Can I? It won't take me long I don't believe.
Let me just say that aside from barriers of racism, discrimination and stigmatization that were largely perpetrated by the sisterhood or by feminist women, it became really challenging to address, because everyone sort of treated those service providers as mom and apple pie.
You hear across Canada, and certainly in the north, that the government is always saying, “These people take care of all the problem people, so let's not be too hard on them and let's not have too high of expectations.” Even across Canada today, there are no standards for shelter services. One of the guys got kicked out of his shelter for not participating in the program when he didn't have addictions. I'll leave that one alone for the moment.
Let me just talk about two things. One is that, in the Northwest Territories recently, a study was done on women living in violence. The study was done, but not by interviewing women or children who were experiencing violence. They interviewed 100% service providers, and nobody who actually had the experience. Of those people, they interviewed 86% non-indigenous people, when 99% of the people in the shelter were indigenous.
With the people they did interview, of the 86%, the majority of those people were new to the north. They didn't even really know where they were and what was going on. They would never have the capacity to understand the northern situation. Now that report is being put out there like it is the solution.
Their solution is to have more money for sheltering services. We're saying that it's permanent housing. We had a fire in Yellowknife that destroyed a transitional house. There were 33 families on the street. All of those families were rehoused by the next day in private market housing. I'm sitting here asking why they weren't in private market housing in the first place.
I find that the lobbying efforts really.... It's not that shelters aren't important, because I ran one. I probably needed the support and couldn't really function in one before that. I'm just saying that we tend to keep women in those housing options forever, and we let the private market housing off the hook.
There are three women I would really like to talk about, but that will take too long, so I'll just leave it.
However, if anyone else wants to talk about those three women and the exemplification of their experience—to hear what I'm saying—that would be great.