Refine by MP, party, committee, province, or result type.
Status of Women committee I would add that it's not just housing for women. It's housing for the shelters themselves. It's the second-stage shelters, which are shelters that women need to go to if they have a high risk of lethality or of post-separation violence. They don't exist in a lot of rural and rem
July 7th, 2020Committee meeting
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich
Status of Women committee We've seen that, because of COVID-19 and the social distancing requirements, fundraising for shelters has taken a huge hit. As I said in my remarks, the majority of shelters rely on fundraising because the funding they get from the government, usually from provincial and territor
July 7th, 2020Committee meeting
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich
Status of Women committee We don't work specifically on human trafficking. I believe that Amnesty International Canada just put out a brief about sex workers and not having CERB accessible to them. I would recommend looking at that brief. I would not be surprised that social isolation has made things eas
July 7th, 2020Committee meeting
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich
Status of Women committee This would definitely help. One of the things we heard was that women were nervous about moving into shelters, into the communal space of shelters, because of COVID, because of the virus. Shelters that are already set up to be apartment-style units that are self-contained did not
July 7th, 2020Committee meeting
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich
Status of Women committee The priorities are around funding and around securing other means of housing women—whether that be hotel rooms, university campuses or anything else—for the increased number of calls that are coming in. As we've been saying, we also need a national action plan to ensure that thi
July 7th, 2020Committee meeting
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich
Status of Women committee From a shelter perspective, I think it would be very important to have priority COVID-19 testing. Something we saw was that when women were able to make the call to a shelter to leave the violent situation, they had to go into two weeks' isolation within the shelter. That is very
July 7th, 2020Committee meeting
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich
Status of Women committee Sure. Just a clarification, the $10 million given to indigenous shelters was only given to on-reserve shelters. It did not include urban indigenous shelters or Inuit shelters. The other money that we distributed did go to those shelters. We've heard from different shelters sayin
July 7th, 2020Committee meeting
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich
Status of Women committee That's a very good question. I think every level of government needs to fund and give core funding to shelters, because there is going to be abuse against women no matter what happens and we need shelters to be able to support those women. We also need to try to prevent the vi
July 7th, 2020Committee meeting
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich
Status of Women committee Good afternoon and thank you for this invitation. My name is Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich, and I am the communications and development manager at Women's Shelters Canada, or WSC. WSC is a national organization representing over 550 shelters and transition houses serving women and c
July 7th, 2020Committee meeting
Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich