Hi, everybody. I'm Leslie Varley, the executive director at BC Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres.
I belong to the Giskaast clan of Nisga'a nation and reside at Musqueam territory in Vancouver. I'm calling in today from beautiful Lekwungen territory in Victoria.
I'm just going to jump right in to some recommendations. There is so much that needs to happen and that needs to happen collectively and collaboratively.
First of all, we indigenous women know that our women and girls are known and accepted as collateral damage by both government and by the resource sector in the sense that this stuff happens and we pay. However, we still don't hold the sector nor the government accountable for their workers. My recommendations are mostly around funding indigenous organizations to provide services to our own people, but I have a few more.
The first is that we need to require resource industries to work with local nations and urban indigenous women to develop credible and practical safety plans for indigenous women and girls. Those plans also need to include the accountability of the resource sectors themselves and accountability for their workers.
In a recent situation in northern B.C., a resource industry company presented a so-called safety reconciliation plan to the town council. They proposed a safety plan for indigenous women and girls. This plan was for all men to wear a little awareness campaign item on their clothing. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. These awareness campaigns are never evaluated for effectiveness. Their leaders are not vetted thoroughly from a women's safety perspective. Industry and government seem to love these visual but ineffective responses where they are essentially seen to be doing something.
These actions are meaningless to indigenous women. Any racist can wear that little pledge button. It really isn't helping. These man-made solutions help the entrepreneur make a profit off the violence that we indigenous women experience. In this instance, indigenous women were never consulted by that resource company in developing safety plans for indigenous women. This is a very common experience for us. That one was fresh. That was this week.
I also think it's really important for us to support realistic and practical funding for indigenous people and meet them where they live. In B.C., 85% of us live off reserve and we still have no long-term funding for violence against women and the wraparound services needed to support us. We still have to go through our mainstream colleagues to get funding. We at BC Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres—the 25 centres—are only project-based to develop capacity. I remind us that it's 2022 and we are still project based in anti-violence funding.
There's a shortage of indigenous wraparound services. Indigenous organizations are grossly underfunded compared to mainstream organizations. There are too few culturally appropriate services for indigenous people and therefore we have fewer ways to interface with professionals who can help us and who can provide us with support or connect us to support services. All these areas need to be supported comprehensively, so that we can properly service our own communities.
Another area is the police. We need to work with the police to make them investigate. They have it within their discretion to decide whether they will investigate or not, so police are in fact gatekeeping many of these issues. We need to hold them accountable for collecting data. The police input the data that goes to Stats Canada, yet Stats Canada clearly indicates to us that there is severe dearth of data.
Finally, I'm just going to talk about housing. The housing situation for women fleeing violence is horrific. A home where a woman can raise her children is a luxury most of us cannot afford in this province. We need to fund indigenous urban groups and first nations to develop more second-stage housing.
There's often nowhere to go and men exploiting women know that there is no security without the safety of housing. Housing is what we need to keep women and their children grounded and safe, so they have less need to go into the survival sex trade, put up with violent relationships and endure violence against their bodies, and so they can better protect their daughters and sons from sexual exploitation.
Thank you.
I'll pass it over to you, Ninu.