Status of Women Committee on April 21st, 2016

[Supt Shirley Cuillierrier]

It's my understanding that we've made it available to youth, our police officers, and teachers, so absolutely, it would be available to parents so they could have an understanding of the use of the tool and the benefits of being a bystander or getting involved.

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

Absolutely. It sounds fantastic.

I'd like to turn the page.

You've spoken a lot about youth and how we can help educate and mould them, but that also leads us to our children who are going off to college or university. Just to touch on that, we've seen with the sexual education system in Ontario that a lot of times some of the families don't feel comfortable with that and therefore will pull their children out of class. We may have the same concerns if we're trying to talk about sexual touching, which I myself believe is really necessary to educate about, but not all families and parents are going to feel the same. We have to now worry about sending our children who have been uneducated on these issues off to college and university for the first time by themselves. It's a new world and they're quite vulnerable.

What are we doing in our colleges and universities to make sure what programs are available? How is Public Safety as well as the RCMP involved in making sure that the issues on campus are not going on, and what other programs are available there for that age group?

[Lori MacDonald]

We don't have a specific crime prevention program for on-campus kinds of behaviours, whether that's date raping or the rape culture. We don't have specific programs on campus for that. I will say that, as a mother of a young university-aged woman, one of the first things that we did when she went to university was ask where the safety program in the university was, what the policing was, what hours it is available, where the cameras are, and where you can go in terms of assistance. I won't name the university but I will say that they actually have very good awareness campaigns right at the very beginning of their freshman year in terms of that.

I think the challenge always is that on university and college campuses, there tends to be a sense of complacency from the students as well in terms of, “It's a university campus so everything should be okay. I'm safe here. I'm not downtown or in Timbuktu, so I don't have as much to worry about.” One of the challenges becomes not allowing them to fall into that complacent sense of safety and keeping that level of awareness with them wherever they go.

I'm not sure, Shirley, if you have a comment on it.

[Supt Shirley Cuillierrier]

Building on my colleagues' remarks, the RCMP doesn't have a crime prevention program specifically targeting colleges or universities, but we work closely with the RCMP detachments located within university towns. We work closely with the institution and campus police around developing or supporting their programs on personal safety. We look at physical measures around the university campuses for protecting young women and making them feel safe. In some cases, we've been asked to come and present, and we do that gladly and talk about personal safety. The number one rule is to not travel alone, as much as you can. They are really simple messages, but sometimes complacency sets in. It's important to have that refresher and drive the message home.

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

Earlier this week, we heard from Statistics Canada. They were talking about the universities. I think some of us were taken aback when we heard some of the stats. Some of the universities said they had no reported sexual misconduct on their campuses. I think with the mix of alcohol and youth, anything can happen. Let's not pull the wool over our eyes.

Sitting there and making an unofficial statement, do you believe this would be the situation? Are you saying this is something that hasn't been reported, that we need to work harder to make sure that students report sexual misconduct to the police?

[Lori MacDonald]

We can't be naive and we can't be complacent. We know that sexual assault and assault are under-reported. We know that when young women go off to school they don't always have a strong friend structure in place. There is a lot of anxiety about being away from home for the first time, and there are a number of substances available on and off the campus. All these things come together and should be signals to us that we should never accept a zero value. We should always be thinking. We have to have a level of awareness. We can't be complacent, even in terms of ourselves looking at the issue. We always have to be challenging our programs, our services, our level of security, our awareness, and what we're doing in terms of continuing that education piece. It shouldn't matter whether they're four or 24 in terms of wanting to have an environment where we can keep them safe.

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Excellent.

Ms. Sansoucy, you have another seven minutes for questions.

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Ms. MacDonald, earlier, you spoke about your program on chatting. We know that there are new technologies that allow us to monitor how much people are using these applications to communicate with each other.

Can you share your data on the number of daily users as well as the frequency of use, and tell us how popular this mode of communication is?

[Lori MacDonald]

I'm sorry, but I don't have any statistics on this subject.

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Is that because you don't have them with you or because they don't exist?

[Lori MacDonald]

I'm not sure. I'll have to contact my office to find out more.

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

If you prefer, you can answer in English.

You're saying that you'll get this information for the committee. I think that information on the evaluation of your different programs and their use could be useful to us.

In your speech you mentioned the program that had been created in La Loche, Saskatchewan, after the events that took place there. This program is based on an existing program in Newfoundland and Labrador. I'd like to give you a chance to talk about that program a bit more.

[Lori MacDonald]

Thank you for the question.

We actually have a couple of programs. We had two programs running. One, a program called Venture, finished. It was very well received by La Loche.

The program focuses on two main components. One is very much an outdoor intervention in activities—hunting, fishing, recreational activities—in which the kids are involved with community leaders. It's also building resiliency factors, meaning how to stay away from drugs, how to not be involved in substances, and how to manage issues at home when you're living in a house of 15 people and there's conflict all the time and there's no place to get away for your own kind of space.

It ran for five years and it was extremely popular. It was very well received by the community, because the community owned that program. They invested themselves in it, they invested their own leadership in it, and there was significant positive impact. For example, more children were going to high school than before. There was less truancy, less violence in the home, and more uptake in terms of looking for role models in people, away from their homes, who they could spend time with.

