bits and pieces, when you go to the next place there's a big wall there preventing them.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Ms. Tucker.

[Sandra Tucker]

Pauktuutit is very pleased that we've also developed an Inuit women and business program. Through the gracious funding of INAC it looks like this year we're going to be able to continue that training, as well as the establishment of an Inuit women's business network. From our perspective, we are assisting Inuit women in gaining the skills they need to become entrepreneurs to start their own businesses to gain those skills.

The one thing I want to say is when you look at Inuit women as a whole you see a group of exceptional, strong, well-informed women. Our current government has a very good example of that in Leona. We have Nellie Cournoyer. We have Mary Simon. We have Elisapee Sheutiapik. We have exceptional leaders and very, very, wise and brilliant women. It's a bragging right for us that they are the examples of how you can become a leader in your community and facilitate change.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

I'll now go to Mr. Bevington again for five minutes.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Thanks, Chair.

Someone mentioned here that Yellowknife has one of the highest per capita incomes for families. But Yellowknife also has one of the highest per capita expenditures for families. Throughout the north the cost of living is a problem that simply exacerbates everything else. When you get to the smaller communities, where unemployment rates are very high and yet the cost of living is considerably higher than here in Yellowknife, the impact of that on family relations has to be very severe.

Of the base causes of family violence, in many cases we would see that in the south a lot of them would be economics. Does economics play the same role here in the north in terms of causes of family violence? Do you see that as one of the prime movers?

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Lyda.

[Lyda Fuller]

I'm struggling with how to answer that.

For me, the prime mover around the violence here is the colonization that happened and the oppression and trauma that have impacted whole communities.

On top of that, other stressors that are in place certainly keep the pot stirred around things. And poverty has a huge impact on families. It's hard work to be poor. It's hard work to try to meet your ongoing needs. So it definitely has an impact.

Once again, for me, it's housing, housing, housing, as the key driver. We see so many situations with overcrowding. That leads to stress and things fall out of that--arguments. We have lots of requests, as a shelter, for women to come from Nunavut and from small communities here in the territory because they want to relocate to Yellowknife where there are more services and more housing, although certainly not enough housing. You see that migration. You see the pressure. You see agencies and women themselves saying, “We feel like we have no options.”

For me, the big driver is that huge cultural disruption that happened over a long period of time, and that still has an impact, and the housing situation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Ms. Lacey.

[Barbara Lacey]

And addictions. Absolutely, what Lyda is saying.... Part of coping with the trauma is addiction. There are both males and females in that population, of course, but if you look at who's on the street, you will see a lot of male aboriginals with addictions issues. We're looking at the integration of mental health and addictions services, which is being looked at across the country, but we're not there yet in Yellowknife, as far as being able to address the addictions issues in the way we need to.

Addictions and family violence certainly are connected.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have three-quarters of a minute.

[Sandra Tucker]

Really quickly, we also see the clash of the traditional ways of living and the modern ways of living, especially with the younger population. The older people are still looking at the community as a whole: everybody shares the wealth, everybody shares the resources. We have a younger population that, like every young person, is very materialistic, which leads in a lot of cases to elder abuse, draining grandma and grandpa's cheques right at the beginning and using the threat, “I will commit suicide if you don't.” With the rates of suicide, nobody wants that hanging over their head. So there is a clash of traditional versus modern.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

We have the time to go into a three-minute round, a very tight round. If someone has already said something that you wanted to say, you can add something new and that will be fine. But I want to hold this tightly so that we can get it done.

I will go to Ms. Neville again.