Status of Women committee  The police investigate and sometimes the case is simply not put forth. Maybe there wasn't any abuse. As I said, this is not researched information. It's anecdotal and it's based on what we heard. Given the lack of research in the area, we certainly didn't make any recommendations

Status of Women committee  I have not seen any statistics in that area.

Status of Women committee  You may wish to call the various police departments to see if they keep statistics. That might be a good way of finding out.

Status of Women committee  Or they might be of a different culture and see things very differently from how you and I would see them. We make a point in our report--and I think you mentioned it also--that we certainly did not go far enough in dealing with ethnocultural groups. With regard to abuse of the e

Status of Women committee  They could have. I don't have the research on that. Certainly, if it happens, I don't think the percentage would be any higher in rural communities than in urban communities. I simply don't know.

Status of Women committee  That could be an issue.

Status of Women committee  Yes, that's what we heard. I'm not suggesting that this is a researched answer. What I'm suggesting is that it's what we heard from police people themselves: that they certainly could not respond to all of the cases they have heard about.

Status of Women committee  We heard some stories, some tear-jerkers, as you say in English. A woman was being financially abused by her nephew. She lived in an institution. The bank was concerned that more money was being taken out of her account than was expected. They didn't do anything until it came to

Status of Women committee  Again, when we went out to discuss this matter across the country, it was a split between those who felt the Criminal Code was sufficient to deal with the situation and those who said, no, we need special measures in the code. We didn't make any specific recommendations except to

Status of Women committee  There are a lot of recommendations. I come back to the first one: awareness and information. That's number one. Then comes giving sufficient resources to deal with it, and training. Maybe there should be a national forum of police officers on elder abuse, to deal with the situa

Status of Women committee  It's like anything else. I don't know if I put it in those terms, but the point is that in a lot of police departments across the country there's no specific group to deal with matters of elder abuse. In certain police departments, like the Ottawa one--and there are three or fou

Status of Women committee  It's hard to comment on that, in the sense that if you know an older person is being abused, why don't you report it? People in certain communities simply don't want to do it; they don't want to get involved. Everything is confidential when you go to the police and you report.

Status of Women committee  You bring up a very good point. We have also raised it in our report. There are no national standards. It varies from province to province. We have also noticed something else. In long-term care establishments, various types of people are hired. They are not trained to provide c

Status of Women committee  I don't know. I'm not an expert on that. Our approach in our reports—and we tell this to ministers—is that there's absolutely no area the federal government can't go into. It depends on how you negotiate with the province or how you say “here's the role of the federal governmen

Status of Women committee  I am a good old Franco-Ontarian from Lowertown, Ottawa.