Evidence of meeting #120 for Status of Women in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was housing.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Cynthia Drebot  Executive Director, North End Women's Centre
Jennifer Gagnon  Executive Director, South Shore Transition House Association (Harbour House)
Donna Smith  Executive Director, Tearmann Society for Abused Women
Samantha Lacourse  Coordinator, A Safe Place, Victoria Faulkner Women's Centre
K. Kellie Leitch  Simcoe—Grey, CPC
Sonia Sidhu  Brampton South, Lib.
Terry Duguid  Winnipeg South, Lib.
Caithlin Scarpelli  Director, Communications and Fund Development, Atira Women's Resource Society
Geneviève Latour  Associate Director, Crossroads for Women inc.
Fiona Cunningham  Mental Health Counsellor, Iris Kirby House
Jean Fong  Transition House Worker, Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter
Daisy Kler  Transition House Worker, Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter
Bob Bratina  Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, Lib.

4:25 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff

You have about a minute.

4:25 p.m.

Executive Director, North End Women's Centre

Cynthia Drebot

Flexibility will be incredible. One of the biggest barriers we've had has been how homelessness is defined. The connection to a gender-based lens is what we've been asking for. We're really happy if there's going to be more flexibility in how the housing approach will be provided.

4:25 p.m.

Winnipeg South, Lib.

Terry Duguid

How much time do I have left?

4:25 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff

You have 45 seconds.

4:25 p.m.

Winnipeg South, Lib.

Terry Duguid

Our Nova Scotia friends talked about prevention and outreach. In the short time we have, could you elaborate on that?

I'm just wondering if you're aware of the work of the Bridges Institute and the efforts to engage men and boys, particularly dealing with abusive men and keeping families together.

November 5th, 2018 / 4:25 p.m.

Executive Director, South Shore Transition House Association (Harbour House)

Jennifer Gagnon

Yes, I've definitely heard of it. The proposal we put in to Status of Women Canada was to engage men and boys.

It's a big area. Gender-based violence is not a women-based issue; it's a people issue. We need to start looking and teaching differently.

4:30 p.m.

Winnipeg South, Lib.

Terry Duguid

That's well said. We're on board.

4:30 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff

Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here, and to the committee members for their excellent questions.

We're going to suspend for just a minute while we switch the panels. We'll come back for our second panel.

4:35 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff

I'm going to call the meeting back to order.

Welcome back to the 120th meeting of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

Before we go to our panellists, I will let committee members know that there will be no meeting on November 21. The fall economic statement will be delivered in the House that afternoon, so there won't be a meeting that day.

For the second hour, I'm pleased to welcome the Atira Women's Resource Society and Caithlin Scarpelli, director of communications and fund development. We also have Crossroads for Women Inc., with Geneviève Latour, associate director. We also have Fiona Cunningham, who is a mental health counsellor at Iris Kirby House. Last but certainly not least, from the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, we have Daisy Kler and Jean Fong, who are both transition house workers.

I will now turn the floor over to you, Ms. Scarpelli, for your opening statement. You have seven minutes.

4:35 p.m.

Caithlin Scarpelli Director, Communications and Fund Development, Atira Women's Resource Society

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today.

Atira Women's Resource Society was incorporated in March 1983, and we opened our first transition house in South Surrey in 1987. Then called the Atira Transition House, its mandate was to support battered women and their children. In keeping with the practice of the time, this meant that women were screened in or screened out, based on a number of onerous screening criteria. For example, if you disclosed that you struggled with substance use or you had a mental health diagnosis, you were turned away. If you lied in order to secure that desperately needed space and you were discovered, you were asked to leave, regardless of the consequence to you.

In September 1992, Janice Abbott came on board as our executive director, and things quickly changed. Based on her lived experience, she understood the deep-rooted relationship between women's experiences of violence and struggles with substance use and mental wellness, and that by excluding these women from receiving services we were causing harm to the very women and children we were meant to support.

Within just a few months, Atira did away with its lengthy screening process and started asking only one question when a person called for space: “Are you fleeing violence?”

