Justice committee  Just to reiterate the point that Richard and I have tried to make a number of times, the statistical information is not available. As a federal government you may be able to talk to your provincial counterparts and get it, but we question whether it's really available there eithe

Justice committee  Not being a politician, I would ask if the amber alerts get rid of all the abductions of kids. A couple of years ago, every time we turned on CNN it was all about child abductions. Those abductions are still going on at probably the same rate they were before, but other things ha

Justice committee  I don't think there's any one easy answer. Early on in our submission, we talked about systemic discrimination and we identified what the Manitoba justice inquiry said about systemic discrimination. When we met with Minister Day, the national chief was there and he asked Minister

Justice committee  In some ways it sums up what we've been talking about as far as the tools judges require, particularly when you're dealing with our communities. We need tools and types of sentencing that are specific to our communities. At the same time, as we've said in our report, there need

Justice committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. There are parts of the country that may skew some of our statistics. We note in our presentation that numbers reach critical levels in the prairie region, where aboriginal people make up more than 60% of the inmate population in some penitentiaries. There a

Justice committee  I think, first of all, that it's a simplistic equation to say that a first nation offender or an aboriginal offender equals a first nation or aboriginal victim. I don't think that's true. I think there are a lot of aboriginal victims who weren't victimized by aboriginal people. T

Justice committee  Yes. What I'm saying is it's not due...it's not a straight line to the over-representation of first nation or aboriginal people imprisoned.

Justice committee  That's true.

Justice committee  That's true. And what this bill is talking about is taking an important tool out of the hands of judges and, as one of our colleagues has said, putting that tool into the hands of crown attorneys where a judge is trying to weigh a variety of evidence and trying to take the whole

Justice committee  Thank you for the question. One of the effects, for sure, from evidence we've looked at--some of it anecdotal, some of it more empirical--really goes to the effect of family on rehabilitation. If you have no access to your family, you have no access to your community, and the li

Justice committee  A part of the strategy is indeed looking at conditional and alternative sentencing, at defined sentencing like what's going on in Toronto. Actually, on the service in Toronto, it would be nice if we had more time to hear some of the real stories that happen through this instituti

Justice committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Honourable members, on Richard's behalf and my own, I want to say we're pleased to be here today to present before you. I want to offer greetings to all of you on behalf of our national chief Phil Fontaine and the executive of the Assembly of First Nations.

Finance committee  Perhaps I'll start. In our action plan that was presented to first ministers, housing was highlighted. We talked both about social housing and market value housing. Our plan calls for a mix of both fair market and social housing. There are some who think that if only we had pri

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and good morning to the honourable members. I'd like to extend greetings to you from National Chief Phil Fontaine. He regrets that he's not able to be here to present today, and he would welcome the opportunity to spend perhaps more time going in

Status of Women committee  If I can start, I'm sure everyone will have some other answers. I think what Debra talked about is a need for a high-level group to be able to sit down and sift through the many recommendations that have been made from the many studies and come up with some examples and some idea