Over the past two years we have been working with the directors of victim services from the provinces and territories with a new survey that's looking at the number of victims coming to various services. That's not just shelters, but any type of service. We are monitoring that closely.
Similarly, we will be watching and looking at the police data more closely to see if the number of police-reported sexual assaults sustains itself and continues.
The pre-MeToo and post-MeToo report that you referred to was very interesting. We looked on a quarterly basis, every three months, to see the increase of police-reported sexual assaults. We looked at it by province as well as by large cities. We noted that after the #MeToo social media phenomenon, there was a very substantial increase, but then it decreased. We're not sure why. It could have been two things happening. We know that some police services were advertising new hotlines, and we knew that Canadians were out there—it was in the media—and maybe more victims were feeling more comfortable to report what they experienced to the police.
We will be monitoring to see if those numbers keep going up, and we will be working with the directors of victim services to collect information from them.