Evidence of meeting #83 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 métis.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:35 p.m.
Program Director, Aboriginal Legal Services
Yes. This is not rocket science. This isn't new.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Martin Shields Conservative Bow River, AB
Great. Thank you.
Dr. Yuen, you mentioned some specific things about “who”, which in a previous panel I probably asked a couple of times about the “who”. I think you began to identify the “who” that was important to do things, both within and out.
One of the things I found very interesting was your intergenerational piece. Would you talk about that a little more, about the significance of it?
12:35 p.m.
Associate Professor, Concordia University, As an Individual
Yes. I've been doing some research with indigenous women in general, not just indigenous women who've been incarcerated, looking at what healing means to them. It always goes back to intergenerational relationships—my son, my daughter, but also my grandmother, my mother.
When they're experiencing a ceremony, they make comments such as, “My mother and my grandmother were never able to do this. I do it for them. I do it for my son.” It's so connected. It's so intertwined that you can't separate and just focus on the woman—the individual—for healing. It needs to encompass, I mean, seven generations before and seven generations after. When we're trying to support, if you want to frame it as such, rehabilitation or healing, if you're looking at it from their perspective, doesn't it make sense, then, that we create programs that encompass multiple generations?
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Martin Shields Conservative Bow River, AB
When you talk about “generational”, from my experience that widens in a sense how it's often viewed. It may be a number of family, in a sense, connections that are not just directly linear. Have you experienced that?
12:35 p.m.
Associate Professor, Concordia University, As an Individual
I'm sorry, can you clarify what you mean by many generations as opposed to linear?
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Martin Shields Conservative Bow River, AB
I mean linear in the sense of grandmother, daughter of, son of, but it expands in the sense of the family as they see it.
12:35 p.m.
Associate Professor, Concordia University, As an Individual
Yes, absolutely. To incorporate that line of thinking, it's not just the nuclear family but the larger collective, and I certainly don't know and am not the person to ask about the tangibles of what that would include. I think that because the trauma has been intergenerational, to address it the healing needs to be that as well.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Martin Shields Conservative Bow River, AB
Having listened to the other witness and what he described, is that something that you believe would fit into what you have seen as a solution?
12:35 p.m.
Associate Professor, Concordia University, As an Individual
Do you mean the program, for lack of a better word, in Toronto?
12:35 p.m.
Associate Professor, Concordia University, As an Individual
Yes, I think it's a good start. The problem is that we're just beginning. We're just at the cusp of—the birth of—trying to understand colonization and where we go from here. We've come to the point of this pan-indigenous approach. How do we pinpoint it? If we need to start with this “being all-inclusive, for everyone”, then what?
We have to start somewhere, and I think that this is a good start. It might start involving other specific nations and then mobilize them to move beyond this sort of “one shoe fits all” stage we are at right now.
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Karen Vecchio
Thank you so much.
We're now going to move on to Sheila Malcolmson for seven minutes.
12:35 p.m.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to all three of the witnesses.
Again, talking about mandatory minimum sentencing, here is a scenario that I've heard about how taking away from judges the ability to use their discretion in sentencing has been a problem, and how disappointing it is that this government hasn't actually repaired that policy of the previous government. Here is the way it's been described to me.
A woman—in this case an indigenous woman—ends up being accidentally the accessory to a crime. Her boyfriend uses her car as a getaway car, her house is the address. It could be something so remote. She doesn't have great access to the justice system, doesn't have the means, and doesn't get good representation. In any case, in the past the judge might have been able to say, “I see you're in a bind here. I will allow you to serve your sentence on weekends in jail, at which point you can ask a grandmother or somebody to look after the kids.” If the hard and fast rule is that you must serve your sentence starting on day one and ending on year three or whatever, then that woman can lose her children, and those kids go into foster care or are split from their family, and then we have the intergenerational trauma that Dr. Yuen described.
Could it be that simple, that small a crime, that then has that collateral damage, when mandatory minimum sentencing is the framework in which women are sentenced?
12:40 p.m.
Program Director, Aboriginal Legal Services
Yes, that's certainly the case. In some mandatory minimums, depending on how they're prosecuted and regardless of the person's actual involvement, if they are factually guilty, they will get the mandatory minimum. If the mandatory minimum is a year or two or three, that's what they're going to get.
The other thing that gets in the way is that any mandatory minimum sentence prevents a conditional sentence from being put in. Generally, if you get a weekend sentence you can't get one longer than 90 days. If the court felt that 90 days wasn't enough and they felt that four, five, or six months...you can do a conditional sentence, which is served in the community, with house arrests and other difficult sanctions, but that's not available if conditional sentences don't permit it.
What happens then is that the person goes to jail, and if they don't have someone to look after their kids, you're exactly right, they will lose their kids.
12:40 p.m.
NDP
12:40 p.m.
Program Director, Aboriginal Legal Services
Certainly, yes. Even if the person gets their children back, they will have been removed from their families. I can tell you, having read thousands of the Gladue reports that we produce, that experience of being taken from your family and put into foster care—particularly when a child is older, because they're not going to one home and they'll often be moved from place to place to place—is incredibly damaging.
12:40 p.m.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
Dr. Yuen, has that damage, as described by Mr. Rudin, been something you've focused on in your research?
12:40 p.m.
Associate Professor, Concordia University, As an Individual
It's certainly something I've heard the women I have spoken to talk about. They talk about being placed in foster care, or having someone in their family incarcerated and how it's impacted them, and the self-fulfilling prophecy, “I said when I was younger it wasn't going to happen to me, but here I am.”
I'm dreaming here, but wouldn't it be so amazing if the child could go, or the mom stayed at home with their child, or if it must be prison, then the child goes to prison with mom and is there beyond the age of four or seven.
12:40 p.m.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
To Melanie Omeniho, for the Women of the Métis Nation, you talked about Gladue reports either not applying to Métis people or not being accessible. Can you talk a bit more about whether there are waiting lists? In your experience, what is the access to these, if they are an option?
12:40 p.m.
President, Women of the Métis Nation
For starters, most of the time defence attorneys are not advising Métis women on what the purpose of a Gladue report is and how it will benefit them. They're not encouraged to engage in the process of asking for a Gladue report, and if they don't ask, there won't be one.
Even in some instances where I have gone to court to advocate for somebody and have advised the legal aid defence attorney that they should be getting a Gladue report, they don't. In fact, they tell the judge on recommendations at sentencing that Gladue factors have been considered. That is not the purpose of a Gladue report.
Part of it is that I know the actual structures within the system are so taxed. It is the issue of funding the Gladue reports. Who is funding this, with what resources, and how many Gladue report writers are there considering the number of indigenous people who are being incarcerated or sentenced? It does become a really major issue.
If somebody is not visibly an indigenous person, they will try to get away without doing any Gladue reports or engaging them in that process at all. I've even seen where Elizabeth Fry does assessments on people, and people will say, “That's like a Gladue report, and that's all they need.”
12:40 p.m.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
I have a quick question for any of the three witnesses. We heard last week from Correctional Service of Canada, who said, “Our approach to working with indigenous women is holistic and women-centred, and is built to address their unique needs and contribute to their safe and timely reintegration into the community.” Has that been your experience?
12:45 p.m.
NDP
Sheila Malcolmson NDP Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC
That's a simple answer.
Is there anything from the other witnesses?