Status of Women committee  My feeling is that the National Judicial Institute is starting to open up. I've been working in this field for 35 years and just last year was invited to do a one-off workshop for a group of provincial court judges at a national judges' conference on domestic violence and homicid

Status of Women committee  Yes. Across the board I have not spoken to anybody who isn't in support of the bill. Many people like me would like to see some changes to the bill in terms of training for all federal judges, not just the new ones. We would also like to see a mechanism for provincial court train

Status of Women committee  I think that one way to make this particular bill stronger is to make sure that it not only mandatorily trains new judges coming onto the bench but mandatorily trains all federal judges. I think the wording right now is that it's new judges, and it should be all judges. I also t

Status of Women committee  That's okay.

Status of Women committee  Good morning. I'm speaking from the beautiful Coast Salish territory. I'm in Vancouver. I'm speaking on behalf of the Ending Violence Association of B.C., which is a provincial body that has 240 programs across the province that respond to sexual assault, domestic violence, and c

Special Committee on Indigenous Women committee  This is another opportunity to talk about the last question as well, in terms of the root causes of violence against women. One of the many root causes is how we socialize men and women and boys and girls. This program, “Be More Than a Bystander: Break the Silence on Violence A

Special Committee on Indigenous Women committee  I'd be happy to do that. What I was saying is that I think there are two things that need to happen. There's an existing infrastructure of strength across the country in anti-violence programs. In B.C., they come in the form of community-based victim assistance programs, sexual

Special Committee on Indigenous Women committee  It's Tracy here, from Vancouver. I certainly have a response, if I'm still on.

Special Committee on Indigenous Women committee  Okay, thank you. We have a project going on that's being coordinated by Beverley Jacobs, who used to be with NWAC a number of years ago. She is trained as a lawyer and is going around the province engaging the leadership of aboriginal communities—the governance, chief and counc

Special Committee on Indigenous Women committee  Okay. I'll just finish up on this diploma course. We believe that by having a diploma course and starting to see graduates, we could create within a short period of time substantially more diverse anti-violence programs. We could increase the employment opportunities for aborigi

Special Committee on Indigenous Women committee  Thank you very much. My name is Tracy Porteous and I am the executive director of the Ending Violence Association of B.C. This is a provincial non-profit NGO that works on behalf of 240 anti-violence programs in the province of B.C. What they all have in common is that they resp

Status of Women committee  I very much appreciate the question, and I think we also need to proceed with great caution. What I've heard from my friend Marilyn and other aboriginal women is that you can't just go into a community and start talking about violence and then leave. Expecting women to speak up a

Status of Women committee  It's a good question.

Status of Women committee  We actually are experiencing a problem with data collection here in B.C. I don't know if that's an issue across the rest of the country. We have been told that B.C. police have only about a 30% compliance rate in providing statistics to Statistics Canada in terms of crimes comm

Status of Women committee  If I may say one more thing in terms of what you can do, concrete recommendations from the perspective of justice and federal jurisdiction, restorative justice is a modality that a lot of justice system people are using to try to resolve crime and bring it back to the community's