Status of Women Committee on Jan. 21st, 2011

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

Suzanne.

[Suzanne Dzus]

A program to engage our men.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

Yes, it seems to be something that we did not discuss very much today, the men's role in all this, because they play a big part too.

[Suzanne Dzus]

Seventy-eight percent of violence committed against aboriginal women is by men, male perpetration.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

Right, exactly, and we should be dealing with that.

[Suzanne Dzus]

Just engage them.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

Yes. Thank you.

Mike.

[S/Sgt Mike Bartkus]

If anything, I would like to see that we continue on along the path we've started in relation to a national missing persons program. There are regional initiatives in the west, with Project KARE, and the OPP Project Resolve. I'm sure you've heard about different ones as you've travelled around, but with the national missing persons database and the national website that's going to be created, there could be a missing person's component in each province that feeds into this national database. Then we can look at things like education, consistent policy procedures, and amendments to legislation to allow us to be able to share information when there's no criminal offence, for example, for a missing person. Those types of things will allow us increasing success and lower risks for missing persons.

On the homicide side of the house or the opportunity to...I know there are ongoing talks in relation to the lawful access....

You're cutting me off. I apologize. We can talk after.

Thank you.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

I'm sorry. That's all right. We will talk, yes.

April, what would you...?

[April Wiberg]

Thank you.

We definitely need a national aboriginal victims service to be a mandate, and also a national public service announcement to educate and raise awareness of the dangers out there experienced by aboriginal women and children. That could also be a message to the perpetrators that we're not going to continue to tolerate these types of crimes.

I am truly honoured to be here today. I keep hearing from a lot of people from my community. The elders have been saying for years that we all need to work together, and I think they meant it's not just in our aboriginal communities; it's for everybody, every citizen of Canada to start working together. The fact that we're all here today means this can actually happen. All of you hold the power to possibly stop another daughter, mother, or whoever from being murdered or going missing.

Thank you.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

Thank you, April.

Gloria.

[Gloria Neapetung]

It's pretty much what April said. As I said, it's pretty traumatizing when someone's daughter goes missing or someone's son goes missing. Yes, there are men who go out there and work on the street and they do go missing or get murdered. They're not acknowledged a lot more than women are.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

Thank you.

That brings us to the close of this panel. I would like to thank everybody for appearing. You've given us some heavy, heavy things to think about, and there's a lot here. I thank you.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

If we can have everyone seated, we'll start.

In this session we have Sandra Lambertus and Jennifer Koshan. From the Institute for the Advancement of Aboriginal Women, we have Muriel E. Stanley Venne.

We're going to start by giving each of you seven minutes to prove your point, to tell us what you're all about, and to give us some solutions, as we would like some answers.

Sandra, we'll start with you.

[Dr. Sandra Lambertus, Author, As an Individual]

Thank you.

I want to thank the members of the standing committee for the opportunity to present the findings of a research study I completed a few years ago. The information I'm presenting is based on a province-wide study of aboriginal women's experience of violence in Alberta. I made the report public in November 2007. I've since confirmed that the information is still current and relevant, and indeed some of the situations have actually worsened.

I want to point out to the standing committee that it's only been in the recent past that the proclivity toward aboriginal women's victimization in Canada has been acknowledged in statistical surveys and that the gap in information at the national level has naturally led to similar gaps at the provincial level, Alberta being no exception. The availability of statistics combined with political drive plays an important role in the determination of program availability and sustained funding. So when there are no actual statistics available, you can see how reticent politicians are to approve programs and to continue with funding for proven programs. Yet even without the quantitative information, front-line workers across the province knew experientially that aboriginal women have been overrepresented as victims of violent crimes for many, many years.

Some of the key points from the study that I'd like to make include the following.

Much of the violence involving aboriginal women, I found, does come from domestic violence as well as the sex trade, but ultimately, most of the people involved in the sex trade did experience some kind of family violence.

In Alberta, aboriginal women are more likely to experience converging intersections of risk factors for victimization, including poverty, social and geographic isolation, homelessness, lack of education, substance addiction, prostitution, and family dysfunction. No other category of women in Alberta experiences such a multitude of interwoven risk factors for victimization.

Flaws in the criminal justice system are probably the most insidious of the systemic factors that subvert aboriginal women's safety, because aboriginal women are often encouraged to access police and the courts to help them. The stories of the women reveal how the criminal justice system plays a role in their continuing victimization.

There are some patterns that the study revealed. For example, in families and communities where aboriginal women are frequently victimized with little or no redress, the children are often at higher risk for victimization and the community is usually unstable.

Chronic familial dysfunction that has not been effectively addressed is another one of the roots of aboriginal women's victimization. The roots of crime are also embedded in the violence that has not been addressed in communities.

