Status of Women committee  Given the reality of why I was invited to come, the fact that women are the fastest-growing prison population, and the links that has to women's inequality generally, it strikes me that a report card of the kind that was done some years ago, which resulted in the status of women committee coming into existence, would be very useful at this time.

Status of Women committee  I think fundamentally we have to talk about reinserting national standards. Those of us who are long enough in the tooth to have been around at the time the Canada assistance plan was eliminated didn't think that plan was the best. We wanted to see stronger and more enduring national standards at the time than we had.

Status of Women committee  Your point is well taken. If I sounded as though I was saying that all of these resources are there right now, then I need to correct myself, because most of the resources that I'm talking about have been systematically eliminated. Social services, education, and health care have been eviscerated in this country, as the provinces and territories have been allowed--with the elimination of the Canada assistance plan in the mid-eighties--to basically spend federal tax dollars in very different ways and not prioritize those who are most marginalized.

Status of Women committee  I would recommend that the committee review the Parliamentary Budget Officer's review of Bill C-25, as it then was. We've already had the stats that a third of the women serving federal jail sentences are indigenous. In one of the appendices for that document, the Parliamentary Budget Officer showed what it was costing to keep one of the women on the management protocol.

Status of Women committee  It has not been followed through on, no.

Status of Women committee  When I said “the backlash”, I meant that it's very clear that we are seeing increased charging. As women call the police for protection, they're increasingly likely to also be charged if they have used any kind of defensive force, so we have a large number of women in prison now who have been charged with assault in situations in which it should have been recognized that they were actually trying to defend themselves and/or their children.

Status of Women committee  I just want to go back. I know that the issue of family violence, domestic violence, has been on the government's agenda, and on various governments' agendas, for many years. The challenge is that it has been de-gendered in a way that has caused some problems. There were some productive consultations in the mid-nineties that occurred between what were broadly called “women's groups”.

Status of Women committee  I'm sorry, but I will speak English. One of the challenges with fetal alcohol is that it's a raced and gendered way to blame women for issues the state doesn't want to deal with. When I met with pediatricians a few years back, when we first started working on this issue, a number of them asked why we weren't looking at the inadequacy of nutrition, the lack of running water, or the lack of adequate health care as the issues that set up young people and children to be at a deficit.

Status of Women committee  As has already been discussed by the other women on this panel, who have done incredible work in their own right in their own communities both individually and within organizations, we could go back to some of the very basic recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples that have not even been touched.

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much, Ms. Neville. As we discussed, one of the things that I noticed when I first started working exclusively with women and girls, and in particular with the indigenous women and girls, was the number who had entered guilty pleas and had not even gone through the process of having a trial.

Status of Women committee  Thank you very much. Thank you to the committee for inviting us to present. I'll keep my comments brief in the interest of being able to answer some of the questions from the committee. In reviewing some of the proceedings, I realized some questions have come up, so I will try to address those in a very broad way.

Justice committee  We don't have them right across the country currently, and it's left to individuals to fund them themselves, largely.

Justice committee  That's correct.

Justice committee  I have no reason to believe it. It certainly hasn't applied to women at all. None of them who were denied have reapplied.

Justice committee  That's correct.