Because of this, we were one of the few transition houses, if not the only one, opening their doors to women struggling with substance use and/or mental wellness. We started getting more referrals than we were able to accommodate. The increase in demand was so high that in 1997 we opened a second transition house in Surrey called Shimai, and a second-stage transition house called Koomseh.

From there, we began to expand quickly, and by 2001 we operated the Downtown Eastside's first women-only housing. We now operate more than 23 residential programs for women and their children, including some of Canada's lowest-barrier, women-only housing, as well as a number of innovative non-residential programs, including the world's first—

4:35 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff

Excuse me. Could you slow down just a little bit? The interpreters are having trouble hearing and translating. Thank you.

4:35 p.m.

Director, Communications and Fund Development, Atira Women's Resource Society

Caithlin Scarpelli

Sure.

So...including the world's first community-accessible, women-only safe injection room.

Atira now comprises five entities, including two wholly owned for-profit subsidiaries, Atira Property Management and the Painter Sisters painting company, and two related non-profit societies, the Atira Development Society and the Atira women's arts society.

In 25 years, we have become known for our entrepreneurship, risk-taking and innovative programming and housing—for example, Canada's first multi-unit recycled shipping container development, as well as the Maxxine Wright place, a multi-service, multi-part program focused on keeping moms and their kids together.

The projects are often started on shoestring budgets but with amazing partnerships. They are always in response to the needs of the women and children and based on feedback from our staff who identify gaps in services.

We are also known for taking controversial stands, including supporting and upholding the rights of women who do sex work; opening our doors to transgender and gender-queer women and to non-binary individuals who identify as significantly femme; and setting up shared-use spaces in our buildings without the benefit of legal protection.

Our CEO continues to show bold leadership, coming to the table with amazing ways to respond to challenging needs identified by the women and staff, and inspiring us all to take risks and believe that ending all forms of gendered violence is absolutely possible.

I'd like to take you now through some of the things we've learned over our more than 35 years of experience working alongside women and their children.

First, almost all women who have accessed our programs have been, or have children who are currently, in the care of the Ministry of Child and Family Development. Women who have experienced trauma and violence and who are struggling with that trauma are often holding on by a thread. They are surviving, often living in chaos as a result of their circumstances, trying to find safe, affordable housing for their families, and then their children are apprehended. That thread that they are holding on to disappears. This often leads to struggles with substance use, homelessness, street-level sex work and violent relationships with men, and the intergenerational cycle continues.

We need to keep moms and their kids safely together. We need to do this by providing housing that is affordable, providing support services that offer information and supports around life skills, and providing resources and referrals to outreach teams that can support moms once they leave first- and second-stage transitional housing into subsidized or private market housing.

Second, in 2017 Atira housed close to 2,000 women and their children through first- and second-stage transitional housing and through long-term supported housing. Unfortunately, we have had to turn away more than three times as many women and children as we were able to house. This is due to the lack of space.

We need more housing with operational agreements that adequately reflect the needs of our program. This means food budgets for community kitchens to teach life skills and build support networks; repairs and adequate maintenance budgets; and 24-7 staff who allow women to develop relationships and trust to support them through the next steps in their journey.

Third, Atira supports a disproportionate number of first nation, Métis and Inuit women. More than 70% of the women who access our programs in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and Surrey are women who identify as indigenous. According to the Canadian Women's Foundation, indigenous women are killed at six times the rate of non-indigenous women.

We need culturally appropriate housing for indigenous women and their children, with support services to reconnect them or connect them for the first time with lost culture and healing practices and ceremonies. We need to honour and recognize the continued effects of residential schools and the multi-generational trauma that still happens every day.

I'd like to give you a little example of what that looks like. Recently, a young indigenous woman, aged 19, was brought to our Imouto program by another organization that wasn't able to offer her support. She was tired, scared and incredibly shy. She came to Downtown Eastside to stay with her uncle, who became extremely violent and tried to force her into sex work. When she ran away, she was alone, lost, hungry and she had no money. When she got to Imouto, she wasn't connecting with staff and barely spoke to anyone at all. Staff were finally able to build some trust with her and figured out that she wanted to return home. Neither her band nor her family could or would provide her with the bus ticket she needed to make that journey back. Staff provided arrangements to drive her to a reserve near Keremeos. When they got into her territory, she completely changed, telling stories of her auntie and talking about the mountains and her family. She's still living there and she's thriving.

