Justice committee  Thank you.

Justice committee  I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to speak. I thought I had 10 minutes, so I will have to be faster than I'd like. First of all, the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter is Canada's first rape crisis line. We opened in 1973, and we operate a transition hou

Justice committee  Okay. I have one more point. With regard to strangulation, we think the change is good, but it doesn't reflect the potential lethality of strangulation. In terms of sentencing, the shift to include former partners and dating partners is significant, because women who have lef

Justice committee  That's the first time I have heard that argument, so I need a little more time to think that through. I'm not as quick as Professor Sheehy on that. What I'm saying is what I—

Justice committee  Okay, I can't see all of you, so I don't know who you're talking to unless you say my name. What I agreed with about reverse onus is that I thought it was a good start. The flaw I saw was that men who were convicted.... In the case of this batterer of a woman I was working with,

Justice committee  Yes—

Justice committee  Yes. It's hard to actually argue against it when we don't know what the argument is. If somebody is saying that if the reverse onus is implemented, then somehow women will report less, it's just making a statement. There is no argument. I agree with Ms. Sheehy that if women are

Justice committee  First I think we do have to acknowledge that even in the male population in prison, people of colour and aboriginal men are overrepresented. The institution of racism gets reinforced within the prison system. We do see in our transition house women getting charged. Often a man ca

Justice committee  Certainly, historically how preliminary inquiries have worked—or not worked—for women is that the defence uses any minute difference between, say, the police statement, the pretrial hearings, and then the trial hearings. Any difference between those three gets examined, to the ex

Status of Women committee  My name is Daisy Kler. I am a collective member at Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter as well. I've been there for about 20 years. My main area of work is in the transition house with the battered women and their kids. Most of us have already talked about the need for fun

Status of Women committee  We are a bit different. We're a mix of volunteer collective members and paid staff. We think women are very interested in coming in to do the work. That's not the problem; the problem is that we do without. We have public service announcements. We're known in the community. We

Status of Women committee  Well, I think what's going on is that there's not much left of any of the social safety nets. Everybody talks about intersectionality, in terms of the approach we take in analyzing race, class and gender intersecting to cause even more barriers for women, but when you look at the

Status of Women committee  We don't get any federal money. I think that was the point of what I said in terms of the federal government downloading the responsibilities to the provinces over time, since the 1990s, without ensuring how provinces are spending that money. This means that most of us go without

Status of Women committee  I'm sorry, which one? Is that the capacity-building one or the one before that?

Status of Women committee  We applied, and we didn't receive funding. The capacity one is a little better, in that you're now allowing for advocacy, but we didn't receive any of that funding.