Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Aboriginal Peoples
Issue 37 - Minutes of Proceedings - May 22, 2013
OTTAWA, Wednesday, May 22, 2013
The Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples met this day at 6:45 p.m. to examine and report on the federal government's constitutional, treaty, political and legal responsibilities to First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples, and on other matters generally relating to the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada.
Senator Lillian Eva Dyck (Deputy Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Deputy Chair: Good evening. I would like to welcome all honourable senators and members of the public who are watching this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples on CPAC or on the web. My name is Lillian Dyck., I am from Saskatchewan and I am deputy chair of the committee.
The mandate of this committee is to examine legislation in matters relating to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada generally. In considering the studies the committee might like to undertake, we from time to time invite individuals, organizations and departments to give us an overview of issues of concern within their mandate.
Recently, we have heard from witnesses on the subject of Aboriginal peoples within the criminal justice system. Today, we will carry on with this subject by hearing from a professor from Carleton University who does research in this area.
Before hearing from our witness, however, I would like to take this opportunity to ask the members of our committee who are present this evening to introduce themselves.
Senator Patterson: Dennis Patterson, senator for Nunavut.
Senator Watt: Senator Watt, Nunavik.
Senator Raine: Senator Greene Raine from British Columbia.
Senator Beyak: Senator Beyak from Ontario.
Senator Enverga: Senator Enverga from Ontario.
Senator Seth: Senator Asha Seth from Ontario.
Senator Demers: Senator Jacques Demers from Quebec.
The Deputy Chair: Members, please help me in welcoming Dr. Jane Dickson-Gilmore, Associate Professor, Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University.
Dr. Dickson-Gilmore, we look forward to your presentation, which will be followed by questions from the senators. If you would please proceed, we will ask questions afterwards. I apologize for the confusion about the location.
Jane Dickson-Gilmore, Associate Professor, Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University: We saw all kinds of landscape between here and Centre Block, so it was interesting and entertaining.
Thank you for this opportunity to speak with you about the relationship between Aboriginal people and the criminal justice system. As most of you are aware, that relationship is characterized by a considerable state of disorientation and dysfunction. It is characterized by rampant overrepresentation at every level of the criminal justice system, most obviously in prisons, both federal and provincial.
Although Aboriginal people constitute roughly 4 per cent of the Canadian population, they constitute 20 per cent of the federally involved inmates and 27 per cent of provincially sentenced inmates. These are averages that do not reflect the much greater disproportionate representation in some of the Prairie provinces and in more isolated northern contexts.
Much of this overrepresentation has to do with the fact that on reserve communities we see far more crime than we do off reserve and in the non-Aboriginal population. Over all, crime rates on reserve are three times higher than the national Canadian average, and violent crime rates are eight times higher.
I have been working in this area for almost 30 years. I have many things to say, but in the interests of brevity I will focus my presentation on what I perceive to be three of the most important problems or issues impacting Aboriginal people and criminal justice within Canada. It is my view, based on my experience living in communities, working in communities and researching, that if we can adequately address some of these issues, this will go a very long way to assisting us to address high crime and conflict rates in Aboriginal communities and, through this, ameliorate the overrepresentation of Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system.
The first of these issues concerns the epidemic rates of family and partner violence within Aboriginal communities, rates which are key to the cycles of violence, conflict and overrepresentation. These high rates of family violence result from a toxic combination of historic trauma and intergenerational effects and from the poverty, marginalization, weak infrastructure and lived environment and asymmetrical power relations and social dysfunction that are evident especially among reserve communities occupied predominantly by status Indians. These realities foster conditions conducive to conflict with the law, most specifically, early exposure to violence of Aboriginal children, early exposure to substance abuse, leaving school, dissolution of the family and exposure to foster care, and high residential instability and mobility. These are all factors that those of us who work in the study and analysis of offending and crime clearly know, based on the evidence, lead to conflict with the law. As a result, what we see in many Aboriginal communities is more and more serious crime, much of it committed by Aboriginal adults with longer records and significant personal deficits who began their careers at very young ages and as a direct result of those aforementioned conditions.
The second issue is what I have learned based on my work in Aboriginal communities as the inability of community and restorative justice approaches and sentencing reforms to provide meaningful responses to crime and conflict and solutions to overrepresentation. The Government of Canada and some provincial governments have supported Aboriginal justice for decades, but in the past 10 years Aboriginal prison populations have risen by 35 per cent for Aboriginal men and 86 per cent for Aboriginal women. Why have these sentencing reforms not worked?
At the outset, I would mention that the evidence was very clear at the time most of these reforms were undertaken, specifically the reforms under section 718.2(e), that the statutory direction to judges to consider Aboriginal background in circumstances and sentencing was largely unnecessary and irrelevant. It is clear that most judges at the time were quite mindful of Aboriginal background in sentencing and that most of the discrimination that we saw in terms of sentence length between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal offenders manifesting similar offending histories and backgrounds was of positive discrimination. In fact, we discovered, contrary to the popular belief that Aboriginal people received longer sentences, that they were in fact receiving shorter sentences of incarceration. The devil in the detail, of course, is that although they were receiving shorter sentences, they were much longer to wait for release on any kind of conditional or supervisory order, with the result that in the long run they were spending far too much time in prisons and for too long.
We also know that 718.2(e) and the considerations that it requires judges to give both to the determination of sentence in the sentencing process and the type of sentence to be imposed upon an Aboriginal offender do not trump the more general sentencing purposes and principles articulated in sections 718, and 718.1 and 718.2. This is especially true of section 718.2(ii), which emphasizes spousal abuse as an aggravating factor to be considered when passing sentence.
