Our unit is capped at $150,000 per annum. That is regardless of how extensively our files have grown over the last number of years.
We are very limited in how we can offer direct support under our mandate until victims' own support systems kick in, so we rely a lot on Alberta Works for our victims when it comes to accessing shelters.
Shelters available to our victims when they ring is where they have to go. We don't even have the capacity to take them. We can get them a taxi, transportation, again through Alberta Works.
That aspect of the funding is.... We have women in rural communities with their kids. Their lives are in the rural communities. The kids go to school there. If they're trying to leave a domestic violence situation, they might go to Calgary, if they live in Lacombe County. That's uprooting everything. That's revictimizing them when they're already going through something that's so traumatic. They're already at a heightened level of anxiety and stress and everything.
To try to streamline the funding, make it equitable, what can we build within communities so that we can help those victims when they need it most and not revictimize them by pulling them away? Yes, their home life is not a safe place because of the domestic violence, but where can we take them that it is not tearing them away from absolutely everything they know?