This program, Imouto, is currently single-staffed, and we are required to raise more than $160,000 each year from the public to keeps its doors open. Without this program, this young woman would likely have been lost to the Downtown Eastside.

Finally, I would like to say that because of years of no increase in funding for housing for women victims of violence, Atira has had to be creative with building new housing and partnering with different levels of government through cash funding, donations of land use and waiving of permit fees. We have also had to—

4:40 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff

I've actually let you go over your time.

4:40 p.m.

Director, Communications and Fund Development, Atira Women's Resource Society

Caithlin Scarpelli

Okay. No problem.

4:40 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff

Thank you.

We're now going to turn to Geneviève, from Crossroads for Women Inc.

4:40 p.m.

Geneviève Latour Associate Director, Crossroads for Women inc.

Good morning. My name is Geneviève Latour, and I am the Associate Director of Crossroads for Women inc.

Since 1981, Crossroads for Women has been helping women and their children who are affected by violence against women and intimate partner violence.

Crossroads for Women is the only transition house for victims of family violence and sexual assault in southeastern New Brunswick. We also provide the following bilingual programs and services: a family crisis centre, a sexual assault centre, a toll-free crisis line, more long-term housing, a community outreach program and a youth support program.

Our transition house provides much more than a safe place. We provide vital services and resources that enable women and their children experiencing violence to begin their healing, to rebuild their self-esteem and to take steps to return to a self-sufficient and independent life.

We also raise awareness and contribute to social change as part of broader efforts to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls.

The transition house has three cribs and 41 beds, three of which are accessible to women and children with reduced mobility. As I just said, we provide much more than housing.

In 2017-2018, we responded to thousands of crisis calls. We provided support to more than 70 individuals who came to the hospital to get medical care in the wake of violence they suffered. We housed 250 women and 90 children.

The federal government really has a leadership role to play in addressing violence against women, and that of course includes the work of transition houses like ours.

I will begin by talking about the discrepancy between the number of beds needed and the number of beds available. It is difficult to gauge that discrepancy. In November 2016, our capacity went from 17 beds to 41 beds. In 2016, our rate of refusal was over 30% and, now, it is just under 20%. The reason there was a drop of only 10% while our capacity increased by 40% is that we are doing more to raise public awareness of this important issue affecting women. Each effort we make to raise awareness leads to more calls.

4:45 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff

Can you slow down a bit?

4:45 p.m.

Associate Director, Crossroads for Women inc.

Geneviève Latour

Okay.

Although we have nearly two and a half times more beds than before, our operational income has increased by only 4%. I will talk more about this issue later, but for now, I will come back to the second issue of interest to us—existing federal programs and funding for transition houses.

As you know, the federal government does not provide funding to cover the operating costs of transition houses for women who are victims of violence, with the exception of transition houses on reserve. The majority of federal funding is intended for capital. Managing a transition house is like managing any other house. We must pay bills for public services, insurance, property taxes, food, and so on. All those expenses have increased over the years, but our core funding has only increased very slightly.

Who pays the price of that? Our responders and employees do, and that staff is made up entirely of women. Retaining qualified staff is really a major problem. At the end of the day, women and children fleeing violence pay the price. My recommendation concerning existing federal programs and funding for transition houses has to do with core funding. Ultimately, we cannot do our job effectively if we do not get the funding we need for our operations.

What are the potential solutions? We recommend that, in future legislation, shelters really be recognized as a fundamental human right. Canada needs more safe and affordable shelters for women and children. I also think it is important to keep in mind that transition houses are not “band-aid solutions”. Building more affordable housing without support services for women and children who have fled from violence is not the solution. Those two elements are really necessary. We need more affordable housing, but we also need adequately funded transition houses for women and children fleeing violence.

With adequate funding, transition houses can ensure that all women get immediate access to services. All women have the right to live and enjoy a life free from violence and abuse. Right now, we are abandoning those women if we cannot provide them with services. The only statistic I will emphasize today is the fact that, in Canada, a woman is murdered every six days by someone she knows and is very likely in an intimate relationship with.

