Status of Women Committee on March 21st, 2024

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you so much.

I know that all the witnesses spoke about the importance of wraparound supports. My question is for Hilda.

What do wraparound supports look like for you? Why are they important?

[Hilda Anderson-Pyrz]

Thank you so much, Leah.

I just really wanted to quickly amplify that when we look at this, it's really about justice and human security as well. We really need to put a lens on the principles for change from the national inquiry when we look at a focus on substantive equality and on human and indigenous rights. It has to be a decolonizing approach. Wraparound services, they have to be strength-based and rooted in our indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing. They have to be holistic, and that will help strengthen us as indigenous women, girls and two-spirit and gender-diverse people with protective factors to allow us to live our lives with dignity and safety.

In addition to this, wraparound services also uphold our indigenous and human rights because as indigenous women, girls and two-spirit and gender-diverse people, when we're born we're born with a bundle of rights and, right from birth as indigenous women, our rights are not upheld. That's really critical, especially when we look at call for justice 3.4, which is for all governments to ensure indigenous communities receive immediate and necessary resources, including funding and support for the establishment of sustainable, permanent, no-barrier, preventative, accessible and holistic wraparound services.

In addition to this, I also wanted to quickly highlight call for justice 3.1. It calls upon all governments to ensure the rights to health and wellness of indigenous people and specifically that indigenous women and girls are recognized and protected on an equitable basis.

We also look at the importance of creating pathways for human security. If we do that, we will be really focusing on what wraparound supports look like from our lens and ensuring that we see ourselves in those wraparound supports, that we feel connected, that we feel like we belong and that these supports are meeting our needs from a cultural lens. Often the supports and services that are out there are not meeting our needs, and often they're really deeply embedded with systemic and structural racism. When we're vulnerable, we're seeking safety, but we continue to experience violence because of the systemic and structural racism.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Wow, what an incredible panel.

I would like to begin by just thanking Hilda and Keely, and online, Sandra and Charlene. Thank you so much for your testimony today. We do greatly appreciate it.

We're going to suspend so we can switch over the panels, and then we'll get started immediately. Thank you to the ladies, and we'll be back in a second.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

We're reconvening and I'd like to welcome everybody. If everybody could take their seats, that would be wonderful.

I'm just going to remind the ladies who are on today's panel about the earpieces. When you're not speaking, please make sure you have your microphone off. That would be very useful. Thank you very much.

Also, I'm sure you know about interpretation, but what we're going to do is that I would now like to welcome two witnesses for this next panel. Before we get started I am going to give notice, because everybody knows that today we have votes. Bells will be going at 5:15 p.m. We will take a vote at that time, but I believe we all will go to vote at 5:25 p.m., and I'll ask for that unanimous consent at that time.

We only have two panellists at this time and although we're starting late, it will all work out in the end.

To begin, I would like to welcome the Native Council of Prince Edward Island and Lisa Cooper, who is the president and chief. From the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, we have Jessica Savoy, who is the national youth representative.

I'll pass it over to Lisa Cooper for her five minutes of testimony.

When you see my arm going up, please wind up your remarks.

[Lisa Cooper, President and Chief, Native Council of Prince Edward Island]

Thank you.

I want to give a land acknowledgement. I am from Prince Edward Island, which is the traditional, ancestral homeland of my ancestors, the Mi’kmaq peoples.

Hello, members of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. My name is Lisa Cooper, and I am the president and chief of the Native Council of Prince Edward Island.

My organization has existed since 1975 and has been advocating for the rights of off-reserve indigenous peoples for nearly 50 years.

Just recently, there was an instance of a missing and murdered indigenous woman in P.E.I. Summer Kneebone was reported missing on August 7, 2023. My organization rallied around the family immediately, and we spent the next month working closely with the municipal police, RCMP and volunteers to locate Summer Kneebone's remains, which were found on September 15.

