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Results: 1 - 10 of 10
View Rosemarie Falk Profile
CPC (SK)
Thank you, Chair.
Ms. Hache, I want to thank you for sharing your testimony and your experience. I think that's courageous and so wise because you have firsthand experience of this.
I'm really interested in rural and remote.... I know you talked about violence against women. How does access to safe housing have an impact on the health and safety of indigenous people, especially in rural and remote areas and locations?
Arlene Hache
View Arlene Hache Profile
Arlene Hache
2020-11-19 17:02
At the end of the day, safe housing is everything in rural and remote communities. Who defines safe housing is the question. How you access safe housing is also the question. We find that women are often flown from remote communities or rural communities into cities and into regional centres, where they're also at risk. It's just a different level of risk and a different type of risk.
Because they're not involved in the decisions about what that looks like, it creates another problem and a different problem. For example, when women are flown in from small communities, they often end up losing their children to child welfare. They often end up on the street and in a different kind of violence because they're not able to navigate cities or regional centres as much as they are the communities.
I actually think that's a broader conversation that needs to be explored further in a more open-dialogue way.
View Leah Gazan Profile
NDP (MB)
Thank you very much.
My question is for Madame Marin-Comeau, with regard to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
A report that came from the Native Women's Association of Canada indicated that first nations women living off reserve experienced “gendered and racialized discrimination by potential property owners”, which affects their ability to find not just adequate housing but safe housing.
Call for justice 4.7 of the report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls says, “We call upon all governments to support the establishment and long-term sustainable funding of Indigenous-led low-barrier shelters, safe spaces, transition homes, second-stage housing, and services for Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people”.
My question is, how many low-barrier, 24-7 safe spaces have been created since the national inquiry report was released a year ago?
Chantal Marin-Comeau
View Chantal Marin-Comeau Profile
Chantal Marin-Comeau
2020-11-17 19:49
Thank you very much for the question.
I don't have the answer to that question. Perhaps some of my other colleagues from the federal departments would have some of those answers. If not, I'll get those answers and provide them to the committee.
View Leah Gazan Profile
NDP (MB)
I ask that because, since the beginning of COVID, I've heard the government say that the reason they haven't been able to follow up on the action is due to COVID. However, we know there's been a 400% increase in violence against women in some areas, mainly targeting indigenous women.
I'm wondering if that is a focus going forward. I know you don't have a number, but is that a specific focus? As we know, in many cases it is a life-and-death matter.
Chantal Marin-Comeau
View Chantal Marin-Comeau Profile
Chantal Marin-Comeau
2020-11-17 19:50
Perhaps I'll answer for the responsibility of Inuit and the Métis Nation. The partners we're working with to develop the strategies certainly have that as a focus. Obviously this is something that is very prevalent, as you've just mentioned, and it's very important for indigenous communities. When we developed housing strategies with Inuit and with the Métis Nation, there was certainly a very large focus on gender-based violence and how housing can help to alleviate some of the gender-based violence, as well as the shelters and homelessness. There is a very strong focus in those strategies on what you've just mentioned.
Paulette Senior
View Paulette Senior Profile
Paulette Senior
2020-06-15 14:07
That was completed over a two-week period.
Then, most recently, we were able to again work with Women and Gender Equality to start distributing, as of last week, $10 million specifically to non-sexual-assault centres, non-shelter, but GVB organizations. In total, we identified, together with WAGE, about 450, and we'll be distributing funds to them over the next week or two.
View Andréanne Larouche Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I thank Ms. Bonfanti for her presentation. I am in contact with many organizations working with disabled individuals in my constituency, so I am well aware of the difficulties they are experiencing, especially during this pandemic. I, too, take issue with some parties not seeing how important this matter is. In fact, last week, we were the ones who asked that the bill be split to provide assistance faster to people with disabilities. I share that desire to help them as quickly as possible.
Having said that, my questions will be for Paulette Senior, president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Women's Foundation. We know that COVID-19 has had a profound impact on the health, behaviours and activities of Canadians, particularly Canadian and Quebec women. We know that confinement has caused a lot of tension and that, for many women, it is cause for concern.
According to a Statistics Canada survey, about 1 woman in 10 fears potential violence in their families. About 8% to 10% of female respondents expressed that fear. At the end of March, the SOS violence conjugale hotline in Quebec reported a 15% increase in calls related to the confinement measures. In her mandate letter, the minister said she wanted to address gender-based violence.
In concrete terms, can you give us examples of measures you would like to see as part of such an action plan? Also, what can we expect?