There is also the problem of community base and community resources. The move to community-based sentences, which is an explicit component of 718.2(e), and the directions of the Supreme Court of Canada to pay attention to and consider community sentences wherever possible failed to recognize some fundamental realities facing communities. Communities have very limited resources to support the reintegration, rehabilitation or healing of Aboriginal offenders, and victims for that matter. Additionally, even when a judge would consider sentencing an Aboriginal offender to a period of community supervision as opposed to a carceral sentence, the risk/need profiles of the bulk of those offenders render the majority of them unsuited to alternatives to incarceration. Their risk/need profiles are simply too profound for most judges to be prepared to undertake the leap of faith that would see an offender released into the community.
It is also the truth, and I work in restorative justice and community justice with Aboriginal people, that we have utterly failed to adequately evaluate the vast majority of these programs. The evaluations that have been done tend to be methodologically unsound. The limited evaluations that we have from the international context that look to the efficacy of community-based sentences and processes such as sentencing circles in dealing with Aboriginal offenders have indicated remarkably poor results. An evaluation of sentencing circles coming out of the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research in 2008 showed that Aboriginal offenders who were sentenced through the traditional system when compared with Aboriginal offenders who were sentenced through a sentencing circle had no difference between those two groups in terms of the frequency, seriousness or timing from release of reoffending.
This was bad news given that in the early days of the sentencing circle their promise was that they would reduce recidivism. Indeed, Judge Barry Stuart, who was the primary progenitor of sentencing circles, and for whom I clerked for a brief time, believed that they would reduce recidivism rates by 80 per cent. We have simply not realized anything even remotely close to that kind of outcome.
The third issue is the rise of law and order politics and especially the move toward mandatory minimum sentences. This is most especially true in the case of mandatory minimum sentences directly associating actions and activities that are related with particular Aboriginal groups, most notably the possession of contraband tobacco. The use of mandatory minimum sentences for offences that directly impact Aboriginal people I believe stands in direct contradiction with the goal of Aboriginal incarceration contained within 718.2(e) and reinforced through the Supreme Court decisions of Gladue and Ipeelee. Additionally, the research from other jurisdictions is absolutely clear and largely unequivocal. Mandatory minimums do not reduce crime or recidivism. They radically inflate the costs associated with incarceration and prosecution and consistently impact marginalized groups such as Aboriginal people and minor criminals disproportionately and unfairly.
What do we need to do differently? Quite frankly, we need to move beyond traditional criminal justice approaches of crime suppression through trail, nail and jail approaches. These methods, while they are politically expedient, have not been shown to reduce crime. The greater measure of evidence confirms that building up families and communities is a far more effective mechanism of crime prevention and crime reduction.
There are challenges to this approach, of course. Two of them are that the best crime prevention does not look like crime prevention. The best crime prevention is good schools, sound employment, robust community services and an active cultural life. Secondly, the best crime prevention takes time, and there is perhaps an understandable reluctance on the part of governments to move towards crime prevention efforts that will not show fruition during their tenure in office but perhaps two or three generations down the road.
We have to think about this. Both crime prevention and crime suppression cost money. The former works, while the latter largely does not, at least not the way we approach it. Why not invest in what all the evidence tells us will work? We spend a lot of money on Aboriginal communities, on Aboriginal justice and on our criminal justice system. We do that anyway, so really what this is about is deciding how you will spend your money. Will you spend it on communities or jails? You decide.
Thank you.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Gilmore. You have given a lot of information very quickly. I could not keep up with my notes here. I am sure the lawyers in the crowd got a lot more information than I have. Fortunately, I do not have to ask the first question.
Senator Demers: Thank you for your presentation. It was very clear.
In your view, what are the most pressing social conditions in Aboriginal communities that may play a role in increasing the risks of coming into conflict with the law?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: There are many. In many communities that I have been in, both in my capacity as a researcher and as an Indian claims commissioner, we are really looking at a triage approach in a number of communities. Certainly the lived environment in these communities — the physical environment, housing, infrastructure — is absolutely at a Third World level. You have a toxic mix when two or three families live together in one house barely fit for one family to begin with. You then combine the stress and tension involved in that with the reality that many Aboriginal people in these communities are struggling with trauma and the psychological and physical impacts of trauma. Many are unemployed or at best underemployed. There may well be substance abuse in the mix, and, if you are in a rural or isolated community, access to weapons.
We need to build better houses. People need to have their own houses. As a previous report of this committee said, we need to build better schools. All of these things go into making a better environment.
Senator Patterson: Thank you for a very charged presentation, replete with information and strong recommendations. I was struck by you basically saying that restorative justice is not working, despite all the efforts of the provinces and territories in that area and all the money that has been spent. This is, to me, shocking and worrisome. You can tell me if I am overstating it.
I would like to pursue that with you a bit further. I know there have been many programs adopted in Canada, some of them from Australia. In the area of restorative community justice, is there no program with better results?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Well, first off, jail is not the solution, absolutely not. The difficulty we face is that because we fail to evaluate the bulk of these programs in Canada, we do not know what kind of effect we are having. When I talk about restorative justice, I am talking about community justice on the ground: What are people in communities doing to deal with conflict and crime in their midst? There is a multilevel difficulty.
The first of these difficulties is the when communities are actually engaging in conflict resolution — holding sentencing and healing circles — we find that in many of these communities the level of jurisdiction that local community justice bodies are allowed to take on means that they are dealing with only relatively minor, non-violent crimes. There is a lot of sense in starting small and working toward more serious cases. The difficulty we face, though, is that there is urgency in many communities to deal with more serious types of crime because those are the things making life very difficult for many people.
