Status of Women Committee on April 21st, 2016

[Lori MacDonald]

Perhaps I could add to that. The other thing we look at, too, is working across departments. We would work with Immigration Canada, as an example, in terms of some of the programs it has at the front-line level for working with new immigrant women coming to Canada. There's also a vast network across the provincial and municipal levels for women's services and services that actually assist people who come into contact with that kind of crime. At the same time, we also struggle a bit with the fact that lots of times people don't even recognize they're being trafficked in those kinds of situations.

One of the things we're launching is a crime prevention program called exiting prostitution. One of the things we've asked people to look at, who put project proposals in, is for the marginalized group that comes into that trade, those pieces that have an influence, so those would be women who are victimized either through trafficking or women who are growing up in environments where they have no social supports, where they have no parental guidance, where substance abuse and abuse is commonplace. We'd like them to link all those pieces back, when they're developing their models, so that we can better both influence and intervene, then put programs and services in place to continue to support those kinds of things.

It's not directly related to human trafficking, but it is related because all of those factors come into play. When we want to put an intervention model in place we want to be able to address as many factors as we can.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

That's your time, sorry.

We'll go over to Ms. Vecchio for five minutes.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Thanks very much.

The first question I have goes to Shirley. You indicated that 8% of the employees you have with the RCMP are first nations. I know that currently the population is a little less than 5% for all of Canada. Are we focusing on putting more people into the first nations, or is that kind of looking at the entire 8%, which would mean 3% would probably be throughout the rest of the units? Do you understand where I'm going with this question?

Are we putting more resources into the first nations because we recognize there are some issues with victimization and the suicide issues we're having right now, or have had for some time? Are we putting more resources into those communities? When we're looking at that 8%, is that saying that we have 8% throughout Canada?

[Supt Shirley Cuillierrier]

It is 8% across Canada. However, to your example, when something like the La Loche, Saskatchewan, shooting happens the RCMP mobilizes first in Saskatchewan, and if necessary, we mobilize different parts of the country, based on what the threat is or the crime that's occurred, or whether it's a disaster.

However, the 8% is across the country.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Okay. Fantastic. Thanks very much.

I'll move on to public safety as well as the RCMP. We recognize there is a lot of victimization. What kind of training are our police officers getting? When we bring in the fact that we're looking at immigrant populations and aboriginals, is there specialized training for that as well, because we're dealing with some different cultures and communities? What are we doing there to make sure that our first-line workers have all the training they need?

[Supt Shirley Cuillierrier]

In the RCMP, recruiting is foundational in terms of our organization. We need to reflect the Canadian population. The commissioner has testified at numerous committees in terms of his targets around recruiting women, visible minorities, and aboriginal people. We have those internal employee committees in the RCMP as well, even to generate ideas and innovation with these groups.

I always reflect back to my earlier days as a constable working in the community. I am first nations, so young first nations women have to see themselves in me. It's great when you become a role model, because for most Mounties in the RCMP, when you talk to them, that's how they were influenced to join the RCMP. It was through the members that they have seen over their childhood. I think that's a critical piece in terms of being able to deliver a culturally competent police service. You have to be reflective of the country that you police.

In terms of actual training, we have intensified, or I guess have a higher level of training for, let's say, forensic interviewing of children for sexual assaults. I mentioned earlier that we've developed a missing persons' strategy as a result of the missing and murdered indigenous women—a report back in 2014. We're currently developing a course to have a higher level of expertise around investigators investigating missing persons. We have a variety of courses that are offered through the Canadian Police College here in Ottawa for all police services in Canada, whether it be on violence in a relationship....

Those are some examples that I can give you. It's an absolute in terms of investigating multi-jurisdictional or complex investigations that either are throughout the country or, in some cases, international. An example, perhaps, would be a human trafficking case. There is a higher level of expertise for some of these areas as opposed to years ago.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Now we're going over to Ms. Vandenbeld for five minutes.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much for coming, and thank you for your excellent intervention.

