Status of Women committee  Thank you. I want to thank the committee for the invitation to be here. I do work for Aboriginal Legal Services, but I want to mention our Ojibway name. We asked Elder Jackie Lavalley for our name. We gave her tobacco and asked for our name. The name we received was Gaa Kina Gw

Status of Women committee  Certainly, you're right that Gladue reports are not universally available . They are not available at all, frankly, in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. One of the issues is that the federal government does not want to be involved in the funding of Gladue reports. While the federal gove

Status of Women committee  The federal government already does cost-share agreements with indigenous organizations that provide services in restorative justice areas, and we have funding for that. There are all sorts of areas where the aboriginal justice division in the ministry of justice or the Departmen

Status of Women committee  There are two problems. One is whether that would be funded, because currently our funding is to provide Gladue reports to the courts, not to parole. The second issue is how you get the information about how someone has worked through the prison system. Where is that information

Status of Women committee  Certainly, it could be. The difficulty is that the person, if they're in the federal system, will have had at least two, three, four, five, six, or seven years in the institution. What becomes so important at the parole process is what the person has done while they've been insid

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 hea

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

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

Status of Women committee  The Pathways program is something that CSC has been doing for a while.

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  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  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 th