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Results: 106 - 120 of 8639
View Eric Melillo Profile
CPC (ON)
View Eric Melillo Profile
2021-06-17 11:52
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to say thank you to all of our witnesses who have joined us today and who already have given us so much to think about. I appreciate how honest and open everyone has been in talking about such an important and difficult issue—and the many issues, I should say, around this.
I'll start my questions with you, Ms. McGuire-Cyrette. You mentioned the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls action plan in your opening remarks. I'm from the riding of Kenora, just beside Thunder Bay, and unfortunately this is an issue that is deeply personal for a lot of people in my riding. I don't have the exact figures in front of me, but I have previously cited in the House and in other work that somewhere near half of the identified cases over the past eight years were in the Kenora region alone. It's a very important issue to many in my riding.
You mentioned, if I'm not mistaken, that in your view the action plan seemed to miss some key recommendations and missed the mark a bit. I know that you were pressed for time and weren't able to go into a lot of detail, so if you're able to, I'd appreciate it if you could expand on some of your thoughts on that.
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
View Coralee McGuire-Cyrette Profile
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
2021-06-17 11:53
Yes, definitely. Thank you.
We were looking for the national action plan to speak to indigenous women's safety. That's really what we're speaking about here. There is no investment in indigenous women's safety here in Canada—very limited.
When you're looking at the interconnection between human trafficking and missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, the data tells you that for a large percentage of missing persons cases there's a high degree of probability that they could be trafficking cases. When you're looking at missing children and youth and you're looking at the interconnection between child welfare, missing and murdered indigenous women and girls and human trafficking, there is an intersectionality that goes on there.
What we were looking for from the national inquiry and the national action plan was that data that I believe Courtney spoke to around.... There are the homicide reports. We know for the coroners' reports, for instance, that they've given us their knowledge and recommendations around the fact that, I believe, it was that approximately half of the cases were domestic. The piece with that, which is really important to note, is that those were preventable deaths by having services and programs and having safety plans.
What we were looking for was really to tell the story around “how did the woman die and who killed her?”, that one part of the story, in order to have stronger policies to make sure that it doesn't happen again. The same thing is happening with human trafficking of indigenous women and girls. The root causes go back to colonization. Here in Canada, we sold indigenous children. The selling of indigenous people has a history of colonization here, and it has continued on to today into what we now call human trafficking.
That's part of the issue that we're really looking at. There are two major components where a high level of healing is needed. Indigenous women-specific healing is needed because, as Ms. Smiley spoke to, we're talking about indigenous-specific issues. When we focus on everyone, we focus on no one. When we're talking about safety issues like human trafficking and the missing and murdered, indigenous women's experience in those issues is very unique and, therefore, we need unique solutions.
View Eric Melillo Profile
CPC (ON)
View Eric Melillo Profile
2021-06-17 11:56
Thank you very much for that.
I also want to pick up a bit on a similar topic. You've already mentioned in your conversation with Marcus some of the transportation gaps in the north. Many of the communities in my riding are remote communities that are serviced by Thunder Bay, Sioux Lookout or Winnipeg, and many indigenous people, and many indigenous women specifically, of course, have to leave for basic medical care, for job opportunities, for school and for a number of things. Obviously, that puts them in a more vulnerable situation.
I'm not sure how much time you'll have to respond, but if you can talk a bit more about that as well, I'd appreciate it.
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
View Coralee McGuire-Cyrette Profile
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
2021-06-17 11:57
Yes. Thank you.
Something we learned from the national inquiry, from survivors, was for example, when you're looking at the Highway of Tears, when you're looking at Barbara Kentner here locally in Thunder Bay, what it's telling us is that it's not safe to be an indigenous women walking. It's telling us about the lack of safety. With transportation and the Greyhound system, those issues there.... There are no safe systems for transportation across Canada. We need to look at how we are going to address that so that we have safe transportation. That's something that is concrete that we can address. When you are looking at Kenora and that district, what's the safe transportation to get to and from larger centres for medical appointments, for instance? It's not there. It doesn't exist—never mind getting across Canada.
When you're looking at having to hitchhike or at having to be trafficked in order to get to a medical appointment, that's just not acceptable. That's part of that human right to access basic services. We need infrastructure. Safe transportation will address violence against indigenous women.
View Bob Bratina Profile
Lib. (ON)
Thanks very much for the reply.
Mr. Battiste, would you please go ahead for five minutes?
View Jaime Battiste Profile
Lib. (NS)
Yes.
I'd like to thank the witnesses for their testimony.
I'm coming to you from the Eskasoni reserve, a Mi'kmaq community. We have a community of about 5,000.
I don't want to paint all situations with the same brush because I know it varies, but one of the thoughts and one of the things that is noticed by indigenous leadership is that there is a lot of intergenerational trauma that exists currently in our communities from residential schools. This often leads to bad situations at home, and that often leads to people fleeing their home situations. Often, addictions are seen as the main cause of people getting into positions where sexual exploitation is possible.
I know there's more to the story, but is addiction too commonly used as the reason for sexual exploitation? Tell me a little bit about how the basic income guarantee would deter that if addictions are a problem.
Also—just because I know I may only get one question—with regard to funding autonomous women's organizations, which organizations are we looking at funding? Should we be funding the national women's organizations? Are we looking at funding the French centres or the rural support? In my community, we have the Jane Paul Indigenous Women's Resource Centre, which is set up in an urban location. What is the best, most efficient use of the money—the $2.2 billion—that we're putting towards missing and murdered indigenous women?
I want to start off with Ms. Smiley and then go to Ms. Skye, if I can.
