Justice committee  This issue has come up repeatedly, and certainly the commission into murdered and missing indigenous women and girls has heard a lot of evidence about the impact of dual charging. We see this in our work all the time. A man is charged. He says, “Oh, she did it too”, and then the woman is charged as well.

Justice committee  Thank you very much. We are very pleased to have this opportunity to speak and provide our perspective on Bill C-75 to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. In the interests of time I will not speak extensively about Aboriginal Legal Services, except to say that our Ojibway name is Gaa kinagwii waabamaa debwewin, which translates as “All those who seek the truth”.

Status of Women committee  I was recently at the KwIkwèxwelhp centre near Abbotsford. They are popular. Indigenous healing lodges, from CSC's perspective, are not restricted to indigenous people. Anyone can go who wants to participate. The problem there was that they couldn't get enough indigenous inmates.

Status of Women committee  I think the communities have answers, whether they be urban communities or reserve communities. I think Dr. Yuen's point is very significant. Many people who go to prison have no sense of their indigenous identity other than the vague sense that they're indigenous. Tragically, as someone in the last set of speakers mentioned, some people only start to learn about indigenous identity in prison.

Status of Women committee  I'll make that unanimous.

Status of Women committee  Yes, that's certainly the case. In some mandatory minimums, depending on how they're prosecuted and regardless of the person's actual involvement, if they are factually guilty, they will get the mandatory minimum. If the mandatory minimum is a year or two or three, that's what they're going to get.

Status of Women committee  Certainly, yes. Even if the person gets their children back, they will have been removed from their families. I can tell you, having read thousands of the Gladue reports that we produce, that experience of being taken from your family and put into foster care—particularly when a child is older, because they're not going to one home and they'll often be moved from place to place to place—is incredibly damaging.

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  I have no doubt that it will work, but the question is whether it will ever be funded.

Status of Women committee  Yes. This is not rocket science. This isn't new.

Status of Women committee  It's not funded yet. CSC's ability to do outreach and actually work with communities to set up programs.... They don't have a great track record. Ms. Yuen talked about the funding issue. CSC is trying to do better, but we'll have to see whether they actually do better.

Status of Women committee  The other point, though, is that one of the issues—and I think one of the last speakers mentioned this—is the classification of indigenous women. They are over-classified as maximum security. Indigenous women are 42% of the women who are classified as max. The difficulty with healing lodges is that you can't get into them until you're minimum.

Status of Women committee  Let me try to clarify. The concern I had was that CSC's indigenous programming is only available to indigenous women who are interested in participating in the Pathways program, which is basically the cultural orientation program. What I mentioned is that there is a program that we are helping with that has not yet been funded by CSC.

Status of Women committee  Right.

Status of Women committee  The focus needs to be on the needs of the individual women, but also recognizing that they are indigenous. Indigenous women, as you heard—it was touched on here, and you heard in your previous panel—share many issues. The reason they come before the justice system and are in the prisons is that they share a number of experiences.