In this instance, my organization encountered many issues in our search efforts. The municipal police force and RCMP officers did not know what the acronym of MMIWG stood for. They did not communicate with each other to coordinate our volunteer search efforts, and P.E.I. had not yet implemented a missing persons act that authorized the police or RCMP to request access to Summer’s social media records. As P.E.I. is Canada's smallest province, cases of MMIWG are not as common for us, but situations have untold impacts on smaller communities.

My organization works closely with our sister organization, the New Brunswick Aboriginal Peoples Council, in supporting their “Looking Out For Each Other” project. This project is a collaboration among maritime provinces to report cases of missing indigenous people and coordinate search efforts. Through this project we have found that many times an indigenous person goes missing in one maritime province only to be found in a different province. This project has shown, on a small scale, the success that can occur when search efforts are coordinated across different provinces, organizations and police services. The red dress alert that is being proposed by the government will be a natural extension of the work already being done in the maritime provinces and will be welcomed greatly by our communities.

Between 2017 and 2019, I served as a representative for the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples on the MMIWG working group table, providing input into the 2021 MMIWG national action plan. In the three years since the MMIWG national action plan was released, I have seen little commitment from the federal government to address MMIWG and 2SLGBTQIA+ in off-reserve communities.

The MMIWG national plan provided an inclusive definition for distinctions-based supports that included off-reserve, urban and two-spirit representation. Over 80% of the indigenous peoples in Canada live off reserve, yet our voices are often silent in consultations. As we move forward in the development of the red dress alert, I ask that the federal government uphold the inclusive approach to MMIWG promised in the national action plan and ensure that the voices of the off-reserve indigenous peoples, as represented by the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, are heard in the development of the red dress alert.

Thank you, honourable members, for your time. Wela'lin.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you so much.

We'll continue online with Jessica Savoy.

Jessica, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Jessica Savoy, National Youth Representative, Congress of Aboriginal Peoples]

Good evening, members of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to bear witness to this important issue.

My name is Jessica Savoy. I'm a proud Nisga'a woman born and raised in the beautiful unceded Coast Salish territory of what we now know as Vancouver. I am calling from the unceded Coast Salish territory.

I would like to share briefly that I am the vice-president of the Northwest Indigenous Council and the national youth representative for the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples.

I am happy to be here with you to advocate on behalf of my community, as well as the CAP national youth council, to better the lives of all indigenous peoples in Canada and to help in doing that.

I also want to share that most of my life I have worked with communities to implement policy, to engage on important issues affecting them and to work with indigenous and non-indigenous youth within the inner-city neighbourhoods of Vancouver but also across the country through my representative role with the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples. I have experience working with local non-profits and municipal governments in various capacities.

I want to share my experience and perspectives on the red dress alert and some insights from the CAP youth on its implementation.

We know that, in May 2023, the House of Commons supported a motion that deemed the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls and two-spirit and gender-diverse peoples a national emergency and called for funding for an alert system to inform the public when an indigenous person is missing.

In December, through the MMIWG working group, CAP participated in the red dress alert engagement with the family and survivors circle. They chose to engage CAP and others because the federal government wasn't engaging enough groups. Much work remains, and it requires the perspectives and insights of all indigenous partners.

The red dress alert was also on the agenda of the indigenous-federal-provincial-territorial meeting held in February. Again, we were not fully included in this conversation. I do want to note, though, that I was invited at the very last minute to witness inside of that room, at the IFPT meeting. We were not fully included in this conversation, but I was able to witness parts of that engagement.

Given the history of colonialism and abuse, the often-reported anti-indigenous racism in the delivery of policing services, the killing of indigenous peoples by police officers during mental wellness checks and the dismissal by law enforcement of those reported cases of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls and two-spirit and gender-diverse peoples, setting up a red dress alert will be challenging. We know this. Governments have a responsibility to address these issues, especially in urban areas where policing is delivered by mainstream policing services.

Call for justice 5.8 calls on all governments “to enact missing persons legislation”. Preliminary national research on missing persons legislation in Canada identified huge gaps. Many provinces and territories do not have missing persons legislation that covers MMIWG, and Canada is currently lacking national standards for investigating cases of MMIWG2S+. Without these in order prior to the implementation of a red dress alert system, the process will fail to address systemic racism and build trust.