Paulette Senior
View Paulette Senior Profile
Paulette Senior
2020-06-15 14:21
Well, I think the pandemic has really revealed some of the issues that were already there and exacerbated them. It's important that as we move forward, particularly as we start to think about recovery, we consider all of the various elements that have made women, particularly women in vulnerable circumstances, involving violence, poverty and other issues that are compounded by gender inequality.... We really need to think about these measures that will be necessary to support the strive toward gender equality. These are, to me, all aspects of what make up a gender-equal society. The pandemic has really widened the chasm of cracks that were already present.
A national action plan to address issues of gender-based violence needs to consider all of that, and then I think it needs to be resourced appropriately to be able to address them, so that we're not losing ground as we come out of the recovery.
If we look at issues around women who are paid minimum wage, or just above minimum wage but certainly not a living wage, we're seeing that a lot of these women have, during the pandemic, been providing quite a bit of what we have now accepted to be essential services. Whether they are women who are providing personal support assistance or working in grocery stores or other areas that we've deemed to be essential, we think it's important that we consider how we are planning the recovery and how we're thinking through all of these issues we have seen raise their ugly heads even more during the pandemic.
Paulette Senior
View Paulette Senior Profile
Paulette Senior
2020-06-04 17:29
Thanks. I appreciate that.
More than 65% of cleaners working in hospitals, schools and office buildings are women. Much cleaning work, now perceived as essential, has long been precarious: part-time, low-paid, often subcontracted work, lacking job protections, paid sick leave or extended health benefits. Pandemic outbreaks in LTC—which harm residents, staff and their families and can lead to community outbreaks—can be traced to some of these ongoing issues. Where full-time jobs are not available, PSWs may work multiple part-time positions at different locations to compensate, which increases the risk of spreading infection from one care facility to another.
With regard to the government response, the federal government needs to ensure a stable, full-time, long-term care workforce, with sufficient protections—physical and job—to provide care and maintain their well-being. That will benefit both the workforce and the residents, who are mostly women, and the community at large. This includes working with the provinces and territories to ensure that employment standards are sufficient and fully enforced, including a sufficient supply of PPE and honouring refusals of unsafe work; to ensure full-time positions at salary levels above a living wage; and to ensure a full, open-ended review of the structure, management and ownership of long-term care, keeping in focus the women who work and live in LTC facilities.
The closure of child care centres and schools placed a triple burden on many mothers doing full-time jobs from home and managing both children and household tasks. The pandemic has highlighted that child care is now integral to the community. Without it, Canada doesn't work. Child care has been revealed as an essential service that cannot be shuttered. Provinces that closed all child care centres quickly reopened some to accommodate workers considered essential during the pandemic. However, the child care sector is fragmented and underfunded, much of it not stable enough to withstand the drop in parent-fee revenue resulting from pandemic closures.
Many centres are not committed to reopening. While the need for physical distancing changes the economics of child care, it remains essential to economic reopening and to gender equality. The federal government needs to ensure that funding is in place to safely reopen the child care sector at pre-pandemic levels of service and to continue to expand until universal access to affordable child care is achieved. The bilateral process with provinces and territories needs to move to a near horizon of three or five years.
As the lockdown increased the risk of domestic violence and decreased women's ability to leave abusive homes for the safety of women's shelters, it highlighted the importance of the violence prevention sector. The Canadian Women's Foundation welcomed the federal government's announcement of $50 million to assist women's shelters and sexual assault centres with their pandemic responses. We partnered with Women and Gender Equality to distribute some of those funds to sexual assault centres and broader gender-based violence organizations. In the process, we heard once again about the extent of need.
As the executive director of one busy sexual assault centre, describing their transition to working remotely, said, “We had to invest in a phone system as ours was a donation from 1980. We didn't have funds for PPE for staff and volunteers accompanying women to hospitals, police and doctors...the funding helped us purchase PPE…a phone system, and food for some clients. As much as I'm grateful for the 25k; I must be honest with you, it's not enough. …we need to invest in a web chat system for youth asking to text… we had to do home visits as we fear for some clients' lives and despite reporting to police, nothing has been done. We are running out of PPE…Volunteers have begun to show signs of burn out and we are averaging 60-80 crisis calls a day.”
The federal government needs to develop and implement a well-funded national action plan on violence against women and gender-based violence that recognizes this work as essential to society and gender equality.
By “well-funded”, we mean commensurate with the multi-billion-dollar annual cost of violence. The federal government also needs to complete development and start implementation of a national action plan to address violence against indigenous women and girls without further delay.
To summarize, this is not the time for small asks. The pandemic has shone a very bright light on deep fault lines of inequality in Canadian society. The government's response needs to be similarly deep. The structural change outlined will respond to needs of women marginalized by systemic discrimination: black and racialized women; first nations, Métis and Inuit women; women with disabilities; and LGBTQ2S and gender non-conforming people. It will strengthen our social systems to provide sufficient care in times of stress, including for an aging population that is largely women, and continue to advance gender equality.
Thank you for your time and attention. I look forward to your questions.
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