Kuei, hello.
Madam Chair, I would like to take a minute to inform you that I will have to leave you at 2:15 p.m. because I have another engagement at the United Nations. My colleague Stéfanie Sirois-Gauthier will finish the meeting with you.
First of all, I would like to thank the members of this committee for affording Quebec Native Women, or QNW, the opportunity to discuss issues of concern arising from the violence, in all its forms, experienced by the indigenous women and girls of Quebec.
For 48 years, QNW has worked for and contributed to the restoration of a balance between men and women, both indigenous and non-indigenous, by giving voice to the needs and priorities of women.
Promoting non-violence has been QNW's main focus since its inception. Our organization therefore thanks the Standing Committee on the Status of Women for listening to our priorities on the issue of violence as it pertains to mining.
It goes without saying that indigenous women and girls are disproportionately victims of violence in all its forms, by which I mean physical, psychological and sexual violence, but also cultural, mental, spiritual, social, institutional and financial violence. These forms of violence are present in our communities and urban environments. Indigenous women and girls deserve protection from the scourge of violence in all its forms, which has been an additional burden during the pandemic. This violence is the result of all forms of colonial policy that were and still are designed to assimilate indigenous people, more particularly indigenous women.
The report on the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, or NIMMIWG, states that mining formed the basis of colonization policies. The objective was to develop an international trade based on resources and a land never conceded as belonging to the indigenous communities that occupied it, and to do so without their agreement or consent.
The NIMMIWG report condemns the fact that indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered than any other women in Canada, precisely because they are marginalized persons. The discriminatory, patriarchal and assimilatory policies, as well as the indigenous residential schools that were established, are convincing examples that have had, and still have, heavy and permanent intergenerational repercussions. They amount to a slow but devastating genocide.
It scarcely bears mentioning how harmful this has been in the communities and for all indigenous women. I do not want to downplay the violence experienced by women generally, but statistics very clearly show that indigenous women are far more affected by violence than their non-indigenous sisters.
Calls for justice 13.1 to 13.5 in the NIMMIWG report refer expressly to the resource-extraction industries and their impact on indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ people. These calls for justice mainly request that the safety and security of indigenous women be considered when resource extraction and development are carried out. For that purpose, they must be made stakeholders in the process before, during and after projects are implemented. Projects must also be subject to socioeconomic impact assessments.
The government is also asked to fund research projects on these issues, and the industries concerned are asked to expand and reinforce existing social infrastructure and increase service delivery capacity.
Since we are here today to discuss the violence that indigenous women and girls experience in a resource development context, our organization wonders whether these calls for justice will in fact be answered. Is the project analysis process complete and multifactorial? What are the criteria for project implementation or non-implementation? Are representative indigenous persons, experts and organizations sitting or represented on the various committees? And what of the ongoing monitoring referred to in call for justice 13.2?
All these questions in fact lead back to one single question: does the implementation of development projects actually take into consideration the safety, protection and well-being of indigenous women and girls?
These calls for justice also concern the right to free, prior and informed consent guaranteed under articles 18, 19 and 38 of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Canadian constitutional law. It goes without saying that the principle of honour of the Crown is not being honoured in any appreciable way.
Our organization is also concerned about the action taken in response to call for justice 13.5 in the NIMMIWG report, under which governments are supposed to provide further funding for research projects undertaken to understand the problem more clearly. For example, in March 2021, the Native Women's Association of Canada released a relevant study on this point, lamenting the fact that women who work in the resource-extraction industry experience incidents such as unwanted touching and emotional abuse and are subjected to sexual comments, sexual harassment and violence.
One question nevertheless remains: what other recent studies expose the problem? Are there any current studies on the violence that occurs off mining sites? The answer that our organization would like to give is that too few studies have been conducted for women to be heard.
Slightly more women have been working on sites in recent years, but it has previously been acknowledged…