I've forgotten the name of the second program, but I'll get that for you. We have a second program running right now—

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

The leadership and resiliency program.

[Lori MacDonald]

Yes. That's in its second year. The leadership and resiliency program is based on giving the kids leadership skills so that they actually don't become involved in their peer network such that, for instance, there's a lot of conflict at home, so I think I'll go outside behind the house and smoke a joint. Then I'll feel better, and I'll avoid that conflict. And you know what? I don't really want to go to school. I'll just smoke pot. I'll avoid the issues at home.

The program really is based on giving kids the tools and the skills to deal with those situations, to become more resilient and be able to say no to peer pressure, and to learn how to be able to deal with some of those issues.

At the same time, we're in the process right now of working with the community on I'll what call “Venture number two”. It's the same kind of program we just had there, but I would call it a “biggied up” version of that. We'll run that program again later this year. There's investment from the community in terms of their leadership around the program.

We're also working with them on a community safety program that my colleague Angela could speak about.

[Angela Connidis]

We have what we call a community safety planning initiative where we work with indigenous communities. One of the biggest challenges with an indigenous community is their capacity to do the work. There is a lot of teaching that has to happen before they can actually even apply for programs.

First we contact the mayor or the chief of a community. Would you be interested in us helping you build your capacity to understand what your risks are in your community, what your strengths are, and how you could build a plan to become a safer community?

The actual impetus behind this was to support missing and murdered indigenous women and make safer communities for women and girls. Women and girls benefit from a safe community. You can't just deal with them in isolation. We go into the community after the chief has, with their influence, gotten a group together. It's usually men and women, but often more women, from their community. They have to be committed to this. We then hire a facilitator. We go with the facilitator to teach them, first, here's what you need to do. What do you have in your community? What are your problems? Where do you think your biggest risks are? What are some of the things you as a community could do to help?

We go back a second time to look at that a little bit more with them and help build their capacity. The third time we go with them is to actually develop the community safety plan. It's a pathway for them to build up their community and identify some of the things they need to improve and where their gaps are.

At that stage, they are in a position to actually benefit from, and provincial and federal governments are in a better position to target, programs that help them. They can now realize where the problem is—i.e., we actually have a community centre here that we could change into a drug and addiction centre to help our youth. They might do that. Or we can work with our colleagues at health and say there's a big health issue and they need help here, so can you use that program? The community itself has a better capacity to identify these programs, do outreach, and see what's in their own community. This way we can engage provinces and territories to say, okay, we have this community safety plan, so what can you do to help?

We have 80 communities—

[The Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you.

Now over to Ms. Vandenbeld for seven minutes.

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

Thank you very much.

It sounds like you're doing some absolutely fantastic programming, especially at the local level. I'm very impressed.

The one thing I'm trying to do is see where the gaps might be. I noticed you said that out of 67 programs there are two that are focused on young children and girls. I think you said one of them was under the age of 12. The one that you mentioned for 11-year-olds to 15-year-olds in Calgary—which sounds like a fantastic program—is to prevent the girls from getting into conflict with the law. Understandably, most of these programs have to fall under crime prevention, but that makes the assumption that it is the youth who are doing this to other youth, and not necessarily that young people are becoming victimized by adults or people not known to them, because they're being exposed to this online.

I'm wondering if there is actually a gap in programming for that age group, for teenagers, for young girls and young women who are being victimized—not necessarily the cyber-bullying by their peers or by a boyfriend who takes pictures—but by adults.

[Angela Connidis]

I'll say quickly that there very well may be a gap. One of the challenges for us is that we do work with victims. We work with victims of crime, where the crime has already happened. However, the Department of Justice is actually responsible for victim programming and family violence initiatives, so that policy programming expertise lies with that department. We work with them closely on victims' issues, but we aren't resourced and given the mandate to fill that gap.

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

Thank you. That's very helpful.

[Lori MacDonald]

Maybe I'll just add to that question in terms of the point about the young girls and whether it's necessarily to prevent them becoming involved in criminal activity. I think it's important to understand that it's a large catchment. It's an at-risk group that could become involved in crime, but that's not why they are necessarily included in that group.

If you look at the girls in the SNAP program in Halifax at six, it's because social services has come and said, “There's a problem here. They can't manage this child in day care and they can't manage her at school. There are lots of behaviour issues. We're not sure if something's going on with mom. We've had mom in, but she's really just turned 19 and has no parenting skills whatsoever.” There's that piece involved in the program as well.

Inasmuch as it's a crime prevention program, it's actually broader than that. It does take in some of those issues.

In terms of the gap issue, there are only two, so yes, I would say there is a gap.

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

These are probably some of the girls who might be targeted by some of those predators, because maybe they don't have the parental guidance or—

[Lori MacDonald]

Absolutely.

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

Okay.

[Lori MacDonald]

They could be victimizing someone else, or they could be the victim as well. In a number of these programs, not only that one, but in even the high school programs as well they will say, “I have low self-esteem. I'm cutting. I'm doing something. I'm withdrawing”, and then they're going toward a negative peer group. It's that path. It's the issue we talked about earlier about all those root causes, those things that come up.