Thank you.
I believe one of the areas I would certainly look at is developing community capacity. I believe that any community, whether it's a very remote and isolated community or a major urban centre such as Calgary, should be resourced and equipped, staffed, and financially resourced to build the community from ground zero, so that aboriginal families learn the skills to.... I should go back and say that most families have those skills. But how do we support families and communities, including our elected officials, to work together to begin to talk about the issue of family violence?
Family violence in our aboriginal communities continues to be a very painful subject. Many of our leaders are not talking about the issue, and we need ambassadors from our leadership to talk about family violence and to build communities that are adequately resourced.
We receive families from many remote and isolated communities from across the province, from Saskatchewan and across the country. Taking these families from their cultural community and bringing them into a jungle like Calgary is very traumatic and difficult for them.
Another thing I would recommend very quickly is that the three levels of government--the federal government, the provincial government, as well as the municipal government--need to talk to each other to support these initiatives and strategies that are happening, because we need to move away from the jurisdictional issues and be able to challenge that as well, to say that our women are dying--they're dying on the streets, they're dying wherever they are--and we need to take some action around it.