Status of Women Committee on Feb. 1st, 2018

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

I'll convene today's meeting if everybody could have a seat.

I'm very happy to be here, as we've got some great people to testify. From the Native Women's Association of Canada, we have Virginia Lomax and Katharine Curry. From the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, we have Kassandra Churcher and Savannah Gentile. Denise Peterson is a councillor with the Town of Strathmore.

It's wonderful to have everybody here today. To start, we're going to have seven minutes for each group to be able to give some testimony, and then we'll go to our rounds of questions.

We're going to start with the Native Women's Association of Canada for their seven minutes.

[Virginia Lomax, Legal Counsel, Native Women's Association of Canada]

Meegwetch.

Hello.

Good afternoon, honourable committee members and everyone.

My name is Virginia Lomax and I'm legal counsel for the Native Women's Association of Canada. I would like to begin today by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. I would also like to thank the Standing Committee on the Status of Women for inviting us to contribute to this important study on indigenous women in the federal justice and corrections system.

The Native Women's Association of Canada has long advocated for the rights of criminalized indigenous women, including those within the federal corrections system. Much of this work has centred on the lived experiences of indigenous women, including their overrepresentation in prisons, as well as the socio-economic conditions that underscore this overrepresentation. Specifically, NWAC's policy priorities related to indigenous women in the federal criminal justice system include the need to abolish the practice of segregation; the need to meaningfully engage in sections 81 and 84 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act so that the act's legislative intent is better fulfilled; and the need for community-based, trauma-informed, culturally appropriate alternatives to incarceration for indigenous women.

The over-incarceration of indigenous women is a significant area of advocacy and policy for NWAC, but it is not the only area of the federal justice and correctional system where indigenous women are overrepresented. In Canada, indigenous women are more likely to be involuntarily segregated and face longer segregation placements than non-indigenous women. Presently, indigenous women make up 50% of federal segregation placements. Women may be isolated for months, and even years, on administrative grounds.

While the overall number of segregation placements is in decline, specialized units with similar restrictions are used to the same effect. It is segregation under a different name. Indigenous women continue to experience lengthy periods of solitary confinement, defined instead as modified movement, clinical seclusion, and structured or enhanced supervision. This shift in vocabulary does not necessitate any changes to the condition of confinement, and women may still spend up to 23 hours per day in isolation.

Many psychological and emotional harms of segregation are established and recognized at the domestic and international level. The UN defines solitary confinement in excess of 15 days as torture, and Canadian courts in Ontario and British Columbia have recently ruled the practice both discriminatory and unconstitutional.

Segregation is a particularly cruel practice for women with histories of trauma and abuse, another area in which indigenous women are overrepresented. Their specific lived experiences of colonial patriarchy, intergenerational trauma, and state violence makes them particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of isolation.

CSC guidelines exclude from segregation prisoners with serious mental illnesses and significant impairments and prisoners who are actively self-harming. However, the standard for serious mental illness is a clinical judgment and must include the presentation of symptoms resulting in significant impairment in functioning. This definition does nothing to protect women with histories of mental illness or those who are experiencing a lesser degree of symptoms, for whom segregation is equally detrimental.

Prohibiting the use of segregation for prisoners who are actively self-harming is an acknowledgement that the practice should not be used to manage mental health crises, but does nothing to address the fact that segregation itself is often the cause of escalating self-harm behaviours.

For these reasons and many others, the Native Women's Association of Canada calls for a complete end to the practice of solitary confinement by any name and for any duration.

Section 81 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act was intended to allow for indigenous communities to oversee the care and custody of indigenous prisoners, but its potential for indigenous women has yet to be fully realized. Indeed, many indigenous women are unable to access section 81 beds due to the minimum- or medium-security classification requirement. Given that indigenous women are classified at higher security levels, this requirement creates significant barriers. Further, NWAC argued recently before the Supreme Court of Canada in Ewart v. Canada that indigenous women are unfairly and discriminatorily classified as higher risk prisoners, exacerbating this barrier. The CCRA does not place limitations on the security classifications, and section 81 agreements were initially understood be available to all prisoners regardless of classification.

Also complicating access is the fact that there are only two healing lodges for indigenous women. Okimaw Ohci is located on the Nekaneet First Nation in Saskatchewan, and the Buffalo Sage Wellness House is located in Edmonton, Alberta, meaning that women outside of these areas must transfer farther away from their families and communities to access them. There are no healing lodges for women in the Pacific, Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic regions or in the north. Government support and funding for the creation of additional section 81 healing lodges may help to remedy this inequity.