I'm looking through the different programs that you outlined. There's the national youth strategy, and you mentioned the national crime prevention strategy. In terms of the national crime prevention strategy, you said it's not uniquely gender focused. If I look at the national youth strategy, a lot of this is about preventing youth from becoming perpetrators of violence, but not specifically about youth victims of violence.

In terms of the young women and girls who are victims of violence, how many of them are victimized, not by their peers, but by an adult? What programming would be specific to some of those young girls?

[Lori MacDonald]

Thank you very much for the question.

I'll just give a bit of an overview in terms of the crime prevention program. We have about 67 programs operating across the country today. Of those, there are two specifically targeted toward young children, girls. There are about 27 targeted toward aboriginal, and there are another 21 or 22 that are actually on reserve. They address both men and women, boys and girls. There are different models in place to take on some of those challenges. There are different age groups as well.

I will give you an example of a gender-specific one in Halifax. There is a crime prevention program called SNAP, which focuses specifically on young girls, starting around the age of six and going up to about the age of twelve. It is gender-sensitive. It is focused specifically on the issues these young girls have, everything from aggression and low self-esteem to self-injury and substance abuse, even at that young age. The program model works on behaviours post-going into the program. It works on attitudes. At the same time, it also works with parenting. While the children are going into the program, the parents, typically single moms, are also going into the program during their sessions—at the same time but in separate areas—and they learn together in terms of how to manage behaviours, how to parent, and how to address some of those particular issues.

At the same time, at the other end of the country, we have a crime prevention program that would be gang-related. Again, that would focus on youth, both young boys and young girls. They would look at both risk factors and protective factors, how they got involved in violence and gangs, and then how to remove them from those situations.

Depending on the model that is used by a particular crime prevention program, and depending on what that focus is, it could touch specifically on women and girls, specifically on boys, or on both.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

I am wondering about young girls, or young teens, who are just getting to the age where they are online. They are using smartphones and texting, but they are not yet at the level of maturity to be able to understand how to handle.... Young girls are now being exposed to a world that many of us, when we were young girls, would not have been exposed to.

I see a lot here about child sexual exploitation. You mentioned the six- to twelve-year-olds. What is there specifically for young teenagers, 13 or 14 years old?

[Lori MacDonald]

There are very good cyber-programs online that focus specifically on youth in terms of behaviour—Shirley used some examples—where they work with youth to identify what behaviours are cyber-bullying, identifying if your child is involved and how to take those signals and determine if there is something going on. There are also programs online that identify what is bullying and how to withdraw from that—how kids can remove themselves from that situation so they are not being victimized, being bullied, or identify that they are the ones being bullied.

Our cyber-program.... If you have the opportunity to go online to look at some of those, there are lists there that give you an opportunity to be exposed to some of those programs. They are open to anyone, of any age, young girls and young boys as well.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

You talked about the delivery of social media campaigns. Can you explain a bit more about that?

[Lori MacDonald]

What we look at is anything from Twitter accounts to Snapchat—the kinds of things kids are using on social media—to identify when their behaviour is crossing a line, to make them aware that saying something, the kind of language they use, the kind of behaviour they use, for example, when young children are exclusionary, so I send a text to my friend Angela to talk about my friend Shirley and I exclude her from that.

They identify different ways that children are using social media, and target behaviour that is considered to be bullying, harassing, or, in the extreme, stalking.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

All right, we are over to Ms. Harder, for five minutes.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Shirley, I just want to clarify something. Do you have front-line experience with regard to policing?

[Supt Shirley Cuillierrier]

I do, but it is dated.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

I would imagine that you stay reasonably close to the front lines in terms of your knowledge and your appreciation of what goes on there.

[Supt Shirley Cuillierrier]

I talk to members every day who are on the front lines.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

We can talk so much about the theoretical level, if you will, or the higher level of coordination, the stats and all of that. Those things are really helpful for a report, but I'm wondering if you could provide us with some anecdotes. Could you provide us with the front-line experience, and the challenges that are faced in terms of policing and preventing violence against women?