The problem, however, is that with that urgency comes a need to jump into these programs so that often communities jump into the fray without a clear sense of what they are trying to achieve. For example, I do a lot of work in assisting communities to develop local community-owned and tradition-based approaches to conflict resolution. One of the first things we have to do is ask what we are trying to do. In the same way that Barry Stuart envisioned the notion of sentencing circles with the Friendship Centre, their goal was reducing reoffending rates. They had something clear to aim for that they could measure. If you do not know what you are trying to do, how do you measure whether you are able to do it?
The things we see happening in a lot of communities with these programs is that it is hard for them to get traction. You can go in and train and work with communities to try and get the programs up and running, but it is hard to sustain them for many reasons. Even when they are sustained, despite the fact that most of these processes are supposed to be about equality between victims and offenders and positive empowering dialogue between victims and offenders within a community context, there is almost, without exception, far more emphasis on the offender than on the victim. There are high rates of re-victimization of victims when they enter these processes, and the limited information we have from the international context indicates that offenders are much happier with these community justice processes than are victims.
We also find that there are serious problems with follow-up in many communities. The purpose of most of these types of community-based initiatives, whether it is community conferencing, which comes to us from New Zealand and Australia, healing circles, even some sentencing circles, is to produce an agreement or, in the context of sentencing circles, a recommendation for sentence that usually encumbers the offender with a set of criteria that he or she must meet over the period of sentence or the healing process. Therefore, they may have to attend counselling or engage in groups like Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. They may be expected to provide certain services within the community or to maintain employment. When you have a community with an 80 per cent or 90 per cent unemployment rate, requiring an offender to be employed is not an easy task.
When you have a community that, despite its best efforts to sustain AA or NA and try to have counselling services available to their community, they are unable to get any of those programs going.
When you have a community service that requires some oversight and there are one or two probation officers probably three to four hours away who serve a number of communities, where is your follow-up and oversight?
When agreements are not kept and it is not clear that some of the details of the sentence have been respected, the process loses credibility. Offenders feel often quite confused as to why they have not been held to the accountability they demonstrated in the circle, and victims lose faith.
It is not so much that those processes cannot work; it is about them not working now because we do not support and resource communities to make these programs and pursuits possible. We do not necessarily allow communities the time and the support to develop so that they can deal not only with minor issues but also with the major ones that give their programs credibility and respect.
Senator Patterson: You are in Ottawa and we are a committee that has a mandate with the federal jurisdiction, mainly. I know that Justice Canada has a big community justice restorative budget, and I always thought that when you get federal money, you have to promise to do evaluation. It is a mantra almost, in my experience, yet you said that that is not happening. Can you comment specifically with reference to the federal Department of Justice and its programs, because that is our mandate, and why this might not be happening even with a government that seems to demand evaluation?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Yes, I can, qualified by the caveat that it may be that some evaluation is getting done and not being made public, as was the case with the Community Holistic Circle Healing Program in Manitoba for which there have been three different evaluations. The first one was never released to the public; the second one was so methodologically flawed that we could take nothing away from it; and the third one was not about whether the program was working but whether it was more cost effective. We all know that almost anything is cheaper than putting people in prison. That did not tell us anything we did not know.
The second evaluation, which was methodologically flawed, is a good testament to the challenges we face in many communities. In order to evaluate a program, you need data, which means you need to be able to do things. For example, when an offender comes into a community process, there must be an intake interview. You need to know who the person is; what his or her background is; what the charges were; what the disposition was. You need to follow and track their movement them through the process. When they finish, you need to complete the records by including all the data that is relevant to finishing up: What community service was performed? Did they attend the AA? All of these details have to be kept and maintained. In some cases, we are talking about keeping records, usually computerized and, of necessity, confidential. They need to be maintained sometimes for one, two or three years. There are limited numbers of communities that can retain people from the community who have those skills.
Interestingly, a colleague of mine a number of years ago was responsible for evaluating Aboriginal Head Start in the Yukon. He said that the biggest challenge they faced, because this was a multi-year, multisite evaluation, was bringing Aboriginal people from the communities and teaching them how to do the data entry that was necessary to produce the data so the evaluations could be done. The turnover in the people they trained in order to get that data was 100 per cent every year. Jobs are so thin on the ground that people would come in, get the training, do the job for a year and they were gone south and he had to start again. He said that was one of the biggest challenges they faced in terms of completing that evaluation. It speaks to the broader challenges in communities.
Aboriginal people are no different from anyone else in a lot of ways. They want peaceful, prosperous communities, the promise of their children realized, good services, jobs and full lives. There are all kinds of contexts in this country where Aboriginal people do not have this. I am sorry, but my view of that is in a country as wealthy as this one, that is a political choice.
The Deputy Chair: I will follow up with one or two questions. It is shocking to me that you are essentially saying that the restorative justice system is not working and yet there are a lot of people in the public who think it is the best way to go. It sounds like part of it is due to not having the resources or the mechanisms in place to allow it to work. Is that true all across Canada? Are there places like Saskatchewan, for example, where I am from, where the experience would be the same as other places?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Again, I have not seen any evaluations out of Saskatchewan at this point and, as a researcher, I fall to the data. I can tell you that communities face really compelling challenges in making these programs work. They really do.
Again, I believe in community justice. I believe that the most powerful justice we can give each other is that one person gives to another in day-to-day life; it often does not come from the courts. We do not resource and empower communities to take on community justice in a meaningful way and in a way that can make a difference.
The Deputy Chair: Is there any country that has done that? I think you said something about New South Wales.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Interestingly, in Australia one program that seems to have had fairly significant impacts in communities is a program called the night patrols. They have not been able to get traction in all of the communities in which they have been initiated, but in a number of the communities these are volunteer-based groups that patrol the community at night. Kids get into trouble; they hold them to account right there and send them home. If people are in danger or at risk or in compromising situations that could get them into trouble with the police, they work in partnership with the police, but they are the front line. The night patrols have been evaluated and have indicated that they have relatively good outcomes in terms of crime reduction and prevention due to their efforts.
