Status of Women committee  Over the past two years we have been working with the directors of victim services from the provinces and territories with a new survey that's looking at the number of victims coming to various services. That's not just shelters, but any type of service. We are monitoring that closely.

Status of Women committee  Under the federal strategy regarding violence against women, we have received funding from Status of Women to carry out three critical surveys. One's the survey of safety in public and private spaces. It looks at various forms of abuse, including sexual violence, and whether it meets the criminal threshold, as well as inappropriate behaviours, whether they happen in a public place or a private space.

Status of Women committee  That would be a good question for one of the shelter associations. We don't ask that question, but you're right that most of them are confidential, to protect the women. However, my understanding is that in smaller communities where they only have one shelter, some women leave their community in order to find safety.

Status of Women committee  That's correct.

Status of Women committee  That's a valid statement. It's done every five years, but in addition, through funding from Status of Women, we're doing a survey of safety in public and private spaces. That is in the field now, with a very large sample, and it will complement the other survey. It will add to our knowledge.

Status of Women committee  What we could tell from the transition home or shelter information was the number of people, or individuals, or women turned away because of alcohol or dependency issues. I'm sure you've heard from other witnesses that that's a core group whose needs are perhaps not being met, and they're being turned away.

Status of Women committee  The upcoming survey will include more data. We did a two-year consultation of our survey managers. The three key points they wanted us to collect were women seeking shelter with disabilities and the types of disabilities. When we were looking at indigenous women, they wanted more clarity on first nations and Métis.

Justice committee  Again, a great question. As has been alluded to across the board, victims aren't willing to report for language issues, not understanding that they are a victim, they've been manipulated. Again, is it a retrospective questionnaire that we put out to people asking if in their past they've been a victim of these types of behaviour?

Justice committee  It's a great question. Creatively, we like to exploit existing datasets that others might have, which we can link to other datasets to answer some of those research questions. Ideally, as Mr. Clermont has noted, with regard to one of the questions about court cases and police cases and how they are being dealt with in the courts, what we've done periodically through a lot of work is link our police data with our court data so we can follow those cases, those victims and accused, through the justice system.

Justice committee  We need to think creatively. The other other reality we always have to remember is that these are victims. They're traumatized. From a victim-centric perspective, whether they would turn to authorities, whether they would divulge to an NGO what type of victim they are.... Often with victims there's a pause period.

Justice committee  That's a wonderful question. From our datasets we have no idea of the ethnicity of either the victim or the accused. That data is not captured by police services. That being said, at Statistics Canada we're exploiting different means of mining our data through data linkages. One concept we're thinking about because this is a gap is conceptually how to link our datasets to other datasets that have indicators of ethnicity.

Status of Women committee  With the list of publications, we had a dedicated release focusing on the territories. Again, with a limit of 10 minutes and presenting two sets of data points, it could be overwhelming. But the data is there. We've run it.

Status of Women committee  The general social survey on victimization is independent of the long-form census. They're two different tools.

Status of Women committee  When we release data from the social survey on victimization, it's released independent from the census.

Status of Women committee  I couldn't tell you, but I could get that information for you.