Status of Women Committee on Oct. 31st, 2022

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

I appreciate it.

Amber Crowe, we have about a minute left.

Can you respond to that, please?

[Amber Crowe]

Sure.

I would call your attention to three places. Two of them already have come up. They are the recommendations and calls to action in the report on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, as well as the truth and reconciliation reports. Those reports are amazing in terms of the recommendations they make.

The third place that I would ask you to look is the recommendations that just came out, not even a week ago, from the inquest in Ontario into the death of Devon Freeman. This was the death of a youth who was living in a group home and suffering with mental health and a number of other diagnoses.

The big thing from those recommendations is that the existing systems of care and the systems of services need to be more collaborative and more integrated with one another, so that whatever problems come up.... Problems don't come up in silos; they come up in clusters. The systems need to be able to address and treat them as such.

[Marc Serré, Liberal, Nickel Belt, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Perfect. Thank you so much.

I'm going to mess around with the time for the NDP and Bloc. I won't come back to a third round for you, but I'll provide an extra minute at this time. You'll both be getting three and a half minutes instead of two and a half minutes.

I'm going to pass the floor over to Andréanne for three and a half minutes.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Again, thank you, witnesses. It is truly very interesting. Members of the committee are taking many notes.

Ms. Crowe, you mentioned the Indian Act in your opening speech. You focused a great deal—and you just mentioned it again—on the report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. You also talked about truth and reconciliation and especially call to action No. 66 on young people.

The report includes solutions. With respect to all these solutions, which we all know already, how important is political will and the means for implementing them?

Ms. Crowe, my question goes to you first, but I think that Ms. Fayant also has something to say afterward. I see her nodding her head.

[Amber Crowe]

Thank you.

Yes, I agree. Many reports over many decades have looked at some of the issues that we've talked about today. The recommendations and solutions exist already in many of those reports.

One thing I would recommend is triaging particular marginalized populations to the front of the line, so to speak, when services are required. That would be to help address some of the impacts of colonization and the socio-economic conditions experienced by those marginalized populations. If they were to be triaged into the services, it could prevent those crisis situations that were mentioned earlier.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Ms. Fayant, I saw you nodding your head.

Do you have any comments to add about reports we have already read and the Indian Act that may be connected to our study?

[​Gabrielle Fayant]

I barely heard the translation. Could you repeat it?

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

I was inviting you to add something. I saw you nodding your head. I know that the Indian Act was addressed by Ms. Crowe. Do you see a connection between all these reports and our study on mental health?

[​Gabrielle Fayant]

Yes, but not so much on the Indian Act. I didn't want to add too much about that. But your point about political will is so important.

We see it all the time. One of my biggest critiques of how reconciliation has been handled by the current Liberal government is that they go to three organizations, and then the burden lies on those three organizations. That's my really big critique.

We don't see that done with any other population. There aren't just three organizations for any other group of people; but for indigenous people, it's three organizations, and they'll deal with it. There have to be different approaches. These approaches are not addressing the needs of urban indigenous people at all. Things are getting harder, to be honest. As I mentioned in my remarks, in the last two months six indigenous women in this city alone have been murdered or committed suicide. That's alarming, and it's obvious that something's not working and it needs to change.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Perfect. That was excellent.

Andréanne, we're just going to move forward.

I'm sorry, but the bells are going off.

I'm going to pass it over to Leah now.

Leah, you have three minutes.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you so much.

Very quickly, I know that in the last set of questions, Chelsea Minhas from Covenant House mentioned that it's best to help families in the home at the beginning instead of apprehending kids out of it. The aftermath of that is quite significant.

My question is for Amber Crowe. In July 2020, in noting deaths of young people, Brittany Hobson from APTN said:

According to statistics from Manitoba Advocate for Children and Youth Daphne Penrose's office, there have been 1,605 deaths in the last decade of youths ages 0 to 17. Of those, 590 are what Penrose calls “reviewable deaths” meaning the person had some contact with the child welfare system within the past year of their life. In total, 131 were classified as in government care at the time of their deaths.

This is alarming. We know that for kids going into care, especially young women and girls, it's been called a pipeline into MMIWG2S. We know that the impact on kids of being in care, through so many studies and reports, is detrimental to the mental health of children.