The Deputy Chair: Where is that happening?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: In Australia.
Senator Seth: It is interesting and nice to know that you have done a lot of research and work. You have seen many programs and services that identify and target the root causes of crime in Aboriginal communities. However, all this does not seem to be helping. Your suggestion is to help the community and to do preventive measures, which are better. Have you done any study or any research on causes and preventive measures versus rehabilitation?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Sorry, comparing the cost of preventive measures versus the cost of the rehabilitation?
Senator Seth: Yes.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: It depends on what you mean by rehabilitation. Rehabilitation, if you are talking about what we do when we send people to prison and help them to get grade 12 or to acquire job skills, whenever you put someone in prison you are spending a lot of money. Crime prevention is less costly at every possible level, especially if it is crime prevention that does not look like crime prevention. If you are supporting and building up families, ensuring there is employment in communities, supporting a rich social, political and cultural life, that has such a profound ripple effect that not only does it reduce the amount of crime but the quality of life is so improved that it has positive, measurable effects on the health of all people in communities generally.
I focus on family violence a lot because family violence is poisoning Aboriginal communities. It is central in reinforcing this cycle of violence and crime in communities because when children grow up in contexts where they see violence as a way to resolve their problems —
Senator Seth: They repeat.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Yes. We also know clearly from the evidence that what you fail to attend to in the first five years of a child's life you will spend most of their adult life trying to fix.
Senator Seth: My question is about preventive measures versus rehabilitation. Rather than punishing them by sending them to jail and then offering all kinds of preventive measures and counselling methods to them there, why not do family-oriented counselling first? Why not look after that rather than repeating the same routine? It gets worse and worse and I think it will cost more to give them counselling in prison rather than having them do community work. They are not rehabilitated in jail. They are getting more counselling there rather than being in a community-based environment or getting educational advice to help prevent them from committing crimes.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Community-based prevention is the absolute key. We have tried to make kinder, gentler, more user-friendly prisons. We call them healing lodges, but a prison is prison. It is far away from home and far away from your family, and because there are still not enough of these, it can be far away from your cultural group and far away from the people who speak your language.
I have worked in trilingual communities where people speak French, English and Cree fluently. They move seamlessly through those languages. When they have the freedom to conduct a healing circle or a sentencing circle in Cree, French or English, it is a totally different experience in Cree than it is in English or in French. Language is significant. It is the carrier of culture. If we are going to talk about putting people into these newfangled, fancier prisons that are still far away from home — that is, if you are in a place where you cannot speak your language and experience your culture — there will be limited options for healing for you there.
Senator Watt: The matter that you are talking about is very important, not only on the basis of justice but related to all the other matters that make a community what it is. I certainly share your views, partly because of my experience living in isolated communities, although I am not with the First Nations; I am with the Inuit in the North, in the Arctic. I see the misconception and misunderstanding that we have with our counterparts. When I say ``our counterparts,'' I guess I am talking about the government in the sense of trying to express what the problem really is and how to resolve it. We are far from getting there, and we will continue doing that for the next generation to come and probably the generation after if we keep it up the way we are.
I share the points you raised. The housing crisis is one of the big factors that create animosity and tension within the community, especially when they have no purchasing power and no money, let alone little access to the goods they need in their small communities.
They also got caught, in a sense. Let me try to describe this the way that I understand it. The people we are talking about today are so far behind. We are not even close to closing the gap. I have heard many times over the years — from government, bureaucrats, politicians and even economists — talk about closing the gap. Do they really know what they are talking about? I do not think so in light of the issues you just raised. I share exactly the same concerns you have because I live with them on a daily basis.
Let me take a community with a population of 3,000 or 4,000. Today, 65 per cent of the population in that small community has a criminal record. That percentage has been accumulating in such a short period of time. Within the next five years or so, we might have 99 per cent with a criminal record in that community. I am using that as an example. It varies, depending on the community.
I think we are definitely on the wrong track in terms of dealing with the criminal issue, putting it in a box as criminal. It is isolated from everything else. If we do not touch on the other matters, the side effects and so on, we will not get there. I do not care what instrument we try to create; we will not make it because we are so far behind. We are not closer to our counterparts in terms of our educational needs, the economy, housing, cleanliness, the right to live, the right to food and the right to clothing. Those we do not have.
Whether the government realizes it or not, that is the reality in the North. However, I am pretty sure that is also the reality in the major reserves in certain parts of Canada.
What do we do? I think you are also raising that question. Do we continue to stick with trying to deal with it as a criminal issue, forgetting about the other factors that created those problems? I do not think we will get there.
I would like to have more assessment. I would like to hear more about the real, concrete steps we have to take as senators to make strong recommendations and to be understood, once and for all, by the people who need to understand.
The general public in Canada has little knowledge about what is happening to Aboriginal communities. You talked about a Third World country. I call it a ``Fourth World'' country. That is what is happening.
I would like to hear your opinion on some of the points I just raised.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: One of the things that has been a bit of a tradition of government in this country when it comes to Aboriginal communities and high levels of crime and conflict is that we are very fond of what my dear friend Carol La Prairie used to refer to as ``responsibilization without resources.'' There is so much talk in this country. I hear it among some of my relatives back in British Columbia; I hear it among my students here in Ottawa. When I am in the North, I hear in many non-Aboriginal contexts that Aboriginal people are very expensive and we do not get much for it.
