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Trisha Baptie
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Trisha Baptie
2021-06-22 11:32
Thank you so much for having me.
I just found out I was going to do this late last week, so like the speaker before me, I have notes that are a little cobbled together. I hope you'll have patience.
Six minutes is not enough time, but I hope I have constructed something vaguely coherent here.
I am speaking to you from Vancouver on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
Traditionally, for the last 20 years or so, events have been started by acknowledging the traditional lands on which we stand, which I think is a good tradition to remind us of where we are, but as non-indigenous people speaking to those who look like me, this acknowledgement needs to drive us to look further into the history of where we are. Traditional territory acknowledgement is a not-so-subtle code for stolen land, and today especially, as we discuss indigenous women and girls, it is imperative for settlers to understand how stealing land equates with the complete destabilization of indigenous people, and particularly women and girls. We need to sit with these words, clearly identifying the issues and how it feeds into the topic we will be discussing.
I want to state clearly, for the record, that I am not an indigenous woman. The father of one of my sons is from a band in [Technical difficulty—Editor], but I cannot speak from an indigenous experience. I can, however, speak to what I have lived through with my friends and their families as they invited me into their lives, as well as about the amazing people I have met all over the country as I do this work. I can speak to the abuses I saw my friends suffer at the hands of police, social workers, and men and society at large.
I'm going to quickly explain who I am. I am a survivor of government care. I was apprehended just before my 13th birthday, which was also when I was exposed to the world of trafficking and prostitution. I would get out at 28, with a total 15 years of being exploited. Some of my friends are still being sexually exploited.
So many of my friends and I started being sexually exploited as minors. I find it infuriating that there are those who wish to draw an arbitrary line—say, at 18—for when girls and women choose prostitution. I would like them to tell me what we could have accessed and how we could have gotten out of that lifestyle. Being Caucasian, I had one or two extra options, but my aboriginal friends had few, if any, options that would have saved them from the violent ongoing sexual exploitation.
We lost loved ones to a serial killer and lived through horrors I will not go into. I was a citizen journalist at the Pickton trial, and my CV can go on for quite a while.
We have a question before us, although it is written like a statement. Why is sex trafficking among indigenous people so high, when they do not make up a high percentage of the population? What if we did not look at that question, actually? We know why. Women and girls are trafficked to meet the male-driven demand for paid sex. They are more vulnerable because on their territories, or in the case of the high numbers of youth who find themselves in foster care, life can be horrible, and they [Technical difficulty—Editor].
What if we flipped the whole question and conversation and asked why we think men should be able to pay for sex? Where is the legal binding policy or human right that states that men paying for sex is a protected act? How does allowing any Canadian man to pay for sex help create a safer society for indigenous women and girls—or anyone, for that matter?
We keep sex consensual by not commodifying it, and PCEPA helps us do this.
I am a big policy law person. I quite like the finite details, so I really want to talk about the challenge to Canada's prostitution laws that's happening right now in Ontario, because it would affect not only all women but particularly indigenous women and girls. In Ontario, they would like to strike down impeding traffic, which is section 213; public communication, which is subsection 213(1.1); purchasing, which is the buying of sex; materially benefiting, or making money off the prostitution of someone else; and recruiting. They want recruiting decriminalized.
Whose neighbourhood would we have street prostitution in? I live in a poor neighbourhood. That's where they go: my neighbourhood. Whose schools or job fairs will the recruitment tables be at? Where will the billboards be? Pretty much all of the prostitution provisions they're looking at are predatory, because they rely on a third party making money recruiting, selling and advertising—a third party. Also, it's all young women, right? We're not talking about educated 40-year-old women secure in their careers; we're talking about marginalized, vulnerable youth. We need to really be thinking about that.
Now prostitution is euphemistically called being a “sugar baby” or something like that, but the core of it is the same: men taking advantage of women. Pimps and traffickers would become businessmen. If the tearing down of the Criminal Code happens, all of this will be legitimate exploitation and abuse. All these laws stop the parasitical and predatory benefiting from another's abuse. PCEPA benefited women and anyone being sold, because it changed the way they were viewed. They were supposed to get assistance.
I know that my time is done and I don't want to go over. I know there are a lot of other people. I'm just going to say two last things.
