Justice committee  I just want to echo what Ms. Dale said about the provinces and the territories working together. This issue was brought up to our youth advisory council from across Canada. They're excited to have representation when they go to court if something bad happens, but the youth counci

Justice committee  Those are great questions. How would this help? Unfortunately, in our country you can go from kindergarten to a Ph.D. without learning anything about LGBTQ culture, communities, or history, or even about inclusion and how to create respectful spaces. Frankly, this will make our

Justice committee  That's a very interesting perspective. Our intersectional committee would carefully disagree and would hold to account my statement that everyone has the capacity for racism, discrimination, and sexism. When we look at the International Day of Pink campaign that the Prime Minis

Justice committee  Yes, absolutely. We're just giving a warning that once we're able to get some more research, we'll be asking for changes to be made. Then, of course, we want to emphasize that we do support LEAF's note that the “unconscious” piece might be a problem and might require some clarif

Justice committee  Yes. I mean, there are two pieces to it. One is that there are specific challenges that LGBTQ people face from abusive partners, right? A partner who is abusive might threaten to force you out of the closet. They might tell family members who you're still closeted to and force

Justice committee  Thank you. I'd like to begin by mentioning that I'm using my iPhone because our organization is totally paperless, so I'm sorry if that is new to you. I'd also like to acknowledge that we are on the unceded territories of the Algonquin peoples. I'm perfectly bilingual. So I wi

Status of Women committee  Absolutely. Without a doubt, I think that would be a great option. I also think the training has to be recurring, because these issues change dramatically over time. I've been using “they/them” pronouns for six years now, but it's only in the last two years that we've seen commun

Status of Women committee  I think it doesn't go far enough. I think the explicit needs to be there. We've reached out to judges, lawyers, and law firms, saying, “Hey, we need to do this training”, and they've said, “Oh, we had our unconscious bias training” or “We've had our diversity training.” Then we'

Status of Women committee  I'll be brief, because I know Avalon has a lot to say on this. This also speaks to the training that goes on for lawyers in our country. A number of lawyers in our country have to do a mandatory 30-something hours of training every year. Lawyers are constantly telling me that t

Status of Women committee  I'll just add that there's such a desperate need to diversify the pool at the very beginning. I think the lack of access to education for LGBTQ, especially trans and non-binary gender folk, remains a critical problem. I think we need to look at, again, forcing provinces to subsid

Status of Women committee  I'll just pass it to Bonnie to start. I went first last time.

Status of Women committee  Really quickly, the last thing I want to mention is that while we appreciate that there is some new funding going out to folks to provide training for judges, I do think some of that money should be going to community organizations, so that they are providing the training and the

Status of Women committee  Yes, rather than the funding going to judges to train themselves and figure out whom they need to train, I think the funding should go to community organizations so that we are the ones leading the training and I think the training needs to be mandatory through community organiza

Status of Women committee  I'm done.

Status of Women committee  First and foremost, I do want to thank the committee again for having us. We really appreciate being here. In terms of crown prosecutors, I'll just speak from my own personal experience when I went to trial with my case. The crown prosecutor indicated that they didn't have enoug