Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Ms. Corbiere Lavell, Ms. Dumont-Smith and Ms. Irngaut, thank you very much for being here this morning. Like my colleague, I was also on the committee's tour. I had the chance to go on most of the tour. We realized that, especially in western Canada, racism and prejudice are very prevalent in major centres, which came as quite a shock to me. We asked ourselves a lot of questions as to why this racism was so systemic. For example, why is there so much racism against aboriginals and why are they abandoned in major centres, why is there so much racism even in centres where they make up the majority, such as Prince Albert and Williams Lake?
We have heard a lot of people say that there is so much violence against women because men no longer have an identity, or recognition as aboriginal men. They have no work. There is a lot of poverty and a lot of people in close quarters in dwellings that are too small and that house too many people. If we want to heal the battered women, we must take care of the whole family. We must heal the men, the women who are victims and also the children.
How can we get to the big picture of the problem? I feel that the aboriginal population is not the only one affected by this issue. The white population also has to be educated. White people have to understand that aboriginals have a right to exist. They have a right to live, to be happy, to have jobs, just like everyone living on the territory because they were there before all of us. How can we get this message across?