Whenever another crisis in an Aboriginal community comes to the attention of the government, the first statement that is made by the government, as power, usually pertains to how much money they have spent. There is never really much conversation about whether they are spending it strategically or correctly. There is never any conversation about whether they are actively, ethically and respectfully engaging communities in how that money should be spent, nor is there any significant discussion about the fact that there are things money can fix and there are things money cannot fix.
Money can make communities better places to be. It can build better houses and better schools. It can provide adequate books. It can provide libraries for the children. It can provide clinics. If you are lucky, it can even get people into those clinics.
I was in a community once where a child drowned in the lake off the shore of the community. The child was pulled out of the water and resuscitated. Everyone thought it was fine. They got her up to the clinic, but there was no doctor. By the time they got her to a hospital the next day, she died from the accumulation of the water in her lungs. There was no infrastructure there to support her.
I was in a community last October. They tell me there are 700 people there, but on any given day there are only about 400. The day before I arrived, a 17-year-old put a shotgun to his chest and blew off most of the left side of his body. One of the women on the justice committee is the public health nurse in the community. She came to me that day, the first day I was in the community, and said, ``I do not think I can stay to talk about justice because I had to sit with that boy and help him die.'' I said, ``You had to help him die?'' She said, ``Yes. We do not have any nurses or doctors. I do not have any equipment. There was no plane to get him out. It is a five-hour drive to the nearest community that has a clinic, so I just sat there and helped him die.''
There would be an uproar if that happened anywhere but in an Aboriginal community. In fact, my daughter, who is sitting over there, was quite shocked when I came home and told her about this, because this was in the wake of a high- profile suicide in Ottawa that everyone was talking about, a teenage girl who killed herself. Is it tragic? Absolutely. Do we care? Absolutely. Do we care about that 17-year-old Aboriginal boy? We do not even know about it. Those are political choices.
If you want things to get better in communities, fix the community. Sit down with the people who have to live every day in those communities. Talk to them about what needs to change and really hear them, and then take all that money you are putting into prisons, probation, parole, and all that money you are putting into the itinerant courts up North, and put it into making those communities healthy, positive places to be. Build up the community before you start building on the community with things like community justice and conflict resolution. Those are the fundamental realities.
When you consider that roughly 52 per cent of the Aboriginal population of this country is under 25 years of age and that about 70 per cent of Aboriginal people do not even live full time on reserves anymore, and that 76 per cent of that 52 per cent of the Aboriginal population do not speak their Aboriginal language and have only limited connection with traditional culture, we have to start building up communities or we will lose those cultures, we will lose those languages and we will lose more people who do not have to be lost.
Senator Watt: I share your concerns and fully support the matters you have raised regarding where we should be concentrating our efforts if there is to be any meaningful input from the outside into building up our communities. I fully agree with that. Otherwise, if we do not, first, we will not have enough people who are sufficiently educated to be able to go into mainstream society and compete there. There is no such thing as that. That will never happen in the short term. A handful of people might be able to do so, those who have managed to fall through the cracks and might succeed on their own. I congratulate those who have.
I guess I am hearing what I want to hear. I have been waiting for this for a long time. At times I feel like a very lonely senator here as an Inuit person. Sometimes I do not even bother to raise the issue because I know I will not be understood, but you have made it happen tonight. I congratulate you for that and I hope everyone is listening.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Thank you.
Senator Watt: I also hope to see more of you in the North. I am not sure whether you have spent time in the Inuit communities in the Arctic: Nunavut, Nunavik and Nunatsiavut.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: I have not spent time in Nunavut. I spent a lot of time on the western side of James Bay.
Senator Watt: The James Bay Cree are my neighbours because I am from the Ungava side.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: They are wonderful communities. This is the thing we do not understand: There is so much in these communities.
Senator Watt: We are going through a great deal of buildup in the communities right now and concentrating on the infrastructure. However, that is not happening where it should be happening. It is not right across the board because of the lack of understanding, lack of initiative, lack of political will and no real understanding of the nature of the crisis that the communities are going through. It is not necessarily their fault or the fault of the people coming from the outside; it is just a lack of understanding. The question is where to concentrate. What is the most important part to focus on first, before touching upon the other areas? We need to go through that.
Senator Enverga: Thank you for your presentation. My question is more in line with Senator Watt's questions.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I feel that there is an Aboriginal community out there that wants to retain their way of life and the way of life from the beginning. They do not want to change their traditions and culture. That is what I feel from what I have read. We now have a government that wants to give the same way of life as the rest of the country. Do you not think there is a conflict there? I think that is what you were discussing a while ago.
What can we do? We should start with the root cause of this problem. Let us deal with the tradition first and the culture and then build on that. Do you not think that is one way to do it?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: In my experience, in many communities there is actually a vibrancy of culture, but outsiders come in and if they do not — forgive the crassness — see a teepee, they do not see a culture. The majority of Canadian society is descended from French and British cultures, but no one expects us to still be living in houses such as you find in the city of London or in the city of Paris.
Culture is, in many ways, very mutable at the edges. You have a set of core cultural beliefs and that is your world view. Culture can incorporate all kinds of things and still remain your culture and still remain your way of looking at the world.
It may interest you to know that the Cherokee now have their own email mechanism on Google mail in Cherokee. Cherokee people who do not speak Cherokee fluently can write an email in English and it is translated into Cherokee. Interestingly enough, the Cherokee word for email means ``lightning word.'' Culture can change, it can adapt and it can move, but only if we support it and let it.
As our brethren in Quebec have been clear about, language retention is key to the retention of culture. We need to support Aboriginal communities to retain language, be able to go to school in their own community and schooled in their own language. This can be done inside Quebec and outside Quebec.
In Kahnawake, where I lived for a short time, a child can go to school in Mohawk immersion. There is actually a renaissance of Mohawk as a language in these communities and it is revitalizing communities.
