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Results: 121 - 135 of 488
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 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 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 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.
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.
View Jamie Schmale Profile
CPC (ON)
I most certainly am. Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you, witnesses, for being here today. It is a difficult study, but we appreciate your contributions.
I wanted to talk more about some of the content that was mentioned earlier. I'm going to direct my first batch of questions to Ms. Skye and Ms. Smiley, if I could. I'll let you two decide who would like to go first.
A lot of the conversation that both of you mentioned was in regard to the universal basic income or guaranteed income or whatever you want to call it. To my knowledge, the only country in the world to have that is Iran and that's paid for through subsidies and sales of oil and gas.
Have either of you looked at other potential solutions, such as economic activity and opportunity in some of these communities, rather than a direct payment?
Courtney Skye
View Courtney Skye Profile
Courtney Skye
2021-06-17 12:11
I can start with that.
It's become a misnomer that economic development actually leads to liberation. It actually doesn't. What makes the biggest difference in mobilizing and creating lasting or systemic change for people, and women generally, is political mobilization. That's the catalyst social change draws from in communities, especially within indigenous communities.
Making small investments, the “teaching someone how to fish” kind of examples, don't actually address any of the systemic issues that create multiple barriers to allowing people to work or be self-reliant. We're talking about broad, systemic changes and making space for women and their decision-making, leadership and governance. That is what actually creates lasting social change and creates safety for people. That's what works if you're trying to advance that.
It can't just be limited to socio-economic investments. It has to go much beyond that. Otherwise, it's just solving a small problem perhaps with one family or however many people you can get into a program with small service numbers or one worker limited to so many clients.
Without broader systemic changes, we're not actually going to be able to meet many people's needs and that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to talk about lifting and supporting all people, which is why something like guaranteed minimum incomes and that kind of thing—providing a safety net—is really important. As a society, we're a very wealthy country where we believe in the value of every person. Every person is valuable and every person deserves dignity regardless of their circumstances.
Courtney Skye
View Courtney Skye Profile
Courtney Skye
2021-06-17 12:13
You can't just look at it from today moving forward. It has to be contextualized historically.
I'll give you another example from my territory. We had funds as a nation—investments and Indian trust dollars—which is in the Yellowhead report “Cash Back”. Our community had around $12 million in 1840. The federal government redirected that fund into a trust for us. Trustees appointed by the Crown misspent about 40% of that trust fund.
By the early 1900s, that entire trust fund was almost depleted to do things like build Osgoode Hall, Toronto City Hall or bridges and infrastructure. It didn't actually go to our community for our investment and our prosperity. It was exploited from the Crown.
We have many generations of people who were not able to have control of their financial resources, who now exist in a state of chronic poverty because Canada used our money to build infrastructure that serves the settler population and doesn't benefit the indigenous population.
Now we have people experiencing poverty who have not been able to participate in the economy and were never able to get the economic prosperity that comes from all of the wealth that was generated over the past years in the industrial era. That's why we need to move forward with thinking about that.
View Jamie Schmale Profile
CPC (ON)
I get that government is the problem. I believe that “Ottawa knows best” is causing a lot of these problems. I understand that.
I'm saying that if we're creating opportunity for all and the ability to climb the ladder no matter where you are or where you're from, it's ensuring a foundation that allows people to do that. That is kind of the cause of poverty—the fact that in some of these communities “Ottawa knows best”—but we want to ensure that there is equal opportunity for all and that these opportunities are available.
View Adam van Koeverden Profile
Lib. (ON)
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I really want to thank you, witnesses, today for your extraordinary testimony, but beyond that, your extraordinary work, your research, your community service and your advocacy. It's really extraordinary.
I had a question about disaggregated data, but before I get to the question, I feel as though I have an obligation to highlight or at least address some of the fallacious comments regarding universal basic income that my honourable colleague just put forth. Iran is not the only country in the world with a universal basic income. Countries like Spain, France and Brazil have one, and so does Alaska. Alaska's permanent fund has alleviated extreme poverty almost entirely in Alaska, and versions of a universal basic income have been shown around the world to be extremely effective measures at doing exactly what our witnesses today have pointed out. On behalf of the committee, I apologize for that misleading statement, because it's not at all true.
My question today is about disaggregated data and how on the Parliamentary Black Caucus, we've committed to gathering more disaggregated data. While that might not have much to do with our business here on indigenous and northern affairs, I do think it's related to our ability to make decisions. We really can't change what we don't measure.
My question today is whether any of the witnesses—perhaps Ms. Skye, because, I believe, Ms. Skye brought it up first—can share with the committee their perspective on what is working and what's not in terms of collecting disaggregated data, specific data, and can provide some advice on how our government and other governments in Canada can do a better job of collecting and using this data to address some of these very sensitive issues.
Results: 121 - 135 of 488 | Page: 9 of 33

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