Status of Women committee  Thank you, Karen, and members of the committee. Good afternoon. I would like to begin by acknowledging that we are gathered on the territory of the Algonquin people with a reminder to all of us at we are in a time of truth and reconciliation with the first peoples of Canada. I w

Status of Women committee  I think one of the things that we do understand is that there is a shortage of beds. Certainly accessible beds and accessible shelters is a huge issue. The complexity for that of course is that a lot of transition houses and shelters are in old buildings. One of the things that

Status of Women committee  Again, DAWN is cross-disability and I put a lot of emphasis in my presentation on brain-injured women. One of the things that I emphasized in my presentation is how important it will be to develop screening at the front end in terms of front-line services, so that if a woman has

Status of Women committee  I appreciate the question very much and understand that the focus is on shelters and transition houses. I have to say again, that's not a solution for everybody and it's important to understand that it's not going to work across the country to say we're going to focus on beds.

Status of Women committee  Thank you, Ms. Sansoucy. We were very pleased to attend a bilateral meeting with the UN special rapporteur while she was in Montreal. We submitted a five-page document to her outlining our concerns and were very pleased to see she had included some of our recommendations in her

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  We aren't there yet, madam. I sat on Minister Monsef's committee, and I honestly saw that we had made some progress. Last spring, we issued a call for tenders for projects involving women and girls with disabilities. We now have recognition at the federal level. A feminist pol

Status of Women committee  You should start by reviewing the policies of the federal departments. I don't want to hear any more about GBA plus. We're included in the "plus", and that's really insulting for us; we aren't a "plus". Comparative gender analysis isn't enough. In Canada, that analysis is based

Status of Women committee  I'm from the north—the near north, not the far north. It's different depending on where you are in Canada. It very much depends on what type of community you have and what kinds of resources you have to start with. In so many cases—and you heard what Arlene said, that she started

Status of Women committee  Dr. Colantonio, in some of the work she's done, has included looking at a model that comes out of the U.S. that was developed a number of years ago. There are three or four screening questions that can be discreetly included in an intake. It's the kind of thing where if you answe

Status of Women committee  I'm so glad you brought that up, because I was going to say deaf women.... Talk about being underserved. Again, it's their right. There's a human right involved that is not being respected, the right to access to sign language, both ASL and LSQ, the two official sign languages of

Status of Women committee  Go ahead.

Status of Women committee  The issue of women who have suffered brain trauma is really a very special one. As I mentioned earlier, it's often not diagnosed. These women live with it without realizing they have it. As a result of their behaviour, they can definitely be perceived in a shelter as troublemaker

Status of Women committee  They wind up homeless and sexually exploited. They're human-trafficking victims. The disability rate among women in this situation is enormous. Nearly half of them have a disability. Take the missing and murdered women inquiry and the indigenous women we're talking about in that

Status of Women committee  No, there aren't any. I didn't say a lot about accessibility. That'll be in our official presentation. There's no such thing as physical accessibility or anything related to it.