All of this speaks to the pride felt by the individual. Whether we like to admit it or not, up until very recently in this country, to be Aboriginal was to be viewed as inferior. We have a lot of social problems in communities that are linked not only with the racism that has been projected onto Aboriginal children right from the first moments of their lives, but also by the fact that they are living in community environments where everything about the conditions in which they live reinforces the racist message.
Senator Enverga: You mentioned the Cherokee nation. What have we learned from this? Can we perhaps apply the same thing they have done with the Cherokee communities?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: I am not suggesting that the situation in the United States is that much better. I was at the federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., last month at an expert meeting on tribal justice. The tribal communities in the United States are facing very similar types of problems that a lot of communities here in Canada face. That is partly why we all came together to try to have these conversations about what will work.
Senator Enverga: Does the language help?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: The language is central. In many communities, especially in rural and more isolated communities, there are still a lot of people who speak the language but there has to be support for that language in local education. There has to be a way to ensure that the youth are integrated with the elders so they are exposed to the language. I can tell you that in many Aboriginal communities elderly people face the same kinds of challenges that elderly people in non-Aboriginal society face. They are off in an elder's lodge. They are not necessarily integrated into the community. They are not necessarily respected for the resource that experience and wisdom should give to all elderly people in all of society.
Senator Enverga: I am surprised by the language issue. I came from a school board. I used to be a trustee. We have an Italian language course and we have a Portuguese language course. What happened to these other languages? Do they teach them at all?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Maybe the parents of those Italian and Portuguese children vote. They may be involved in the body politic and maybe the Italian-Canadian population is greater than 4 per cent. Therefore, they can get a lot more attention than the Aboriginal community, which is 4 per cent.
Senator Enverga: Is the study of language one of your recommendations?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Support language and support culture. Make these healthy, prosperous communities so that retention of language and culture does not become a luxury that you might be able to get access to on the days you actually have enough to eat, when there is actually heating in your house and when your water is drinkable.
Senator Enverga: You mentioned that when an Aboriginal person learns something and they find new skills, they go down south. Do you mean they immerse with other communities?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: I think you are referring to the experiences of my friend who was evaluating Aboriginal Head Start. No, the folks that they trained went south and got well-paying jobs in the South.
Senator Enverga: It is more like a brain drain; is that what you are saying?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Sure, absolutely, and it is not surprising. Again — and I am sorry I keep stressing this — the living environment in many of these communities is such that if you find a way out you go, because these are not places in which a lot of people want to raise their children. I say that mindful of the fact that home is still home. Your community is where you have family. You may have your language, you have your culture, you have everything you know, and that makes you who you are. That is why Aboriginal people who leave the reserve go back and forth regularly between the community and the outside world. Having spent a fair amount of time in Aboriginal communities across this country, I can tell you that they are different, even when I was living for a brief time in Kahnawake. It is basically a suburb of Montreal, located between Châteauguay and Montreal. However, it is completely different in its feel; everything about it is different.
Senator Watt: You can feel it.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Yes. It is hard to explain, but it is true.
Senator Enverga: About the brain drain, how can we bring them back to the community?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Make the community a good place to be.
Senator Enverga: Give them a government job.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: No, do not give them a government job. In the communities where we have very high unemployment rates, the people who are employed are employed by the government because they are employed by the band council. That is not enough. At the risk of sounding trite, if you build them, they will come. If you create those communities and make them positive places to be, they will come. If we can get non-Aboriginal Canadians to be true partners with Aboriginal communities and if we can invest in communities in a way that gives them ownership of programs and the structures, then people will not want to leave.
Kahnawake has a population boom. People do not want to leave. It is a nice place to be. I have been in places like the Red Earth and Shoal Lake First Nations on the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border up north. Old people leave there because if you end up in one of those communities you spend most of your time ankle-deep in water in a flooded community.
Senator Enverga: We have a lot to do.
Senator Watt: I have a supplementary question to make sure that my good friend across from me, Senator Enverga, fully understands.
It is not a question of people not wanting to stay. Culture is one thing. We would like to try to retain our culture as much as possible. We know that is almost impossible to do because of modern society and technology. We have to be educated the same as everyone else. In that account, culture revolves and renews itself. The witness has explained that quite well. That is the way it works. It is not a question of the fact that they want to barely retain their culture and nothing happens. That is not the case. I would like to see some improvement in their lives.
I would like to echo one issue you raised. Those young people have learned from their experience and from watching their parents and what is happening in the community. When a young person — it does not matter how old that person is — is living under conditions that are not acceptable, that child, even at five years old, understands when you can see the evidence on the other side of another house. Who lives in that house? The people we bring in from the south. They have everything. They have luxury. They are subsidized. They have purchasing power and this and that — much more than what you probably have in the South. In Inuit and First Nations communities, the houses are like day and night. That is how different it is.
When you are a young person, you are already brainwashed to a certain extent. You can imagine why that person, when he gets to a certain age, has a certain amount of revenge, unless he continues to get educated to be able to counter the criminal aspects and things of that nature. That is what is happening in the community.
There is no easy solution to what Ms. Dickson-Gilmore is raising.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: The reality is that some Aboriginal communities are more prosperous. For the vast majority and pretty much the dividing standard, life is lived below the low income cut-off with limited amenities and limited opportunities for upward mobility. If we do not start attending to this, very little will improve; very little will get better.
If you are not going to build better schools and better houses and build up families, then you better build more prisons.
Senator Watt: You need to raise the level of the bar when it comes to the level of education.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Again, children learn what they live. If you are surrounded by a situation that indicates that you should not aim high, you will not aim high.
Senator Watt: We should aim high.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Absolutely.
