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Results: 106 - 120 of 488
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
View Coralee McGuire-Cyrette Profile
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
2021-06-17 11:37
Yes. Prior to the pandemic we started a ride-along with the Thunder Bay police. The part of the ride-along was actually directed to us from survivors. They said that we needed to build a relationship with all services in order to comprehensively address this. In our ride-along, we were actually able to connect with two children who had just gotten onto the streets during that time, and we safely exited them within days of their getting onto the streets. They are now safe.
We know in terms of the recovery time, the healing time, the sooner that we can help with exiting strategies, the sooner the women are able to reclaim their lives. That's the part that's missing here. We need those specialized programs and services, as Ms. Smiley had talked about, which don't exist. You can't just have regular victim services to do this work. They do not work. We need specialized programs and services.
View Sylvie Bérubé Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My question is for Ms. McGuire‑Cyrette.
I'm going to continue along the same lines as Mr. Powlowski. You talked about colonization, systemic discrimination and support for communities.
According to your research, what can we do to better support communities in response to human trafficking?
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
View Coralee McGuire-Cyrette Profile
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
2021-06-17 11:38
We need everything from policies to programs. We need to ensure that the legislation keeps this illegal. We need to protect women and children in our society. We need to say, as a society, as leaders, as Canada, as a community, that this violence is not acceptable, so we need political will and we need local will. We need communities to say, “How are we going to keep indigenous women safe in each of our communities?”
View Sylvie Bérubé Profile
BQ (QC)
You also talked about the consequences of the COVID‑19 pandemic. Can you tell us more about those?
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
View Coralee McGuire-Cyrette Profile
Coralee McGuire-Cyrette
2021-06-17 11:39
Yes, during COVID-19 not every home was safe to be in, if you had a home. The level of violence increased against indigenous women and girls, and the level of violence in exploiting children and youth also increased during this time. The level of community safety response across Canada wasn't there. There is no safety plan for indigenous women and girls comprehensively across Canada. That's really where we're able to see in the pandemic, for instance, that drug trafficking of indigenous women increased. Because people didn't have access to the usual types of drugs that they use, you've seen an increase in overdoses and increases in deaths due to that.
Who has suffered as a result of that? It is the women and children, those currently being exploited, as well as those being recruited, especially online. When you're looking at online childhood exploitation, everybody's online during this pandemic. We're looking at increasing high-speed Internet to our indigenous communities. We need to build in safety protocols to ensure that, in regard to what they currently don't have access to and they're going to, we protect the children in those communities. We need to make sure that the cyber-services are protecting children.
View Sylvie Bérubé Profile
BQ (QC)
My question is for Ms. Smiley, from Concordia University.
You are doing your Ph.D. on violence against women and you created a platform. Can you tell us more about that?
Cherry Smiley
View Cherry Smiley Profile
Cherry Smiley
2021-06-17 11:41
Yes, I'm just about finished my doctorate, so hopefully I'll be a doctor in the next couple of months, but the platform I founded was actually a response to my experiences in university, coming from an anti-violent frontline worker background, being involved in feminism for the last, I don't know, 15 years and realizing that, in universities, there more places to talk about all kinds of theories and intellectual exercises but fewer places to talk about the material conditions of women's lives.
I created this platform as a way to teach, basically, radical feminist theory so that we can learn from all that knowledge that we've created and we can build on it. We can reject it or we can decide that it's great. We can decide that we like this part and not that part, but we can actually learn that theory before we dismiss it as being irrelevant.
I think there's a lot of really good stuff in there that we can build on, as well as do research on issues of male violence related to indigenous women and to make sure that this research is looking specifically at male violence against indigenous women and girls. Of course, there are other types of violence, but this type of violence is incredibly....
Globally, it's everywhere. It's systemic, but it also has particular histories for indigenous women in Canada. Because of those particular histories, there are particular solutions that we need to be looking at. It's very much keeping the focus on this type of violence and going from there.
View Rachel Blaney Profile
NDP (BC)
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to all our witnesses today.
Ms. Skye, I'd like to come to you with my first question. You talked about this in your introduction to us, but could you be more specific about what makes indigenous women and girls more vulnerable to violence? How do those responses impact them and the communities around them?
Courtney Skye
View Courtney Skye Profile
Courtney Skye
2021-06-17 11:44
Thank you for the question.