[Supt Shirley Cuillierrier]

In terms of the challenges, I think it's probably more of a social issue, namely, how communities and individuals approach the issue of violence against women. The RCMP, Public Safety, and as my colleague has mentioned, numerous departments within the federal government, work very hard to raise awareness, to get people to report, to get people who are being victimized, bullied, or trafficked to report and not to be bystanders. That takes courage in some cases. I always use the example that by the time the police get called it's never a good story. Anything and everything we can do at the front end....

As an example, I was speaking to the commanding officer in Nunavut this morning, and we were talking about suicide intervention, which is very topical these days. “What are we doing and how can I work with Public Safety or Health Canada?” Those are the conversations that are happening, certainly here in Ottawa at the federal level, but also with our provinces and territories and our front-line people, to address the challenge that's going on right now in the streets of Iqaluit, for instance.

It's the same with La Loche. When the shootings in La Loche happened, there were so many services from the provincial government, the federal government, the RCMP, and teachers in the community. The community came together to deal with a very serious situation, a tragedy, indeed a crime. But when you look at the root cause of that crime, it's an issue that's much bigger than policing.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

I have another question written here, but that's a very good point.

Just to pick up on that, when you say it's a much bigger issue than just policing, what does that look like? Break that down for us. Give us a bit of a picture.

[Angela Connidis]

Shirley mentioned the provinces and territories in the communities. I don't want to get technical, but you start dealing with a different jurisdiction, so you have your federal jurisdiction and then your provincial jurisdiction. What we find federally is, yes, we have the Canada Health Act and we have cross-country health issues, but the federal government doesn't manage health care in the provinces.

We know education is an issue, especially the sexualization of young women. A lot of that can be addressed through education. We don't run the school boards. We don't even manage the education system.

We have federal-provincial-territorial forums where deputies meet at those levels with their counterparts and ADMs. At our level we have working groups with our provincial and territorial colleagues, but our colleagues are also in the justice and public safety arena. We want our provincial justice and public safety colleagues to engage their education partners, their health partners, their citizenship and immigration partners to deal with that at a very local level, because the crime is at the back end. One of the reasons we have a crime prevention program is to stop them at the front end, early. That's why six to 12 is a real focus. Then we go to the youth.

The issues are generally about the family dynamics growing up. How do social services intervene in that? How do you help those youth? I feel like I'm straying from your question in a way. It's something the federal government works at with our other government departments internally, but we also reach out to the provinces and territories and communities to ask how we can work together and get those things done.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excellent. That's your time. Now we're over to Mr. Fraser for five minutes.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Thank you very much for coming in and for your presentation today. I wanted to pick up on some of the questions my colleague Ms. Vandenbeld started with, in particular on how the youth crime prevention strategy is not gender specific.

You mentioned the program SNAP, I think it was, in Halifax. How are programs like that selected for funding that might be specific to young women and girls?

[Lori MacDonald]

Typically, from a purely process perspective, we do what we call a “call out” for a program. I'll use the exiting prostitution program as an example since we did that just recently. We went out and did a call out. We posted that we had an interest in groups coming forward to give us a proposal with respect to how we could possibly impact the community from a crime prevention perspective, in terms of exiting prostitution.

One of the things we do is to post models. Various models are available. Some of them are domestic. SNAP is one that was developed in Canada. We also get models from around the world. We post models that we actually want people to consider using in their submissions for proposals.

Different groups, typically people who are well engaged in these helping types of services or programs that help marginalized populations, are constantly looking for opportunities in their communities to submit program considerations.

Schools do look at that. They liaise with community groups, advocates, municipalities, and so on.

The actually submit a proposal that comes to us, and we have various rigorous processes that we go through in terms of evaluating that program against the criteria that we've established, that we want to look at. As an example, if we specifically wanted a program that focused on girls from the age of six to 11, that would be one of the criteria we would look at if we wanted to have pre- and post-evaluation of those kinds of things.

We would make an assessment on those proposals, and then we would ask them to submit a letter of intent. We would work with them throughout that process to actually get to the point of approving their submission to deliver a program.