Senator Raine: You paint a discouraging scene. You are absolutely right that we need a wakeup call because the statistics show that if we do not do something different, it will get worse.
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is rampant in many communities.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Yes.
Senator Raine: Are you tracking that with respect to its effect on the prison population? I ask you this because things can be done specifically to prevent it. When a young girl gets pregnant, you watch them like a hawk to make sure they do not drink and the babies have a chance. You invest in maternal childhood and use all the resources of the elders. Put some real, solid resources out when they are pregnant, and the next generation may have a chance.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Yes.
Senator Raine: We are not tracking the result of not doing that.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: I came across a piece of research a few years ago in preparation for one of my classes that measured the rates of fetal alcohol effects and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder in the federal prison population, not just among Aboriginals. They estimated that around 70 per cent of federally sentenced inmates suffer from some manner of fetal alcohol impairment. This is not just an Aboriginal challenge.
A few years before that statistic was made public, a doctor in Winnipeg attracted some fairly negative attention when he commented that he was working predominantly in a clinic that served Aboriginal people. The children were chronically diagnosed with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and fetal alcohol effects. When he moved uptown and was working predominantly upper middle class non-Aboriginal clients, the children were diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
We know that fetal alcohol spectrum disorder in all of its manifestations is a significant problem within a number of Aboriginal communities. To this, I would say a few things. If you do not want pregnant women or anyone else to drink, help them to live in conditions that do not drive them to drink. If you are going to work with young Aboriginal women who are tempted to drink, while I absolutely understand the idea that what you want is someone to be right on top of them and watch them every minute, who will do that? When there are many people suffering with addictions and struggling with their own healing process surrounding this young woman, who will help her? If she happens to have the misfortune to be in a relatively rural or isolated community, she is lucky to see a doctor maybe three times over the course of the nine months. Other than that, she may have access to a nurse, but that will be it. I have been in such communities that if I lived there, I would drink.
Senator Raine: You say that we need to build up the communities. How?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: I do not have all the answers and can tell you only based on my experience of what I have seen. We work hard, for example when resource extraction takes place adjacent to or within traditional territories. We have a legal duty to consult. We have what I would like to think and what I would love to believe is the compelling pressure of the honour of the Crown in all of its dealings with Aboriginal people to ensure that their interests are respected in the exploitation of those resources. However, the reality is that when resource extraction occurs near or adjacent to an Aboriginal community, they experience very few of the positive benefits of it. Undertakings to employ certain percentages of community members tend to go unfulfilled. That is significant in a community because when the unemployment rate is 70 per cent to 80 per cent, those jobs are vitally important.
We need to ensure that those promises are kept. We need to be very supportive of Aboriginal business, which is easy to do in the South. When you are not dealing with people who are at a distance or isolated, you can encourage Aboriginal business. There are significant opportunities in communities that need to be supported.
Quite honestly, when it comes to employment in a lot of these communities, the challenge that we face is that we need to start dealing with some of the social problems and the historic trauma. The neuroscience community is telling us now that people who experience significant trauma experience chemical changes in the brain that make it difficult to follow even a rational conversation about appropriate courses to deal with certain problems. They cannot get that. We have to deal with that stuff.
Senator Raine: How?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Part of it is trying to get appropriate healing mechanisms in place. Part of it is understanding that the nature of the violence that has been done to Aboriginal nations, communities and families over the past century will not be cured overnight. Part of it is understanding exactly where accountability can be stressed and demanded and where we are going to have to develop it.
If you want an Aboriginal justice project to work in a community and keep people out of prison, then make sure that the people in the community who are going to take on the job of running those processes are well trained. Make sure that they are committed. In two communities where I am working extensively, we have precisely those kinds of people. They are highly committed individuals who are motivated, supported and sustained. They receive an honorarium or payment for what they do. We pay non-Aboriginal people to do jobs in justice, so I do not know why we expect Aboriginal people to volunteer their time in their communities for the same jobs. Professionalize it, respect it and empower it.
Make sure that there are real and genuine partnerships because they are kind of thin on the ground. We are supposed to be partners in resource exploitation, but that partnership breaks down for Aboriginal communities. We are supposed to be partners in parenting — we all want our kids to have a good future, but that really breaks down in communities.
One of the things you focused on was support to mothers. One of the most effective crime prevention programs in another context internationally is something as simple as home visits to women who have just had babies and are living in poor and underserved communities. It does not look like crime prevention, but it sure functions like it.
Senator Raine: Last week we lost a great Canadian, Shirley Firth Larsson, who was a member of an experimental ski training program. A Catholic priest travelled throughout Yukon and the Northwest Territories. He was a passionate cross-country skier and introduced it to Aboriginal people. Wherever the church sent him, there was already an Anglican church so there was no one in his parish. He was teaching the kids to cross-country ski. He is still alive at 96. His name is Father Jean-Marie Mouchet. In the experimental program, we took Aboriginal kids from Old Crow and Inuvik to the Olympics and to the top of the world. It just shows you that it can be done.
You are right that in our education program, language has to be number one and culture and sport and healthy living. Learning how to live a healthy life has to be part of it, too. Are there any sports aspects in the correctional system? Could they learn sports skills so they can go back and coach?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: A lot of communities have sports. The James Bay Cree, as Senator Watt will tell you, play hockey.
We all remember the trouble that Attawapiskat got into for having a hockey arena and a Zamboni. That was some of the best crime prevention they could have engaged in.
Give kids something to do; give them something with meaning in their lives. The ski program is wonderful, and it is wonderful to take a few kids from an Aboriginal community and take them to the Olympics. However, you cannot take a select few to the top and leave everybody else at the bottom. We all do better when we all do better. We need these kinds of programs because they are important. They give attention and they give people something to strive for, but we also have to build from the bottom up.