While section 84 was intended to support indigenous communities and engage them in the reintegration plans of indigenous prisoners, those supports are often not adequately realized. Communities may not have knowledge of section 84 for successful implementation, or may lack resources that women may need to meet the conditions of their release, such as addiction services or employment opportunities. Building resources and capacity in these areas supports entire communities as well as the women returning to them.

There must also be a degree of community ownership and self-determination in the development and implementation of reintegration plans. First nations, Métis, and Inuit communities are better able to meet the social, spiritual, and cultural needs of criminalized women.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Ms. Lomax, you're beyond your seven minutes. This will give us an opportunity to ask more questions. Could everybody get your presentation in writing? There is a little bit left to this presentation, so I will make sure that it gets circulated for you, if you wish.

[Virginia Lomax]

Sure. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

We're now going to move on to Denise Peterson for seven minutes.

[Denise Peterson, Councillor, Town of Strathmore, As an Individual]

Thank you very much. Bonjour. [Witness speaks in Blackfoot]

My name is Denise Peterson and I am speaking to you from the traditional lands of the Blackfoot people of Treaty 7. For the past 35 years I've worked as a teacher, principal, and education consultant, and though I am a councillor with the Town of Strathmore, my role here today is as a teacher, principal, and education consultant who is focused on working with young parenting women from the Siksika/Blackfoot nation in southern Alberta. My expertise relates to community-based matters, so that is what I am emphasizing today.

I also want to say that I don't speak for the Siksika, but only in relation to what my time with them has revealed to me regarding the matters before us today. I've opted to speak specifically on indigenous women's access to the justice system and appropriate legal services within our community, particularly as they relate to the very vulnerable population with whom we work.

The judicial matters most commonly having a negative impact on my students relate to the issues such as child custody and support, and being the victim of abuse and assault. My students are most often young women with infants, who must file court documents to access sustainable funding in order to live or to attend school. Often, or most always, they are afraid to do so. In the tightly knit community where they reside, such a simple thing as filing a document to ensure parental financial responsibility often has cataclysmic results. Access to legal aid is nonexistent in such cases, and no support workers are in place to assist.

The pressures of living in a small community impact the capacity and willingness of our students to act on their own behalf. In instances of abuse and assault, the young women who are victims do not have straightforward access to legal services. While victim services organizations exist in these small communities, both on and off reserve, my students regularly voice valid concerns that relatives of the perpetrator's family may be working for the agency. Beyond that concern, if they file charges, repercussions are possible, as we've witnessed far too often.

The committee is looking for recommendations on how to improve indigenous women's experience within the federal justice and correctional systems. In consultation with my community, with my students, and with experts and knowledge keepers, we believe it's important to improve access to legal representation and to ease the process by transferring matters before the court to other venues. We believe it's important to work with other service providers to streamline processes for filing the documents necessary to access student aid and social assistance, and to formally recognize restorative justice in practice as a survival mechanism for resolving matters currently brought before the court. Most importantly, we believe that we need to devise a community court system.

We need to change not only the specific structure of our justice system but also the way people think about justice, and from my perspective, of course, education would obviously be a key. We believe, of course, that there are historical systemic issues, and the previous speaker spoke to them more than adequately. Indigenous students perceive the justice system as a place of punishment, where most often they get lost. It is for this reason that we are such a strong supporter of community courts. Having a crown who is willing to work with the defence to come up with strategic plans and support systems for the accused is probably the most impactful system of support that we have seen. If my community could have this in place, lives and the communities would change.

When my young indigenous students are before the court, very few consider the reasons why they ended up there in the first place. The justice system functions in such a way that only looks at what was done. When it does look at the why factor, it's most often in relation to sentencing and rarely in relation to prevention. Community courts aim to tackle issues of poverty, domestic violence, homelessness, and displacement by identifying the systemic issues that led to the young women being in court, and then setting them up with community supports that can assist them in resolution and restoration.

Utilizing indigenous ways of knowing to build a comprehensive community court process would work. We know that if our government truly believes that the function of the justice system is to focus on prevention, rehabilitation and healing, there need to be major changes in the way our court system works. We need community courts and not just pilot projects. The first step that we need to take is to clearly identify what we believe the intended purpose of the justice system is and what functions it has in our society. If we truly believe that the correct approach is to focus on healing and prevention, my belief is that community courts directed and guided by indigenous community knowledge keepers and experts are the very best option.

Here I reference Roberta Jamieson, and end this by saying emphatically that in our Siksika community we know that our indigenous people possess all the capacity and every requisite element necessary to create and implement community court systems that are a reflection of their proven competency and wisdom. Furthermore, we know they require encouragement, support, and respect as they speak their truth to power.

I want to thank this committee for the opportunity to speak before you, and I really look forward to the outcomes. I thank all the other speakers for the education they've been able to offer me. It's much appreciated. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much, Denise.

