Of course, being Status of Women Canada, we were very excited when the UN special rapporteur visited Canada. We spent lots of time ensuring that she got the information she needed to do her report. The government very much welcomed her recommendations and insights into how Canada can continue to do better to address gender-based violence.
In terms of a national action plan specifically, with regard to the gender-based violence plan that I spoke about in my opening remarks, and that Status of Women has spoken to this committee about several times, the focus in the initial stage is to get the federal house in order. Before this strategy was announced, there really was no strategy even at a federal level, and there was no gender lens on any violence programming that the government was doing at the time; it was mostly focused on family violence. So the main focus has been to get the federal house in order.
However, that said, there is a very concerted effort being undertaken right now to work with the provinces and territories in recognition of the fact that this is fundamentally a national issue, and one that all levels of government and civil society have to be engaged in to see success. In fact, there's a federal-provincial-territorial meeting happening in Yukon as we speak—it starts right now—of ministers of the status of women. There are a number of different items on that agenda related to gender-based violence, starting with research as a baseline.
This is following the Australian national action plan. They took a couple of years when they launched their plan, which was a bit ahead of Canada. They were out of the gate a little before us, but they took time to make sure they truly understood the nature of gender-based violence across the country before they started launching into various initiatives.
Following that model, in the past few years, we have put an enormous amount of energy into data and research for gender-based violence. We are working with the provinces and territories to ensure they can benefit from those products we've discussed, especially those we're doing with Statistics Canada.
At the same time, this week they'll be discussing a results strategy. You can't have a national strategy unless you have agreed-upon results that you're all trying to achieve together. That will be another very, very important conversation.
Finally, efforts will be made to do joint programming. Rather than having small, fledgling non-governmental organizations trying desperately to figure out how they can patch together bits of funding, there are efforts being made between the federal and some provincial governments—it's a committee of the willing, to start with anyway—to see how we can join forces and help some of these organizations get stronger together.
