Mr. Chair, I rise today in the House to speak to a matter that evokes strong emotions on all sides, a matter that speaks to the tragedy of racism and discrimination and a matter that requires continued vigilance to overcome. Of course, I speak of the horrors of the murdered and missing indigenous women and girls in this country.
Before I get into my speech, I would like to thank my colleague, the member for Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, for sharing his time with me this evening.
The stats speak for themselves. Indigenous women and girls in Canada are disproportionately affected by all forms of violence. Although indigenous women make up just 4% of Canada's female population, 16% of all women murdered in Canada between 1980 and 2012 were indigenous. The 2019 general social survey on victimization, along with Stats Canada, has indicated that indigenous women were more likely to experience intimate partner violence than non-indigenous women.
Furthermore, during our study on sex trafficking of indigenous people last June, experts told us that 52% of human trafficking victims are indigenous and that the average age of exploitation of an indigenous girl is, shockingly, just 12 years.
Although the indigenous population up to the age of 14 makes up 7.7% of all Canadian children, they represent 52.2% of the children in care. We also know that studies have highlighted that having a child in the welfare system is the most common feature among women and girls who enter prostitution.
Most alarmingly, the statistics may be even more tragic, as experts told the committee that one of the biggest problems is how difficult it is to accurately track how many victims there are of human trafficking and sex trafficking, as well as to accurately track the correct number of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. Without real effort from the government to ensure that a robust framework is in place, with adequate resources that are made available for indigenous data collection, in consultation with indigenous experts and organizations, the true story of their reality may never be truly known.
The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls made 231 calls for justice in 2019. It took two years of waiting for the government's action plan on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, a plan that many involved called toxic, flawed and unsafe. The government has failed to address one of the core elements in the inquiry: that any plan has an obligation to the victims, their families and all indigenous women and girls, to ensure their voices are reflected so that indigenous women today and future generations of women and girls can live their lives free of violence.
Unfortunately, the government's most recent budget implementation act also fails in this regard. With respect to investments in the budget to address the safety of indigenous women and girls, the Native Women's Association of Canada described its concerns: “We're very concerned that on the surface of this reading of the budget announcement, we don't see where the investment is going to be and we have a very serious concern about that.”
The track record of the government has become abundantly clear. Instead of tackling the systemic inequalities, violence and unsafe conditions for indigenous women and girls in this country, it simply throws money and hopes those issues go away. This will do nothing to empower indigenous women and girls. Rather, it will simply grow bureaucracies here in Ottawa. To be fair, past governments must share the blame in continuing this broken “Ottawa knows best” system, a system that has a profoundly lasting and damaging impact on indigenous culture, heritage and language. For true reconciliation to begin, this paternalistic approach to indigenous people and issues must end.
We must not sideline off-reserve and non-status communities either. Women and girls tend to gravitate to urban centres to escape violence, and that creates greater problems, because they cannot access employment, adequate housing or even shelter, and they become victims of a cycle that has been perpetuated by a lack of resources and inadequate supports for them.
In closing, indigenous women and girls need a safe, culturally supportive environment in which they are free from violence, sexual trafficking and exploitation. If we are honest about reconciliation, the current and succeeding governments have an obligation to honour indigenous perspectives when addressing underlying factors that create the unsafe conditions for women and girls, such as precarious housing, poor living conditions, high rates of unemployment, unstable employment, low working wages and the lack of access to social and economic resources.
I look forward to the questions ahead.