A national action plan would provide a baseline, and it needs to be resourced. Like the national housing strategy, which provides resources to the provinces and territories, an action plan on violence against women would need to do this in the same sense. We heard on Monday that this is the first step toward a national action plan so we hope that will come forward. Again, it's this patchwork of services and the example of housing that Tim was referring to.
One example is, in communities in Quebec you need to be living in that vicinity for 12 months before you can access social housing. Once again, I think in a lot of these systems it's often women who live in rural or remote areas who are most disadvantaged. When you have a shelter that has a huge catchment area, the women aren't living there for 12 months, so their stay in the shelter needs to be extended; they need that safety and then you get back to this capacity problem.
Length of stay differs across the country. Maximum length of stay in Alberta is 21 days. In Ontario and Quebec there's no maximum. In a number of other provinces it's 30 days. We need to be able to have some consistency across the country and of course address the funding deficit around this.