It is impossible to cover all the challenges we are facing as a transition house, be it in terms of aboriginal women, the LGBTQ+ community, elderly women, women with disabilities or others. I decided to use my testimony to tell you about the situation of immigrant, refugee and non-status women we accommodate. I am talking to you about this to point out that core funding and the provision of specialized programs are important for transition houses.

In our house, Crossroads for Women, there are always on average three immigrant or refugee women and three children. Those women and children are facing specific barriers not known to non-immigrant women. For example, the average stay in our house is about 28 days for Canadian women, while it is 74 days for immigrant women and families. Some of the things those women are dealing with are language barriers, difficulties navigating in various systems, cost of services, the length of the process to obtain a status—which impedes all the other steps—the absence of a support system, and racism, which is an integral part of all the obstacles I just listed.

Our organization's current funding does not enable us to hire someone who could work specifically with that population and meet their unique needs. I remind you that we have 41 beds, but 85% of the time, we have a single employee on site to support the residents, prepare meals, answer calls, take in community donations, and so on. So you will understand that the issue of discrepancy between the number of existing beds and the number of available beds goes beyond the question of available physical beds. It is important for an increase in the number of beds to go hand in hand with an increase in core funding and a program for women and children.

If I had more time, I would talk to you about an employee's typical shift, but I will rather encourage you to visit a transition house in your region. You are certainly welcome to come to ours.

Before I conclude, I want to repeat that it is necessary to adopt a Canada-wide policy on housing and domestic violence.

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff

That's actually your time.

You did provide a brief, which the clerk will be getting translated and will be extending around to everyone.

4:50 p.m.

Associate Director, Crossroads for Women inc.

4:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff

Thank you.

We will now turn to Iris Kirby House and Fiona Cunningham.

4:50 p.m.

Fiona Cunningham Mental Health Counsellor, Iris Kirby House

Good afternoon.

Thank you for the opportunity to be here today.

I'm Fiona Cunningham. I am the mental health counsellor for Iris Kirby House in St. John's and O’Shaughnessy House in Carbonear, Newfoundland and Labrador. Our organization provides support and shelter from domestic violence for the Avalon region of Newfoundland and Labrador, servicing a population of over 260,000.

Our shelters have 32 and 15 beds, respectively. Additionally, we have 13 second-stage housing units. Last year, we collectively housed over 350 women and children, and answered almost 900 distress calls. Additional services include supporting ex-residents. We answered about 1,400 phone calls last year providing recreational and therapeutic groups for women and children, and providing system navigation housing support.

We work from a trauma-informed, empowerment-based approach, incorporating harm reduction and an individualized approach to each woman's and each family's needs.

From the front-line staff, who are responsible for the daily health and safety of the residents in the building, to all supportive and administrative personnel, we are a hard-working organization. But no matter how hard we work, there are gaps in the system: services we need that don't currently exist, and women and children who fall between the cracks. It is important to note that the gaps in the system don't necessarily exist within the shelter system, but at the intersection between agencies and services.

What do some of those gaps look like for us?

First, there is no women-only homelessness shelter in our area. Trauma-informed practice allows us to understand that women with extensive histories of gender-based violence sometimes cannot live in a mixed-gender shelter. The women we interact with may not be coming directly from gender-based violence, but their histories are richly narrated, and their present-day struggles are a direct result of gender-based violence. They have nowhere to go, nor do they fit within our service parameters. We need a continuum of services to support homelessness as it intersects with domestic violence.

Second, we experience long wait times for mental health and addiction services. These can be upward of six months just for an intake assessment, before service can even begin. Women who struggle with communal living for a variety of reasons, often mental health or chaotic drug or alcohol use, cannot access shelter services, nor can they access timely addictions and mental health support.

Third, there's a lack of transportation to and from services. Women may not have the ability to navigate a public transportation system due to trauma, mental health restrictions or mental acuity, or the area where they need to go may not even be accessible by public transportation. It is not enough for a service to exist; it must also be accessible.

Fourth, our current shelter system is a reactive, acute model, much like the revolving door of our acute mental health care hospital system. Clients often need an approach that is outside the current funding guidelines, which creates limitations on the support and healing we can provide.