We're now going to move to the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies.

You have seven minutes.

[Savannah Gentile, Director, Advocacy and Legal Issues, Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies]

My name is Savannah Gentile. I am the director of advocacy with CAEFS.

I want to start by thanking this committee for taking the time to look into this very important issue. I, too, want to acknowledge that we are on unceded Algonquin territory.

The B.C. Supreme Court recently released a decision on segregation that found that segregation disproportionately impacts indigenous women. Unfortunately, by failing to centre on the experiences of incarcerated women, it did not extend this impact to all women, and in particular to maximum security women prisoners. I'll address that issue in a minute.

CSC itself acknowledged in its 10-year status report on women's corrections in stating the following:

Segregation tends to have a significant impact on women [prisoners]. Generally speaking, women are linked to each other through relationships and the isolation of segregation, combined with the crisis or stress the woman is experiencing, can take its toll.....

Despite this acknowledgement; despite the fact that Ashley Smith died in a segregation cell in 2007, the year after CSC's 10-year review closed; despite the completion in 2013 of the inquest into what was deemed her homicide, the Office of the Correctional Investigator reported last year that CSC has failed to implement the very specific recommendations that could have increased funding and community capacity to “provide the level of care necessary to manage challenging or complex mental health cases” in the community.

It's worth noting that even though these recommendations came out of the inquest into Ashley Smith's death, CSC never actually diagnosed Ms. Smith with a mental health issue while she was incarcerated. Instead of implementing these recommendations, “CSC claims that it is too costly to place and treat” women with mental health issues in psychiatric facilities, and further that “these facilities are reluctant to accept complex needs cases”. These claims are not entirely substantiated, as the OCI notes, “as CSC has received proposals from external psychiatric/forensics facilities that would expand treatment capacity in the community”.

Let me be clear: CSC did not implement recommendations that could have led to a massive change in our ability to treat mental health in the community.

In the conversation about segregation, we would be remiss not to speak about the impact of maximum security. Maximum security is a form of segregation in women's prisons. Women in maximum are subject to restrictive, punitive conditions, and they are isolated from the general population. They experience similar harms. They have similar difficulty adjusting to the general population and to the community more broadly. I am personally aware of a number of cases of women being released to the general population only to be returned to maximum, sometimes first through a segregation placement, due to issues with adjusting.

Indigenous women are significantly overrepresented in maximum security. This has been the case for a number of years. The prevalence of trauma and mental health issues in maximum security is staggering. Despite these facts, there are significant gaps in dynamic security, which result in serious consequences for the safety of women in maximum. There have been at least three serious assaults at the Grand Valley prison for women in Kitchener in the past four or so months that I know of. Two of these assaults resulted in hospitalization, and in one case the women involved had reported their interpersonal difficulties to staff weeks in advance but nothing was done.

To deal with interpersonal issues on the pods, CSC frequently engages in cell moves for the women and engages in what is called “modified movement”, which is essentially locking the women down in their cells under solitary confinement. Women in maximum security have restricted access to education, programming, and spirituality, in part due to a lack of infrastructure to support the unique needs of women in maximum, and also to the fact that these women can't get off the “max” unit to access programming in education in the rest of the prison because of what is known as the “level system”, which was highly criticized by the Officer of the Correctional Investigator this year.

It's not the first time that the Office of the Correctional Investigator has levelled criticism of this kind. In fact, in 2011, the management protocol was eliminated after much protest from CAEFS and the Office of the Correctional Investigator. It was eliminated, only to be replaced by its cousin, the level system, which demonstrates yet again CSC's resistance to change and its inability to correct itself.

The fact that women are over-classified, in particular indigenous women and women with mental health issues, is not news. This year, the Auditor General's report “Preparing Women Offenders for Release” identified that the CSC had not implemented an initial security classification process specifically for women, and it in fact continues to use a tool developed and validated on a population of white male prisoners over 25 years ago.

Moira Law recommended that all women be started at minimum security because CSC's classification scheme is discriminatory. Unfortunately, CSC never published her report.

Before I get into what is possible with the current legislation, I want to say that there is a serious need for judicial oversight and the elimination of segregation in all of its forms. CSC has a track record of failing or refusing to implement recommendations or to correct itself accordingly and cannot be left without this oversight. There's also a need for women to have their sentences revisited where correctional treatment results in the mismanagement of lawful sanction and renders sentences punitive and more severe than that imposed by the sentencing judge. This was in fact recommended by the Hon. Louise Arbour in her 1996 report.

What is possible with the current legislation? In the interest of time, I want to first refer you to Senator Kim Pate's testimony on November 28 of last year before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. She spoke in depth about section 29, which I briefly touched on in the beginning of my testimony. She also talked about sections 77 and 80 of the CCRA, which speak to the importance of involving groups with particular knowledge and expertise on women's issues and those of indigenous peoples.