Cherry Smiley
View Cherry Smiley Profile
Cherry Smiley
2021-06-17 12:00
It's an important point you're making about these kinds of connections between addictions and sexual exploitation. What happens a lot is that women are shamed and blamed in both of those circumstances. Engaging in addictions, perhaps as a coping mechanism; maybe because they started smoking crack when they were 10, because it's very normalized and they've grown up around it; drug dealing—these types of things are happening. It is very tied to sexual exploitation so it is true that some women turn to prostitution, of course, because they're in this cycle of addiction. It's also true—I think Cora mentioned earlier—that drugs are often used as a way to placate women, so the pimp will get her addicted to heroin or whatever so that it's easier to control her and make her continue in prostitution.
Women are blamed and shamed for their prostitution, and they're blamed and shamed for their addictions. That's where the connection lies.
When we're talking about services, harm reduction services have a place, of course, but what we see now is that you can go to a safe injection site and stick a needle in your arm in 10 minutes, but you have to wait two or three weeks to go to detox. I think it's so incredibly important that we actually have these services available so that people have what they need when they need it, and that these services are women only. We've heard lots of stories of women actually being targeted by men when they're in detox or recovery houses and being targeted again there for sexual exploitation.
In terms of the organizations that need to be funded, I really think autonomous women's organizations are so important. When you're part of a larger organization that's essentially male-dominated, there's value there for sure, but you are controlled in some ways. There is less ability to speak out on, for example, issues of #MeToo, like Cora was saying.
It's really important that these organizations are autonomous women's organizations. You could do that nationally, regionally, provincially. I think there's a lot of really amazing women doing a lot of really amazing work. The more we have, the more discussions we can have and the better solutions we can come up with.
View Bob Bratina Profile
Lib. (ON)
Thanks.
Mr. Battiste, that's your time, but I know you have another segment coming up shortly, so perhaps Ms. McGuire-Cyrette can respond at a later time.
To keep our cycle of questions in order, we'll go to Madame Bérubé now for two and a half minutes.
View Sylvie Bérubé Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My question is for Ms. McGuire‑Cyrette.
You talked about the relationship with child welfare. Do you know whether child welfare agencies have taken steps to tighten up requirements, to prevent indigenous children in the system from being recruited into the sex industry?
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
View Coralee McGuire-Cyrette Profile
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
2021-06-17 12:04
That's due to a current gap in policy right now in the child welfare legislation, which is typically about looking at the parents, actually looking at the mother specifically, so that's a discriminatory policy. I won't be able to touch on that too much here today—how the files are opened on the mother regardless of who victimizes the child—but here in Ontario, we did recently get some new legislation that looks at tightening up those restrictions and being able to charge perpetrators under the Child and Family Services Act.
The reason that is so critical and important is that then you already have an act that's there to protect and you can charge perpetrators very easily through the system and then the child welfare system is taking care of it. You're not having to rely on children to do testimony and to go through courts of law in order to prove the violence that's happened to them.
Here is an opportunity for us to really look at what child welfare reform really looks like, and a missing component that never really gets brought up is mothers, mothers and parents and fathers and the role there. We're always talking about the jurisdiction over children, yet the original jurisdiction is with the parents. The TRC recommendations on this are that we need to look at how we begin to reparent.
Getting parenting programs to support parents with their children is a really preventative component there, but definitely within the systems, we need to look at where child welfare has a role and responsibility to play. It's not the only role. We need systems to work together. You need police, child welfare and social services to work together to keep the child safe.
View Bob Bratina Profile
Lib. (ON)
Thank you very much.
Rachel Blaney, you have two and a half minutes.
View Rachel Blaney Profile
NDP (BC)
Thank you so much, Chair.
Ms. Skye, I want to come back to you. You talked in your presentation about the importance of governance systems, and you just gave an excellent answer on human rights and how those are connected.
Could you talk about governance systems and how they impact the trafficking of persons? You also talked about the trafficking of adoption. I'm just wondering if you could talk about the governance systems, the undermining of those governance systems, and how it relates to the human trafficking today.
Courtney Skye
View Courtney Skye Profile
Courtney Skye
2021-06-17 12:07
This is really important because I think that Canada has really lapsed and not been advancing strong policy around many different forms of trafficking. Oftentimes other jurisdictions in the world have had to enact policy in reaction to Canada's not having strong policy program services legislation, because women from this country are being found in other parts of the world. International organizations have started to have a little bit more well-developed policies or programs.
View Bob Bratina Profile
Lib. (ON)
Courtney, could you lift your mike up?
Courtney Skye
View Courtney Skye Profile
Courtney Skye
2021-06-17 12:08
Yes, thank you.
I think it's important to remember. That's why I became involved with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, because they look at many different forms of trafficking and whether it's people who are being trafficked across borders for the purposes of terrorism or children being trafficked for the purposes of adoption. People might consider the child welfare system, as it exists in Canada, which has seen indigenous children continue to be adopted by non-indigenous families and removed from their communities, with that being the only way that they can be placed into what's deemed as an appropriate family, as a form of trafficking. There is also how trafficking has impacted Canada and child trafficking. Specifically, Canada for a long time maintained a program called “home children,” where children from Europe were brought to Canada to populate Canada and specifically to populate western provinces in order to bolster the Canadian population, the settler population here. Actually, about 12% of Canadians are descendants from this program.
We need to think about what those historical contextual pieces are, but also the way that their legacy continues to form and shape the policies that we have today, because there's a direct policy law line to that from the legislation that was developed by Canada in the 1800s through the 1920s, which were inherently racist and discriminatory towards indigenous people, with the legacies of the Gradual Civilization Act and such.
Results: 106 - 120 of 8639 | Page: 8 of 576

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