Fifth, our legal system can fail to provide safety to women who wish to return home or even live safely in their community, which can create unnecessarily long and restrictive stays in our shelter. Denial of emergency protection orders because a woman is in a shelter aligns the system with the abuse and can begin the cascade of reasons why a woman feels unsafe and distrusting within a legal system that re-traumatizes her.

Sixth, another gap is the need to prove poverty in order to access legal representation. There's a group of women who fall above the legal aid cut-off but are unable to pay for legal representation as well as meet their basic needs. This can create a gross disparity between the woman who has survived domestic violence and the abuser. In effect, it creates another modality in which the abuser can continue, and even increase, the violence.

Finally, a woman with employment can have her job threatened due to the need to take time off for medical, police, and legal appointments, and the time it takes to move from home to shelter to a new home. Much of Newfoundland and Labrador is rural, and there are no shelters to be accessed locally, meaning that a woman may have to choose between safety and employment.

Some solutions to the above gaps include the ability to provide flexible, individualized approaches to working with women and families. In the year that I have been employed as the mental health counsellor at the shelter, I don't think two days have looked the same. Front-line workers need the space to be creative in their interventions. Systemic constraints not only revictimize clients on a daily basis but create vicarious trauma in workers as they stand in helplessness with their clients, unable to have their basic needs met. When funding is provided in a rigid framework, women who need services quickly fall outside the box.

We need to provide training and a focus on trauma-informed practices, not just within the shelter system but as a requirement of training for police, lawyers, judges and all support personnel working within the systems to reduce re-traumatization and to begin to create a system that believes and supports women's stories.

We need more access to drop-in, short-term, single-session mental health and addiction support services, specifically those that are trauma-informed and women-centred.

We need to view access to legal representation from a rights-based approach and provide each person interacting with the legal system timely and adequate representation.

We need a shelter system that includes appropriate care to trans and non-binary individuals. A system needs to understand gender as a continuum rather than a duality.

We need to differentiate between women who experience sexual exploitation and those who participate in consensual sex work. Under the shelter system, we need to simultaneously and effectively respond to both groups, which can have vastly divergent needs.

Also, we need a national domestic violence lead policy so that women can both retain their employment and deal with the time-consuming tasks that are thrust upon them as a result of surviving domestic violence.

I wish to thank the committee for taking the time to hear my voice, but I do not have lived experience of domestic violence. It is my wish to elevate the voices of the women around me who do, as I speak from a place of privilege. Therefore, I would encourage the committee to speak directly to those affected by interpersonal gender-based violence, to truly hear stories that are infused with colour and meaning and need. When we take the time to honour each and every woman who has lived and is living the horror of domestic violence, we will find with their strength and resilience that we will seek and find solutions. In listening to them with open hearts and minds, we will be able to stop gender-based violence.

Thank you.

4:55 p.m.

Liberal

The Vice-Chair Liberal Pam Damoff

Thank you very much.

We're now going to turn to our last witnesses, Daisy Kler and Jean Fong, from the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter. I'm assuming you're splitting time.

4:55 p.m.

Jean Fong Transition House Worker, Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter

Thank you.

Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting us to speak today on this important topic. My name is Jean Fong, and I have been a collective member with the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter for the past 15 years.

Established in 1973, Vancouver Rape Relief is Canada's first rape crisis centre. It operates a 24-hour rape crisis line and transition house for women escaping immediate male violence. We respond to roughly 1,300 calls and house around 100 women and their children fleeing male violence every year. Women who call us have been raped, battered, sexually harassed, incested or prostituted. They're immigrant women, indigenous women, women of colour, women from rural areas and urban centres. They're women of all classes and all races.

We operate as a collective of paid and unpaid members. Our membership varies in age, race and class. Our membership includes former battered women, women who have exited prostitution, sexual assault survivors and women who have lived in our transition house. Women call seeking emotional support, information and help with the criminal justice system, but mostly women call because they're looking for somewhere to go.

Through our daily work, we see that women's homelessness is tied to male violence against women, colonialism, racism and poverty. Because of male violence, women are forced to leave their homes to protect themselves and to protect their children. Women leave and go to hotels; homes of friends, family members, and sometimes strangers; and of course, transition houses and women's shelters. Overwhelmingly, the majority of women who have lived in our transition house are poor women, women who don't speak English, and indigenous women.

