Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
My name is Marc Hull-Jacquin, and I'm the CEO and founder of Shelter Movers - Transit Secours.
As Canada's only free moving and storage service for survivors fleeing abuse, Shelter Movers is pleased to provide its unique perspective and national scope to inform the committee's work, focusing on the three questions in front of you for your study.
For survivors fleeing gender-based violence, Canada's ongoing housing crisis remains a significant and pervasive barrier to achieving autonomy, security and stability on their journey to a better future. Having completed over 10,000 moves for women and children in crisis, Shelter Movers has observed first-hand how a lack of safe, affordable and supportive housing contributes to the myriad of compounding risks and barriers faced by survivors before, during and after violence occurs.
Notwithstanding survivors' varied and unique experiences, safe and stable housing is consistently highlighted as a primary concern when contemplating whether or not to leave an abuser.
To understand the relationship between safe, stable housing and survivors' varied experiences, we must understand the nuanced, complex and often high-stakes calculation many survivors are forced to make in their decision to leave their abuser. Key factors such as social isolation, financial precarity and repeated psychological or physical trauma create an environment where leaving an abuser often feels entirely overwhelming and utterly unimaginable. For a survivor who manages to overcome these and other serious barriers, not knowing where she and her children will live next leads many survivors to conclude that enduring further abuse in the home is preferable to leaving.
Key to many abusive and coercive narratives are two combined messages: that the world is a dangerous place where no one can be trusted, and that the survivor is incapable of succeeding on her own. Safe, stable housing and help to collect and retain one's belongings present survivors with a positive empowering counter-narrative that can often make the difference between leaving and staying in an abusive relationship.
As we know, the data reveals that on average, survivors return to the abusive relationship seven times. By the time many survivors decide to flee, the abuser has taken control of the family finances, social relationships and often the survivor's sense of autonomy and self-worth.
Many of Shelter Movers' clients will have left their abuser at least once. Each time the survivor returns, the notion of leaving feels less and less logistically, financially and emotionally achievable. As the survivor's dependency and isolation deepen, the frequency and severity of violence also tends to increase. As housing costs and living expenses increase, each departure becomes increasingly expensive and out of reach.
Emergency women's shelters and transition homes historically have played a very central role in Canada's social safety net. Shelters and transition homes staff face an enormous pressure to continually innovate to meet the increasingly diverse needs of survivors, and they strive to be as multi-faceted in their operational offerings and capacity as the vastly diverse communities they serve.
In working closely with hundreds of shelters and transition homes across the country over the past 10 years, Shelter Movers has observed the many ways shelters strive to adapt and serve the needs of local communities in crisis with varying degrees of success despite incredible efforts.
Shelter Movers views the ever-increasing financial and administrative demands on shelters and transition homes as unsustainable and untenable given the broad ecosystem of services currently supporting individuals and families experiencing abuse. For too long, shelters and transition homes have borne the burden of attempting to be all things to all survivors. Shelter Movers has observed that, rather than focusing on areas of expertise to maximize effectiveness and impact, shelters and transition homes tend to favour offering a wide range of services despite reduced capacity.
A survivor-centred approach would contrast the needs and priorities of survivor subgroups in a community against the available services in that area. This method focuses on a complete, holistic and community-specific system of care. A survivor service ecosystem that typically comprises over 30 individual organizations is a way of spreading out the responsibility and burden on shelters and transition homes to allow organizations like Shelter Movers to do what they do best in a nuanced, comprehensive and compassionate way.
With better resourcing and coordination of organizations operating within this survivor service ecosystem, including shelters and transition homes, we stand a better chance of generating significantly better outcomes for survivors fleeing abuse, while allowing shelters and transition homes to focus on their primary areas of expertise, depending on their particular community's needs.
Thank you.