CAP PTOs have already begun this work. I would like to share with you an example from New Brunswick. In that province, working in collaboration with the right stakeholders, a national helpline was set up to provide support to indigenous families when loved ones go missing. Our affiliate organization, the New Brunswick Aboriginal Peoples Council, in partnership with the Gignoo Transition House, established 1-833-MMI-FIND, which is the helpline for families in need of direction. It's a 24-hour helpline that serves as a support. It provides information and a referral service to families to navigate the various systems when a loved person goes missing.

I want to share that the 1-833-MMI-FIND support line is a good example of what can be accomplished when indigenous communities lead the work. Equitable and respectful engagement is critical to the success of any program or policy the government is developing, and codevelopment is essential.

I will leave it at that, but one more note I wanted to make is that the current model, with the distinctions-based approach, is not necessarily working, because off-reserve indigenous peoples are often left out of consultation processes.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you very much.

I'm going to keep this session very tight. I will be cutting everybody off at the six-minute mark.

I'm going to pass the floor over to Dominique Vien first.

Dominique, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Good afternoon, ladies. Thank you for being with us this afternoon.

Obviously, this is an extremely important study that I think could also be very promising for indigenous women and girls who are facing challenges.

We're looking at how we can land, in a relevant and efficient way, a system called a “red dress alert” so that there will never again be any indigenous girls or women who fall into the wrong hands, in particular, or find themselves in impossible situations and lose their lives.

Ms. Cooper, how do you see this system? Do you see this as a national system? Who do you think should be involved in this organization, or who should be involved?

We felt and still feel that we want to have police forces as partners, but we don't necessarily want to have them as managers of this organization. I don't think a lot of people around the table are questioning the relevance of this system. I think there are questions about how to organize it.

What are your thoughts on that? Practically speaking, how do we set up this system? Who would do that? What would the cost be? Who's going to fund it? Would it be available across the country? What do we do with places where there's no cell reception, for example, and so on?

How do you see this system?

[Lisa Cooper]

Thank you. That's a very good question.

I think there are models out there that can be used. If you're looking at the Amber alert that's used for missing children.... I think there are models out there. The Amber alert is a Canada-wide one. I absolutely think there can be a model that is done like that.

In P.E.I., we're small. We don't often see murdered and missing here, because they go to New Brunswick or Nova Scotia. They end up in the bigger cities and in Toronto. I think there absolutely needs to be a Canada-wide one, and I think there are models out there that can be utilized, such as an Amber alert, for something similar for this.

The “Looking Out For Each Other” project that we partnered on with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia does a kind of three-province approach. There is that 1-800 number they can call and get support within three provinces. We work closely together to share information.

That's quick and dirty.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Lisa Cooper]

I'm sorry. I said that it was a quick and dirty answer, because I know she's going to cut me off. She said this was going to be a really fast one, so I'm just trying to give you an example that could be utilized.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

I'm going to stop the time. I'm looking at Dominique.

It's just something like what I would say that's just fun and silly, Dominique. That's all. The English translation is hard.

It's all good. I'll continue the clock and we can resume.

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Ms. Cooper, I was very busy taking notes of what you were telling us. You said that we should follow the example of the Amber Alert. Is that correct?

I didn't understand why Ms. Cooper's intervention was stopped. So Ms. Cooper can continue her intervention, correct?

[A voice]

She had finished her intervention.

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Okay. I understand.

Ms. Cooper, in terms of funding, on the one hand, and police involvement, on the other, you said that there had been problems with interpretation and communication with the RCMP and local police, that it wasn't obvious and that there was perhaps a lack of knowledge of indigenous culture.

Beyond that, when it comes to the management of this new program, women told us that this system should be managed by indigenous communities, and ideally by women. Do you share that view?

