One hundred per cent, and it's the same across the country. It's the same as it is in Alberta as well. As someone who worked on the front line and went all the way up within women's shelters, I know how difficult that work can be, and it's very daunting for them. If you look at something like turnaways, on a regular day, the rest of us go to work, and we're not having to turn women and their children away from the place where we work. That can be really heavy for them to deal with.
At ACWS, we had an initiative, also funded through the national action plan dollars a couple of years ago, that was counselling frontline shelter staff. This is something that gets overlooked and lumped into their regular EAP, whereas this is really specific. It talks about debriefing, how to deal with those strategies and how to come back to work the next day and do the same job that is extremely hard and heavy. I think we need to look at investing money into that.
As well, we see really high turnover rates when it comes to staff in shelters across the province. We as an organization try to find ways to support shelters to alleviate that, but it's going to continue to happen. The work is heavy, and the ability to do it for a long time is really hard, so I think we need to invest more into how we support them. Also, pay them a living wage. It's such a big part of it, even in Alberta. They're not paid enough. We don't have people who have more expertise or experience to come in to take some of those roles, because the pay is just not enough.
Including frontline shelter support workers in everything that you do and every recommendation that this committee makes is so vital and so important. They're the ones who are going to enact this work and support survivors directly on the worst days of their lives.