There was never a time in my friendships, which I have to this day with my friends who are indigenous, that I wasn't aware that we were treated differently because of the way we look. That's a really bad feeling, but I learned really early in life how to try to interject myself into situations, if I could, to benefit from the way I looked. Women and girls who are being exploited, who are at risk for trafficking and who live around man camps and resource extraction sites and live with that very real threat every day need intervention that benefits them, not anyone else. That's my last little item.
I know that my time here is done, but there's so much to say, so I'm going to end with this. Indigenous people—women, girls, my friends and loved ones—deserve a million times better than the way they live today. I mean, no clean water? How can we fight human trafficking if we're still fighting for water?
I want to live the rest of my life without burying one more friend. Now we are burying daughters, unfortunately.
If things don't drastically change, if indigenous people aren't given what they need to recover from the trauma that haunts them daily and given what is rightfully theirs, and if Canada does not bend to the ways of its original keepers rather than demanding adherence to colonial ways, things won't change, and I will bury more friends. That rips my heart out.
Thank you.
View Rachel Blaney Profile
NDP (BC)
I want to thank everyone for their testimony today.
I would come to you first, Mr. Falconer. Thank you for what you've shared today. I think it's incredibly important, but I'm just trying to clarify. I think you said there's a tripartite agreement, and I'm just wondering, if that's the case, whether you can tell us what the process was for negotiating that, how long it took and who was involved.
I can't help it. I'm going to come back to you, Chief Morrison. I'm just feeling hit by that reality, and I heard it earlier today about having a service if you are non-indigenous, and having a program if you are indigenous. That is just resonating in my brain.
Perhaps I can start with you, Mr. Falconer, and I'll come back to you, Chief Morrison.
Julian Falconer
View Julian Falconer Profile
Julian Falconer
2021-05-13 19:08
The funding agreements operate under this umbrella of the FNPP, keeping in mind it's a program that was initiated pursuant to that policy in the 1990s that I referred to. In order to administer that policy, each first nation either does it in the so-called stand-alones—they're pure indigenous police services, and in Ontario there are nine—or through a shared arrangement. It could be with the OPP in Ontario, or it could be with the RCMP elsewhere in the country.
I don't mean to do a lecture—and thank you for the question, MP Blaney. I do want to emphasize the Ontario case is special. It's special because we successfully, over a period of years, negotiated amendments to the Police Services Act that are about to come into force in January. They permit the exercise of a legislative option by first nations to become a legislated police service in Ontario. This is very important because it does away with the discussions about “being an essential service”, and all that stuff. In Ontario, a first nation can apply and, if constituted, can actually become just like other police services, so that's important.
Getting back to MP Blaney's question, really it's been consistent with all other vestiges of colonialism, which is, whereas for the rest of Canada, health is legislatively protected, whereas for the rest of Canada, education is legislatively protected, when it comes to first nations, when it comes to indigenous people across the country, of course, these are all done by programs. Policing was no exception. The history has been that they show up with a cheque to indigenous people, and they say, “This is your allotment under the funding agreement for this round.” That was historically called a negotiation. It was nonsense. They simply said, “This is what's there. Take it or leave it.”
So, indigenous services struggled along.
Along came, frankly, Grand Chief Yesno and then Grand Chief Fiddler of Nishnawbe Aski Nation, along with Chief Terry Armstrong, the predecessor to Roland Morrison, and then Chief Morrison. They said to Ontario and Canada, “Do you know what? If you don't, one, give us a process for creating a legislated service”—and that's that option I talked about—“and, two, sign these terms of reference that will actually determine how we negotiate in good faith, we're not doing it anymore. We're going to give you back the vehicle that has no brakes and you drive it.”
Because of what Chief Morrison does, which is police so many remote communities, no surprise, they ran the numbers and found out it would cost them a zillion dollars to police these communities. So, all of a sudden, NAN and NAPS enjoyed a leverage, and used it in the negotiations. Now, funding agreement negotiations for NAPS, I'm told, and I've been a negotiator for them—with them—for two or three rounds now, look different than they used to.
What I need to communicate to everybody is that that is not the case for the smaller services. That is not the case for the smaller indigenous communities. They remain complete hostages to this totally “keep first nations down” approach. I'm sorry to sound shrill, but it is important to appreciate that the people who suffer more today are...these services that don't have the leverage. They continue to believe they're not allowed to have legal advice. They continue to engage in this tripartite process, which is not a negotiation. It's, “Here's your cheque and this is what you get,” and they leave.
I hope that answers your question.
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