Thank you very much for the opportunity.
Today I want to reiterate what our community faced on a couple of occasions: the disappearance of the two young ladies, Maisy Odjick and Shannon Alexander, and the impact that has had on our community.
No community can be ready for this. No community can have the tools. We had just been elected in 2008, and in the fall all of this started to unfold. We don't have expertise in this. We didn't know where to turn. The police were unsure. We raised a lot of questions. We were frustrated. The family—and I understand this—were frustrated, maybe by our lack of efforts, and were wondering where we were going.
There have to be opportunities for tools to be developed to help communities address this.
The other situation is Ms. Tolley's situation and the fact that her mom was killed by an SQ patrol car going through the community. There are a lot of questions that the family has asked in trying to get clarification and looking for justice at the end--looking for answers, looking to understand and hopefully learn from it.
That door has continually been shut. Why is that? Why is it that Bridget, as a woman, as the head of her family, had to seek this kind of response and find that the doors are closed to her?
The frustration, I believe, that we meet with in the community is that although you may be talking about it at a very high level and there are programs, the reality is that a lot of these things don't flow down to the community, and they need to. We need to better understand and to be better able to share. Programs come and go; funding gets used by some organization, and then it may trickle down, or it may not.
I believe that the Sisters in Spirit movement and everything it represented was beginning to find its place, and then all of a sudden the door was closed. There was an opportunity. It's capacity development, it's opportunity-building. My concern would be, and the way it appears now is, that the legs are being cut from this movement, which I believe could have generated support and understanding and, really, the main thing: that very important momentum.
I want to close with this: I was watching TV last night, and they were talking about Ronald Reagan and his legacy. He was making a speech someplace in very simple words that I put to you. He said, “We have it in our power to bring about change.”
We do indeed have it in our power, but do we want to exercise it? I hope so. I hope this standing committee will indeed stand and support aboriginal women and first nations women, and bring about those changes that need to happen now.
Thank you.