Current crime prevention strategies to protect aboriginal women are not particularly successful, because the roots of crime are so pervasive and largely beyond the women's control. The women's suggestions and acknowledgement of services that made a difference to them centred on things such as empowerment, understanding, dignity, respect, compassion, and trust. These women are not asking for anything more than the basic necessities for healthy relationships and productive functioning in society.

The violence experienced by aboriginal women is largely outside their own locus of control, and that was a central finding of the study. Addressing this effectively requires commitments from all levels of government, the court, their communities, and their families. More needs to be done to strengthen services to victims in the short and medium term. But the long-term goal should be healthy and safe families and communities.

Programs to improve prospects of aboriginal women cannot be provided in isolation from what is also needed by their families and the communities in which they live. Programs must include counselling, healing, recovery, and skills training. It should be anticipated that in some communities significant change will take more than one or two generations. Ultimately, eliminating the victimization of aboriginal women is dependent upon efforts directed towards health, economic independence, and self-sufficiency for all aboriginal people. The long-term goal should be to create healthy families and safe communities. This is where aboriginal women and their families will probably thrive best.

Thank you very much.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

Sandra, you went under. Very good.

Now we go to Jennifer. You have seven minutes.

[Prof. Jennifer Koshan, Professor, University of Calgary, As an Individual]

I just want to thank the committee very much for this opportunity to speak to you today. It's a real honour.

I'm an associate professor in the faculty of law at the University of Calgary. I'm also a former crown prosecutor. I worked for many years in the Northwest Territories, and I dealt with many cases of violence against aboriginal women at that time. That's the experience I bring to these discussions. Because my research focuses on legal responses to violence against aboriginal women, that's going to be the focus of my submission today.

I'll begin by placing the issue of legal responses to violence against aboriginal women in a bit of a factual context. I then have three main submissions to make, which I will illustrate with a concrete example. I'll then conclude by providing some recommendations that are related to my submission.

I know that you've heard many, many statistics as you've been travelling across the country looking at this issue of violence against aboriginal women, and I think it's important, for me anyway, to summarize those into two main points. First of all, violence against aboriginal women is more prevalent than violence against non-aboriginal women and violence against aboriginal men. The other thing is that there are distinctive forms of violence against aboriginal women and distinctive impacts that violence has on aboriginal women, and that sometimes requires distinctive kinds of solutions. For example, aboriginal women are three times more likely to be victims of spousal abuse compared to other victims of spousal abuse.

My own research shows that we often see the involvement of aboriginal women in the criminal and civil justice systems as disproportionate to their numbers in the population. We have about 5% aboriginal people in the population of Alberta. My research on Calgary's specialized domestic violence court shows that about 11% of cases heard by the court involve aboriginal victims. That's two times higher than their overall numbers in our population.

Similarly, my research on provincial family violence legislation shows that a disproportionate number of aboriginal women—22%—are involved as claimants in applications for emergency protection orders. That's more than four times the number of aboriginal women in the population.

At the same time, and you heard this, this morning, from the Edmonton Police Service, there's no requirement on the police to gather information about the ethnicity or race of the people they're seeing. I think that's one example of a very concrete recommendation that this committee could make. It's critically important for us to be able to measure the impact that the justice system and its response has on aboriginal victims of violence. Police need to be gathering that information so we can measure that impact.

Aboriginal women are also at a higher risk of sexual violence by a factor of about seven times and are at a higher risk of homicide by a factor of eight times. It's excellent to have the Statistics Canada reports on family violence that come out every year, but again, those reports don't always break down the level of violence that is being experienced by aboriginal women. So I think another concrete recommendation that this committee could make would be to have Statistics Canada always show in its reports on violence—whether that's family violence or sexual violence—what's the particular impact on aboriginal women that we're seeing.

When we take into account the fact that violence against women, including aboriginal women, is vastly underreported, these numbers we're seeing are really only the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the prevalence of violence against aboriginal women, as I said, it's also important for us to recognize that certain forms of violence may be uniquely experienced by aboriginal women, and these forms of violence are related to ongoing colonization and the oppression of aboriginal women in Canadian society. So I think we can consider the horrible phenomenon of missing and murdered aboriginal women to be a form of violence that is really uniquely experienced by this group of women, and the same is true of the abuse of aboriginal women in residential schools.

That factual context leads me to make three main submissions. First of all, we must acknowledge that aboriginal peoples live under continuing conditions of colonization and oppression in Canada. This has an impact on the levels and kinds of violence that are faced by aboriginal women and on the solutions that are appropriate.

Second, it's critical that the voices of aboriginal women and their representative organizations be given prominence and priority in proposing responses to the violence they face, and I agree with the comments that Jo-Anne Fiske made on that matter earlier this morning. The involvement of aboriginal women is critical, whether we're talking about aboriginal solutions to violence, pursuant to self-government or aboriginal justice kinds of initiatives, or whether we're talking about responses that fall within the realm of Canadian law and policy.

