Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to speak to a couple of items in clause 2.
When we heard the acting chief commissioner of the Human Rights Commission, at the end of his testimony he posed three questions that the committee should consider. He said: First, will the proposed legislation provide women with fair access to justice? Second, will the proposed legislation ensure women will be able to access their rights in a safe way? And third, do first nations communities have the capacity they need to develop and implement their own matrimonial real property systems, and if not, what can be done to correct this problem?
I'm going to start with the last point. What we consistently heard from witness testimony is that first nation communities do not have the capacity because they simply do not have the resources. It takes a significant amount of resources to be able to develop matrimonial real property. Certainly, a number of us have had emails from Chief Shining Turtle, who had been attempting to work with the government for a number of years in order to have his nation's matrimonial real property code passed. After seven or eight years it still hasn't been passed.
It speaks to not only the first nation's capacity, but questionably.... We didn't hear testimony to this effect, but it would have been interesting to pose to the department its capacity to work with first nations that were developing a matrimonial real property code.
There are two other points I want to touch on with regard to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Fair access to justice, again, is an issue around resources. When I'm looking at the interpretation in clause 2, it's about a family home. Of course, one thing we did hear in testimony from witnesses was around the fact that many nations have a severe shortage of housing.
When you're talking about remedies, it doesn't appear possible that a first nation community would be able to accommodate the family. If the goal is to ensure that when a couple splits up, one person of the couple ends up with the matrimonial home, presumably the other half of the couple could stay within the community in order to have the family continue to try to work around parenting and support.
The other issue around housing, of course, is that there are multi-generations living in some houses sometimes. We hear stories about 10, 15, sometimes even 20 people living in a house. You could have grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, all living in the same house. So if a court order comes down and only one part of the couple ends up staying in the house, what happens if the in-laws are living in the house? That's a question we've never been able to resolve. Do the grandparents have to move out because they would have, perhaps, access when the other family member would want to continue to visit? We haven't dealt with any of those questions.
Madam Chair, I think it's troubling that we're being asked to consider a piece of legislation when we don't have a full analysis of the impact on the ground if this legislation moves forward.
Thank you.