But transition houses are more than just a place to go. They are a women-only space where women are able to heal, regroup and connect with other women who are also escaping male violence. In transition houses, women talk with one another and begin to understand that the violence they endured is not a result of what they did or did not do, nor is it unique to them, but a symptom of patriarchy and the world we live in.

Women celebrate each other's successes and cry with one another when everything seems insurmountable. Transition houses provide space for women to be able to imagine how to move forward, to make plans for the future and to learn how to dream.

In the course of their stay, we also help women apply for welfare, find housing, obtain a lawyer for things like custody and access, make police statements, and find day care, child care, translation, and almost anything else they may need on a daily basis. We continue to be available as a resource and support for a woman who has lived in our transition house long after she has moved out, because matters like those I've just listed continue well past her stay. Often within the first 18 months after a woman leaves, her attacker will escalate his violence in an effort to stop and dissuade her from untangling her life from his.

In closing, I'd like to say that a multitude of initiatives, services and programs working together and alongside each other are necessary to help women be free from male violence. But access to women's services like transition houses and rape crisis centres is limited. There's no excuse for the lack of these essential resources, and they must be available to all women when they choose to leave a dangerous situation. Transition houses and rape crisis centres, and their programs, must become an economic priority for the federal government.

Thank you.

5 p.m.

Daisy Kler Transition House Worker, Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter

My name is Daisy Kler. I am a collective member at Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter as well. I've been there for about 20 years. My main area of work is in the transition house with the battered women and their kids.

Most of us have already talked about the need for funding for transition houses and affordable housing, so I'm not going to do that. I'll address other gaps in services that undermine a woman's ability to leave an abusive man.

The larger context is that in the 1990s, the federal government began downloading federal responsibilities for social programs such as subsidized housing, social assistance, child care and health care to the provinces. This dismantling of the social safety net undermines women's equality. No access to adequate housing, universal child care, health care, and abysmally low welfare rates increase women's vulnerability to men's violence.

Our recommendations are the following.

The first is about operational funding. There must be independent, women-controlled rape crisis centres and transition houses, with federal operational funding, in every community in Canada, including reserves.

The second is about welfare rates. Forty-five years of anti-violence work tells us that women need economic security in order to leave a battering husband, a sexually harassing boss or a violent pimp. Pay equity legislation is good for those who have secure work. Women in dire poverty and precarious employment need livable social assistance. The federal government should re-establish and strengthen national standards for social assistance rates with cost sharing and enforcement measures, so that each province has to comply. This step can be taken immediately.

For a long-term measure, we call on a guaranteed livable income, universally accessible, with no conditions or strings attached. This can be achieved through a negative income tax mechanism. A guaranteed livable income for a woman is how she can escape an abusive partner, and it can also prevent women from entering into abusive relationships out of economic necessity.

Third, on transportation, British Columbia is home to the infamous Highway of Tears, where many indigenous women have gone missing and been murdered. We have lost our Greyhound bus services. Infrastructure such as highways and transportation is both a federal and a provincial responsibility. We want affordable, frequent and accessible public transportation. Battered women in rural areas cannot even get to transition houses and have to resort to unsafe travelling methods that increase their vulnerability to men's violence.

Fourth, with regard to indigenous women on reserves, shelters funded by INAC, Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, receive far below the amounts received by provincially funded shelters. INAC must fund on-reserve shelters at the same level as off-reserve shelters. Also, since no community operates without a sexist bias toward women, funding should not be vulnerable to the whims of changing band councils that may not prioritize fighting violence against women. INAC-funded shelters must be independent from band councils and be in the control of indigenous women from that community.

Fifth, on policing, when women experience male violence, the first point of contact is the police. When the police fail, it undermines women's access to protection through the criminal justice system. The RCMP is in disrepute because of their sexist violence against their own female officers, and because women have no faith in police protecting them from violent men. Abusive men are rarely arrested. Often, police do not prioritize domestic violence calls, and few arrests result in convictions. The federal government has to take a leadership role and direct police across Canada to take violence against women seriously, prioritize crimes against women and force change in the attitudes and actions of the police across the country.

Thanks.