It's really important that we highlight the specific need to address the specific root causes of violence and colonial violence that indigenous women experience. If you look to some of the reports that have been developed around things like the homicide report that StatsCan produces, and you see a comparative study between aboriginal and non-aboriginal identified women within that study, you see, since 1980, a decrease in the overall number of women who have been killed, while the rate of violence against indigenous women has remained consistent across those years, and as a result, indigenous women represent an increased proportion of the victims.
That type of analysis or that type of information being made available really demonstrates that indigenous women experience different causes of violence and that the interventions that have been developed through feminist theory, through typical responses, haven't actually reached these populations, haven't supported them in the way that they need to be supported and haven't developed the same kind of access to services and supports that indigenous women require.
There are, of course, underlying human rights issues that underpin that. I appreciate that there is a need for a special response from government especially, to consider all the different populations that are impacted and all the different realities of people, to draw out strong policy responses that address, as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples says, the need for special measures in certain circumstances. However, we also have to remember that there's a broad experience related to this issue that needs to be addressed. Any type of widespread legislation or national legislation has to consider and be respectful of many different experiences.
View Rachel Blaney Profile
NDP (BC)
I guess what we heard from other testimony is that there are challenges. Like what you just said, the services aren't quite reaching these communities, so what is the block to that? I'm wondering if you could also talk about the issues that exist between provinces and territories regarding interjurisdictional issues and how those supports might be fragmented for a trafficked person.
Courtney Skye
View Courtney Skye Profile
Courtney Skye
2021-06-17 11:47
Yes, there are real service issues but also legal issues within the Canadian legal structure. Depending on where you live in Canada, different laws apply to you. There's an inherent unjustness in the experiences of Canadians where there are different legal frameworks and different legal recourses available to people, which are different province to province and city to city. That is a product of colonialism. What it also does is it creates a patchwork of services and service access, catchment areas and things like that, which create gaps. Also, there are disproportionate or inappropriate responses to people who may move or just have a need to have regular services and a base level of service from their government.
What happens is that we have certain cities, certain places, that do have more support than others and gaps in other parts of the country. This is why I was so interested in drawing responses or policy knowledge from other parts of the world, because there are jurisdictional issues and border issues that impact programming, laws and services in Canada.
I think we should be looking towards, when we're talking about national frameworks or federal frameworks, this understanding that there are root causes that need to be addressed. If we're concerned about vulnerabilities that result in exploitation, then we should be looking to things like guaranteed basic income, basic health services, a national dental care plan, accessible education and things that are going to make it systemically easier for people to access support and not be put in a situation where there's no other option for them but to submit to exploitation, if that's a concern of this committee.
We also need to have a really strong human-rights framework that upholds people's laws and case law around the right to sell sex.
View Rachel Blaney Profile
NDP (BC)
This is such a complex issue, and I really appreciate the part you're talking about in terms of basic human rights, but I feel like a lot of Canadians don't understand what people mean when they say indigenous people need basic human rights.
I'm just wondering if you could say what that means for you, Ms. Skye.
Courtney Skye
View Courtney Skye Profile
Courtney Skye
2021-06-17 11:49
For the past year, I've been supporting the Haudenosaunee Confederacy chiefs council, which is the inherent governance structure of the Haudenosaunee people. We look to our laws, our creation stories and the things that make us distinct, and we look towards how our laws set down governance structures.
I look to this federal government, and they have promised a nation-to-nation relationship yet have almost entirely ignored our traditional governance structure the entire time they've been developing laws and policies.
We look towards what it means to have human rights. It means to live under our own laws, our own jurisdictions and our own cultural practices. Without having that kind of respect for what indigenous nations bring to the symphony that is humanity, we're not going to address the governance issues, the structures and the systemic issues that create vulnerability, that create disunity and that create the lack of social cohesion that exists in indigenous communities.
There are really high-level, broad philosophical questions that then begin to impact people's lives on a day-to-day basis, where indigenous women are denied their basic rights and human dignity. This is especially true for me, because I come from a matriarchal culture where our clan mothers, who are the stewards of our land, are continually denied their right to exercise our laws and governance in Canada.
Those are the kinds of human rights we're talking about here. We've fundamentally failed to entrench that type of true nation-to-nation relationship in policy and law, and unless that's going to be addressed, we're going to continue to see indigenous communities that don't have, or are denied, the ability to participate freely in our modern society.
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.
Results: 106 - 120 of 488 | Page: 8 of 33

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