Thank you very much.
That ends this round, but before we end, we have a couple of minutes left.
Without belabouring it, I want to remark on what my colleagues have said, which is that you are indeed a unique community, although I must say, in Nunavut we also found that same sense of uniqueness. I don't know if it's because you are territories, because you are smaller.... You're talking about colleagues you work with, Ms. Nelson, by their first names. In British Columbia you have a hierarchy in every bureaucracy, with a deputy minister and five ADMs and six directors general, and by the time you get down to the field worker, that hierarchical system is a difficult one to deal with. I think that may be the secret of your success. Let's do away with hierarchical systems right away.
That's important, and there are many best practices that we can learn from you and from Nunavut. When we were there, we heard that same thing.
I want to talk about a couple of things. Dona talked about couch surfing, and actually it's not a phenomenon up here. It's not because of the cold weather. Couch-surfing is a way for women to stay under the radar. It happens in Vancouver more than you would ever realize and in the cities; it keeps them under the radar. Children and family services don't know that they don't have a place to live. They stay under the radar and their children are not taken away from them.
I wanted to talk a little bit about that. Ms. Lacey said something very important that touched me deeply. She said, “I really tried. I tried. I was running around confused, and they still took my children.” At the heart of all this is the fragmentation of families, and children who are already traumatized by watching violence in the family, children who are already traumatized by one parent leaving the home, invariably the mother, and then to be wrested away from that mother is extraordinarily traumatic. You can see how, generation after generation...we know that 45% of children who live in abusive homes turn out to either become abusers or to have partnerships with abusers later on in life. So there is that intergenerational thing.
I need to ask this question, and it's a difficult question, Sheila. I'm not trying to say, you guys are nice because you don't have any options. I know that you seem to really get it and you seem to care. Ms. Lacey really moved me with her statement, “They still took my children.” In many places we went, one of the biggest fears of women reporting violence at all was that they have nowhere to go; there were no shelters for them, and in isolated communities they are just stuck. As you said, they don't have money for a plane ticket to get down to wherever there are shelters, and the shelters are limited--30 days in some areas, but six days is really terrible. So really people just stay where they are and they continue to live with the violence.
We've heard something really important, and I want to ask about this. Housing, of course, is extremely linked, but we've heard that another reason women will not leave the violent situation is that once they get out of the shelter they have such little money from social assistance with which to pay rent.... Nicole brought this up earlier. We heard in certain areas that the foster parent can get $2,500 a month to look after three kids and the mother of those three kids gets about $600 to do the same work. I'm not asking anybody to say what's wrong with that system; it's obvious what's wrong with that. But I would like to find out what we can do to change it. Everyone is aware of it, and surely there is a built-in bias. I understand that women who have been victims of violence quite often aren't good parents because they themselves have been so beaten down, but surely there's a way we can intervene to find a way to give these women.... If we can't find housing for them, at least we can pay for market housing for them, appropriately, if we can do it for a foster parent.
I'm specifically directing this to Sheila and Barbara first, and then I'd like to hear your opinion on it.
Sheila, what can we do to stop that real unfairness and total tragedy from occurring?