Third, as long as Canadian laws continue to apply to aboriginal peoples, the development and implementation of those laws must always pay special attention to the needs and concerns of aboriginal women and their communities.

Just as a bit of an aside, I want to say that one of my proudest moments as a Canadian citizen in recent years was to watch the apology the federal government gave to survivors of residential schools in the House of Commons and to see Bev Jacobs, who was at the time the president of the Native Women's Association of Canada, stand up and make a response to that apology. That was the first time the Native Women's Association of Canada has ever been given that sort of formal voice as citizens of Canada, and I think that was a real turning point. Aboriginal women were not able to participate in constitutional reform negotiations; they're often still excluded from discussions that take place about the sorts of laws and policies we should have in Canadian society, even though those laws are going to impact them tremendously given the prevalence of violence against them; and it is absolutely critical that aboriginal women and their organizations always have a voice around that table.

Do I still have a bit of time? I'm cut off.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

That's it.

[Prof. Jennifer Koshan]

Okay. Maybe in the questions I can get to some of my specific recommendations.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

In the questions you'll get a chance, definitely.

[Prof. Jennifer Koshan]

Thank you.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

Muriel.

[Muriel Stanley Venne, President and Founder, Institute for the Advancement of Aboriginal Women]

First I want to thank all of you, as my sisters. You've come together to implement the standing committee. That is to be noted with much appreciation by myself, as the president of the Institute for the Advancement of Aboriginal Women, vice-president of the Métis Nation of Alberta, and chair of the Aboriginal Commission on Human Rights and Justice.

I've been around so long that it scares me, actually. I've seen over the years how both Conservative and the Liberal governments have deliberately underfunded the aboriginal women's anything. We've done reports and reports in this province—and I have to do my reading notes, too. But it was $150,000 for aboriginal women. It was the only program that ever existed for aboriginal women, $150,000 for the province of Alberta. They used to give us half because we're a bigger organization and we reach out to a wide area of women, but now they've divided it up into little pieces so that nobody can accomplish anything.

I must present my written paper.

I want to say that we have made our submission to you, and I have received recognition, the Order of Canada, and been cited at the United Nations for my work in the area of helping aboriginal women, children, and families. I'm very proud of that, but it hasn't changed anything. It has not changed anything. It has not given us one penny more to work with. It has not done a thing, even though I wrote to the minister, and I copied all the ministers, and I pleaded with him to realize the enormity of this situation--the enormity. I'm sure you've heard everyone talk about the enormity of the problem of aboriginal women being denigrated, killed, mutilated, left on a road or in a bush or in a motel or wherever. The slaughter of aboriginal women is what we're talking about, and it comes from the hatred.

I want to give you this example before I go on. The Saskatchewan Police College released posters to be used for target practice by the police in their province. This is a college. It was the image of an aboriginal woman. This was published in the National Post on February 19, 2001. To the uproar that came from many people about this poster that was used for target practice by the police, the response was, “No, no, it wasn't the image of an aboriginal woman; it was a Caucasian lady.” That should all make us feel good, right? They actually put the image of an aboriginal woman on a poster for target practice, and we have the bullet holes still where they had used it. Anne McLellan was the Minister of Justice. I phoned her and she phoned me back and assured me that those posters were removed.

That is the hatred against aboriginal women in a real-life demonstration. That's what we're up against. What I have learned over more than 30 years of working, as I am.... I was left for dead in the back alley of my home. I know whereof I speak, and I can tell you that my conclusion is that aboriginal women live in a country that is hostile to their very existence. That's shown in every statistic you would ever want to look at. And yet the enormity of this situation is not realized.

I want to see--I haven't got to my presentation yet--that every parliamentarian acknowledge that aboriginal women are the victims of the policies of this government, this government and every other government--not only this government but every other government. When I brought to the attention of the minister who responsible for Status of Women--I'll remember her name--I told her that the aboriginal women's program has not received an increase in 30 years, and actually was cut when Paul Martin did the cutting, and she turned to her assistant and said, “Oh, do we have that?” And she said, “Yes.”

She didn't even know there was this tiny, little aboriginal women's program across Canada.

I want to say there was a recommendation to increase the money to the Native Women's Association, but let me tell you, that is not enough. The money needs to go to the communities where the women are suffering; it needs to be brought to where the women are.

As you can see, I am not an impartial or a cool presenter, but I demand that this government and this committee, made up of women whom I consider my sisters, do everything in their power to bring this forward in every possible way.

I had asked Rona Ambrose to be the champion; we have no champion in Parliament. We have no one standing up and saying that aboriginal women must be considered. I had asked Ethel Blondin to be our champion.

Why is this? Would it deter their ability to get promoted? I don't know.

I wanted to spend as much time—

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Dona Cadman]

I'm sorry, Muriel—

[Muriel Stanley Venne]

Am I out of time?

I have my written presentation.