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.