[Lisa Cooper]

I think it is essential that it be community-led. It needs to be indigenous-led. As I indicated in my speech, the police and the RCMP weren't really aware of what “MMIWG” meant, so there had to be a lot of cross-cultural competency training with them. It's about rallying the community. We were able to rally the community through social media, so I think social media does a great job in education. Over 200 people showed up for the search.

I think there needs to be a lot of educational support around this. However, when you're looking at taking the lead, I think it needs to be indigenous-led.

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Ms. Cooper, should indigenous communities also choose the criteria used to determine when an alert should be triggered?

[Lisa Cooper]

Absolutely. I can't speak on behalf of all. We are tight-knit in our community. A lot of our women at risk are homeless. They suffer from mental health issues and addictions. It was almost 10 days before the family noticed there was no response from their child. That's what triggered us into the actual search and the connection with the family.

We have since put an action plan in place to stay connected to our vulnerable population in terms of homelessness, mental health, addictions, poverty and the ones involved in the child welfare system. There are so many areas that put them at risk, so we do a lot now with the community. How do we check on each other, and how do we make sure we are doing regular check-ins with the most vulnerable populations?

[Dominique Vien, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Is that it?

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

I'm sorry. I'm now going to pass it over to Sonia online.

Sonia, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair. I think Lisa was the....

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Go ahead, Lisa.

[Lisa Hepfner, Liberal, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

I was ready, but I think my colleague Mrs. Vien read my mind, because she wanted to talk about the same thing.

I think everyone on this committee is in favour of a red dress alert. That's not even a question. We're all in favour of it being indigenous-led and culturally appropriate. Really, what we're trying to nail down in this study is what it will look like and the best way to approach this next.

As my colleague Michelle Ferreri mentioned, a phenomenal witness earlier this week set up her own red dress alert system in her community in Nova Scotia. I can't remember what she called it—it was something else. She managed to get, I think, 4,000 people signed up to receive these alerts. She is managing the whole thing herself, but it's very effective because the people receiving the alerts have all signed up. They are all engaged. They go on and share these alerts on their social media pages and it has a very far reach. She's had extraordinary success in helping to find and save indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQIA people. I think 96% was the success rate.

Maybe, Lisa Cooper, you can talk to us about this model and whether this would work across the country. The other model we have is the Amber alert, for example. It is a national platform, but it's rolled out and managed by provinces and territories that decide the parameters on when the alert is going to roll out.

Maybe you can comment on some of these different models and how you think it would work best.

[Lisa Cooper]

We didn't really create a model with our action plan. It was more or less a learning lesson from the Summer Kneebone case.

We were lucky enough in our searches that we had volunteers who were non-indigenous allies and members from the community she was from. We were lucky enough to reach an instructor from New Brunswick or Nova Scotia who was teaching a law course, and he got his students involved online. While we were doing the search, he had his students online, and they were able to track a vehicle that was similar to hers. Because of using social media and the people who connected through social media in his classroom, we were able to track this vehicle down. It was just recently sold. It wasn't the actual vehicle.

I think it's dead-on what they're thinking, which is to not depend only on indigenous communities but on Canadians in general. When there's a call-out and a process that you can utilize, a common social media platform you can utilize, you would be amazed at how many people will get on there, especially the younger generation, because they're much more technologically witty than me. I don't use social media very often. The number of people we had was close to 400 and 500 if you looked at social media.

The Amber alert is something I use as an example, but I think that this one needs to be indigenous-led, and I think it needs to be not only indigenous but non-indigenous, because they are allies. They can share the information and the resources they have. It's like giving you 500 sets of eyes. You can almost track somebody down with 500 sets of eyes, so they are really dead-on. I don't want to use examples because I might be mistaking them. They're very correct, and social media is the way to go. If you're using an Amber alert, there need be connections to each other. We need to able to connect to other organizations far and wide.

We have a person here who's from Newfoundland, an indigenous person at risk. I have one from Ontario. If you look at Chantel Moore, she wasn't from New Brunswick, but she was one who got murdered by a police officer through a wellness check. I think there's such an impact across Canada that it doesn't matter where you're from.