My colleagues today have addressed sections 81 and 84, so I'll just end by saying that all of these sections have been severely underutilized since their inception 25 years ago, in part because CSC policy—not law, but policy—has restricted what the legislation allows, and in so doing has interfered with the intent of these provisions. The requirement of minimum security is a policy choice, not a legislative requirement.

I want to call on you all as members of Parliament who are taking on this very crucial and important issue to exercise the right of access granted to you by section 72 of the CCRA, as Minister Damoff recently did. It's nearly impossible to have a complete understanding of the state of our prisons unless you take the time to go in to meet with the women and to respectfully listen to what they say.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Excellent. Thank you so much.

Before we get started, I would really like to welcome Ms. Sansoucy, as well as Mr. Dhaliwal.

Thank you very much for joining us today.

Today, we're going to start with seven minutes of questioning by Bernadette Jordan.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for appearing today. It's all been very good testimony.

Ms. Lomax, I'm going to start with you. You talked about the number of indigenous women in segregation being 50% higher. Is that 50% of women?

[Virginia Lomax]

Yes, I can clarify that, absolutely. Presently, indigenous women make up 50% of federal segregation placements. Whether or not that is an increase, I don't have that at this moment.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Okay, thank you.

You also mentioned—and it was interesting because it was something that I brought up at our last meeting with the officials from corrections—that there are no healing lodges in eastern Canada—Atlantic Canada and Ontario.

[Virginia Lomax]

Yes, that's correct.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Basically, their thought was that there's not enough population to drive them and that there are also other options available. Can you comment on that? I know we've seen great success with healing lodges, and I know how important they are in the justice system for indigenous women particularly, but if you don't have access to them in your community, are there other options that could help?

[Virginia Lomax]

We would certainly like to see the option of strengthening community sentences, community-based sentences, and community release.

To flag one issue, although there may be some successful cases coming out of these healing lodges, something that I ran out of time before being able to say it—clearly my own fault—was that Canada's colonial history has created a real climate and a culture of distrust, where indigenous people and indigenous women see the justice system as not representing them. Therefore, many women in these programs feel that the cultural programming available in prisons represents another form of colonialism, and that's because the programs themselves are largely developed, defined, and designed by the Canadian government and administered by non-indigenous staff.

An issue is that many of these programs present a homogenized view of indigenous cultures, whereas the reality is that the indigenous population of Canada is not an homogeneous population. Many of these programs fail to recognize that teachings and practices that may be relevant in some communities are non-existent in others. What might be protocol, a teaching, or culture in Treaty No. 6 territory, where most of these healing lodges are, would quite simply not be relevant to Inuit, Anishinaabeg, or Maliseet attendees. Acknowledging the differences between first nations, Métis, and Inuit women, as well as the distinct identities within these groups, would lead to the creation and implementation of more effective programs.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Did you submit your comments or a report to the committee beforehand?

[Virginia Lomax]

Not beforehand—

Oh yes, we did.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

You have? Okay, great. Thank you.

[Virginia Lomax]

About two hours beforehand.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Thank you so much.

That's fine, as long as we have a copy. That's wonderful.

[Virginia Lomax]

Thank you.

[Bernadette Jordan, Liberal, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

I'm going now to the Elizabeth Fry Societies.

We've heard quite a bit of testimony over the past number of months with regard to the accessibility of the Gladue reports, for indigenous women particularly. Can you speak a bit about your experience with this? How important or necessary are these reports for indigenous women moving forward, and how can they affect the long term?

[Savannah Gentile]

We recently began moving away from using the term “Gladue reports”, because the woman after whom they are named never got the benefit of those reports, namely Jamie Gladue.

Gladue reports, unfortunately, come at a point too late. They come at the point of sentencing. In our experience, the information in them can often be misused or misunderstood in ways that don't achieve the effects they're meant to result in, namely alternatives to incarceration. Indigenous women are one of the fastest growing prison populations, and I think that shows that these reports aren't actually having the impact they're meant to have.

[Kassandra Churcher, Executive Director, Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies]

There is also a serious lack of qualified and quality Gladue writers and reporters. The process of submitting information or your social history in such a report often requires women to disclose intense histories of sexual trauma, abuse, and domestic abuse. The formalized process itself, where someone discloses their own personal history in a report that will have consequences for their sentencing, requires someone who has quality training and there are not enough people in Canada to do it. Often, women have contacted us because their reports are not complete. They did not feel comfortable disclosing further information, so their sentencing is then incomplete, which completely undermines the purpose of having a social history report.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

You have a minute left.