Justice committee  Thank you so much. That's not tacit. That's explicit, in my opinion. The issue of implicit and explicit biases that.... Everybody has them, but when you're in a position of power and using that as the basis on which to judge and discriminate against certain members of the popula

Justice committee  Thank you.

Justice committee  Absolutely. Thank you so much for the opportunity. The issue goes back to my point around Black women, indigenous women and trans women who have traditionally been silenced and have traditionally not been believed by the judiciary or the criminal legal system. With the fear th

Justice committee  Thank you very much for the question. What we did was actually.... There were two parts of ethics approved. One was a series of interviews with women in rural and urban communities who had been raped and who reported, and therefore went through the system. The other was a series

Justice committee  I believe it unequivocally. In my opening statement, I talked about the fact that it isn't because Black and indigenous women and girls, or 2-spirit people, have more propensity for criminality or criminal behaviour. It is because of racism. I had a conversation, recently, with

Justice committee  If I'm to be very honest, I think it's ridiculous. We actually did a lot of work with the National Judicial Institute to develop training for candidate judges around this issue of gender-based violence and racism. There were a lot of negotiations back and forth between us and Ju

Justice committee  I completely agree. We are doing work on the impact of traumatic brain injuries sustained as a result of intimate partner violence and how those brain injuries impact and impede the witnesses' ability to testify. When they are testifying, because of their brain injury, their at

Justice committee  I completely agree.

Justice committee  I think her answers were quite explicit, and I completely agree. I really have nothing more to add. She said it very eloquently.

Justice committee  I think that's a really foundational part of the work. The challenge is to have the types of training that are actually going to result in attitudinal shifts, as opposed to training that is delivered to check a box. The challenge for us is really how to ensure that everybody who

Justice committee  Thank you for that question. Can I answer the first one you asked my colleague on the panel, around the process for appointing judges?

Justice committee  I think the process that's currently in place for appointing judges is flawed. If you actually examine the number of judges and break it down by racial demography, you'll find that the system is heavily whitewashed. In a country like Canada, which has diversity, having this overr

Justice committee  In principle we are, yes.

Justice committee  That's correct. I think part of the challenge is who has access and opportunity to actually begin the process of a complaint or bring in a complaint. It's understanding that Black and indigenous women, who are systematically discriminated against, are some of the last people to f

Justice committee  It was really to suggest that Bill C-9 incorporate something more substantive around cultural training for everybody who's going to be part of the process, not just on race, but also on gender. I note that proposed section 84 talks about diversity, but the thrust of our argument