Status of Women committee  Thank you very much for this opportunity to appear before this committee. Thank you for initiating this study on indigenous women in the federal justice and correctional systems. I am the executive director of Prisoners' Legal Services, which is the only full legal aid clinic for

Status of Women committee  Sure. I know, in our clients' experience, not very many of them have Gladue reports from when they were sentenced. At one time we were talking with Legal Services Society about getting Gladue reports for people who had already been sentenced, but it was so restricted in its fundi

Status of Women committee  Yes, I think there's a lot of need for increased funding to legal aid, especially for prisoners. Our organization, as I mentioned, is the only legal aid clinic for prisoners in Canada. There are a couple of student clinics, but we're the only full legal aid clinic for prisoners i

Status of Women committee  I believe the answer is yes. My role at Prisoners' Legal Services is helping people once they've been incarcerated, so I don't have too much experience at the court level. I think the role the federal government can play, in general, is in working with first nations for self-dete

Status of Women committee  I think that's a really good point. It's really important that indigenous services for prisoners be tailored to something that is relevant to their particular first nation. That's why the centralized system that was criticized in terms of creating choices, the P4W, still exists:

Status of Women committee  Well, I think it's important to engage both the bands and the urban indigenous organizations. There are indigenous people who live in urban centres and on reserves all over Canada, so we need to be working with all of those bands and organizations in talking about how to transfer

Status of Women committee  No, and I think urban centres are also indigenous communities, and we need to consider them to be communities as well.

Status of Women committee  That's right. I think the friendship centres in cities would play a big part in that.

Status of Women committee  It would be decarcerating indigenous women.

Status of Women committee  No, I would say no. I think that was a vision of “Creating Choices”. I think some of those ideas were there in the beginning, and there's been a real decline in the women-centric approach from the beginning of FVI and the other women's prisons. I think during the Harper era, wh

Status of Women committee  I'm not aware of any increases.

Status of Women committee  I haven't, and we're waiting for the Supreme Court of Canada and the Ewert decision that has to do with the security risk tools used for indigenous men. Hopefully, we will see some changes for indigenous women too after that decision comes out.

Status of Women committee  I think Ms. Mangat spoke about the approach being security-driven and how wrong-headed that is. I would agree with that. We really need to look at what happened to the person to bring them to this point in their life and what we can do to help them heal. That's not at all what we

Status of Women committee  Until recently, just lip service has been paid to the Gladue factors in the paperwork that CSC generates. There might be a mention that family members went to residential school or that a person was raised through the foster care system, but then there's no connection to the deci

Status of Women committee  Yes. I agree with Raji that we really need to be taking indigenous women, and I think also men, out of the correctional system. It's a system that's broken, and we need to take them out. I think one of the problems.... We've noticed a lot of.... We're talking about getting rid o