Do you agree that more funding resources need to be focused on keeping families together rather than continuing to prop up systems, including the child welfare system, that often have very poor outcomes?

[Amber Crowe]

Absolutely, resources need to go towards prevention and ongoing support, and changing the conditions of families that lead to child welfare involvement. I would say it's difficult or dangerous to make a correlation that involvement with child welfare is what leads to MMIWG or incarceration and all of the other things.

We know those outcomes are correlated with child welfare, but the causal relationship is not established. I would say that certainly prevention is important, as is supporting families to stay together or to be reunited. It's also very difficult for the child welfare system as it is currently constructed with respect to safety issues rather than the socio-economic, colonized conditions of the people being served.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Okay, thank you very much.

My last question is for the DisAbled Women's Network of Canada.

On your website you have the following data. It says that “women and children with disabilities are twice as likely to be victims of violence than non-disabled women, women and children with multiple disabilities experience even higher rates of violence.”

Can you speak to this information in relation to mental health and the overall feeling of safety and security in Canadian society?

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Unfortunately, your time is up.

We have you on the record, but because the time is so tight, we do not have time for a response.

We'll now go into our last round. I'm reducing this amount of time. We have eight minutes in total. We'll go three minutes to Anna, three minutes to Sonia online and two minutes to Anita.

Anna, go ahead. You have three minutes.

[Anna Roberts, Conservative, King—Vaughan, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all of the witnesses.

I have a question for anyone who would like to answer it.

What kind of supports are you getting? I would imagine that this would be emotional for you as well.

[​Gabrielle Fayant]

I can answer that question.

Nothing. It's all just community.... It's all volunteer-based. Our auntie is our elder who is looking out for us. Beside that, there's really nothing.

It feels like we're constantly in survival mode and grief. That conversation about reconciliation, we just don't see it happening.

[Anna Roberts, Conservative, King—Vaughan, ON]

Would anyone else like to answer that?

[Chelsea Minhas]

I can step in there.

I think it's so important to make sure that we're caring for the people who are working on our front lines. That would include investing in programs that our staff can access, clinical supports and investing in programs that allow for staff training around wellness and trauma stewardship.

This is a huge piece that is not talked about enough, and organizations and the government need to ensure that we're investing in that as part of the funding models. If we can't take care of our staff, we can't take care of people. If our staff are unwell, the people we're serving will not get the adequate support they need.

[Anna Roberts, Conservative, King—Vaughan, ON]

I have another question, if anybody wants to answer it.

Each province has social workers. Is there communication with them? How do you work with them?

I've had some experience with social workers. Are they aware of your programs and vice versa?

[Tamara Angeline Medford-Williams]

I don't mind speaking to that.

At DAWN Canada we do a lot of work with partnering organizations; we're more like a network.

Knowing that we are more in the eyes of the government, what we do is that when we get funding, we always try to partner with organizations that are doing the frontline work or on the ground working closely and aligned with the issue and the target populations. We are affiliated with different social workers within the organizations that we are affiliated with.

I am currently doing my MSW. We have done various projects with other universities that have professors within the social work field. We really try to keep that connection going so there's always that cycle of information being fed back in. We are really giving an opportunity to people who are on the front lines to have a voice in the matter.

[The Chair, Conservative, Karen Vecchio]

Thank you so much.

We'll now go online to Sonia Sidhu.

Sonia, you have the floor for three minutes.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being with us.

My question is for Ms. Minhas.

We heard, Ms. Minhas, that young women are among the most vulnerable to sexual violence. In 2018, Stats Canada noted that 61% of young women aged 15 to 24 have experienced unwanted sexual behaviour.

Do you think social media or online bullying affects the mental health of young women and girls in Canada?

[Chelsea Minhas]

Absolutely, I think it has a role to play.

I think it is important to make sure that there is education for our young people around the safe use of technology, because technology is important. We're using it here today, so we need to be well versed in how to use it. I think we need to teach young people about healthy relationships and consent—what's okay and what's not okay—and how to keep yourself safe in an online world. That is our reality.

Social media absolutely impacts young people today. It's our responsibility to make sure that social media is worked in to our services to keep people safe around consent, healthy relationships, boundaries and all of those sorts of things.

[Sonia Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton South, ON]

My next question is for the DisAbled Women's Network of Canada.

What role can the federal government play to decrease the stigma out there, stigma around people living with disabilities?