Senator Raine: From the playground to the podium.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: If you work on the garden, you will produce a good crop. If you neglect the garden, things die.
Senator Patterson: I will get right to the point. You struck me with the comment about all the money we spend on judges, circuit courts, cops and jail. I always thought there was a huge resource there if it could be diverted to the preventive side. Have any studies been done on what we spend on the curative versus the preventive? What do we spend on corrections and policing compared to the other side.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: The difficulty when dealing with governments and budgets is that crime prevention has to look like crime prevention. It is things like a neighbourhood watch and other community-based policing. The Scared Straight Workshop was a complete waste of time as a program and had no long-term effects at all.
We end up comparing apples and oranges because all the evidence tells us, and there is no way around it, that the most effective crime prevention has nothing to do conspicuously with crime. It has to do with building community infrastructure, attending to children and education, supporting culture, extracurricular activities, sports, families, and making sure that parents who do not know how to parent have support to learn how to parent.
The place you hear about most often in terms of cost is how much it costs to put someone in jail. If you are lucky, it is roughly $50,000 per inmate, if you are not building new prisons. That is one of the reasons that mandatory minimums have been walked away from in the U.S. They found that it did not reduce crime. It targeted the lowest people in most of the criminal organizations that it was supposed to be dealing with, and it made prison populations absolutely explode. It was a money pig.
When I was in Washington last month and I had tell them we have mandatory minimums in Canada now, people from Indian Affairs, the Interior, Justice and Obama's office said: ``What are you people doing? Have you learned nothing from us?'' I said, ``Yes, that is what we have learned from you, lots of it.''
If you build prisons and neglect communities and families, you will fill those prisons. If we close prison wings the way we close hospital wings in this country, we could take the money from those prisons and put it into community- based initiatives and community consultations about what they think their problems are, what communities are prepared to do to fix those problems, and the resources that they can bring to bear on the problem. There are resources there, not necessarily the resources that cops, courts and corrections recognize, but there are resources. Then we would actually be able to leave a lot of those prison wings closed.
Senator Seth: Listing all that has puzzled me. Are there no medical facilities in those areas? If you are sick, do you just die? Is there no provision there?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: You go south.
Senator Seth: There are no clinics, physicians or medical practitioners there?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Even in communities that have clinics, there may not be a doctor there more than once a month or once every six weeks, if they are lucky.
Senator Seth: Why has attention not been paid to that area, which is the most important? No matter how much counselling you do, how much community consultation you do or how much culture you have, if you do not have someone to keep everyone healthy and safe, what is that? Does it mean you are living in a place where nothing is available? I think that is worse than prison. If I am sick and I cannot eat, I will not care where I live.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: The plane will come in and take you south.
Senator Seth: Why are we not paying attention to these areas? I am very surprised to learn these things today. It really bothers me to hear this.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: It is the reality.
Senator Seth: I remember transferred to a remote area when I started my practice. I still remember it. It was a challenge for me doing my locum with another doctor in the town of Kipling, Saskatchewan, with a population of 2,000. A plane was used to transfer patients. Being a young doctor, I prayed to God that I did not make any mistakes. I have gone through that, but I really did not realize this. At least we had a hospital, someone to replace each other, and nurses. Now I hear this, and it is worse than that. I thought I was very brave to work there for two weeks because I was replacing a doctor. That gave me a lot of challenges and a lot of courage to move ahead.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: You made reference to counselling services. One of the communities I work in has a waiting list to get access to a psychologist. The psychologist comes in maybe once a month. In that particular community, where I have been working for just over 16 years, one of the psychologists was there long before I arrived. We crossed paths late last year in the community, and I said, ``Here is my list of things you have to do for the justice project.'' She said, ``No, I am done. I cannot do this anymore. There is no support. I cannot help people. They need someone who is here.'' Even if they are up in the community for a week, they can barely scratch the surface.
We all recognize that historic trauma is a significant issue here, and we use wonderful terms like ``intergenerational effects'' without thinking about what those words really mean. You are lucky if you get a half hour with a psychologist. What can you fix in half an hour?
Senator Seth: We have to look into this. This is what we are. The issues are here. We should be more careful about what we can do, and what is important for the people in order to live. If there is no aid; there is nothing there. That is the most important part of life.
Senator Demers: You mentioned Châteauguay, where I live, and Senator Raine talked about sports. I will bring up something that can be done.
As a coach, I had 13 First Nation kids. At first, they drove me nuts. The age was between 16 and 19, and we were allowed two 20-year-olds. They did not trust White people, and I understood that. The first time they did not show up at practice, we found them in a bar. The more we got them together and with time, patience and better surroundings, they became good kids. We won championships. I found that they started to trust me and would do anything for me.
I made it to the NHL and have always said, as honest as I can be, that I owe it to those kids. They played so hard that we went to the provincial championships. Those kids were as tough as nails and could fight with the best of them. I did not mind a little toughness on my team. I am saying it can be done.
Is it a fact that you do not have enough people to help you bring these kids — I am not talking about hockey players but about boys and a lot of young women — together and give them the feeling they can trust us and we will do something for them? When you mentioned Châteauguay, I remembered that we had a reunion a few years ago, and these kids showed up. They are married, and one is a policeman. They are great people, but many of them were going south, and I do not mean south in Florida.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: You were just playing that kind, gentle sport, hockey; it was not like they were playing lacrosse.
Senator Demers: I found they had a big heart. I have been dealing four years with Aboriginal people here, and if they are on your side, they will be there for a long time. They do not want to be crossed because they do not trust you, and I understand that, but once they trust you, they will do anything for you. I had a great experience, so it can be done.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: You are touching on one of the most compelling research findings that I have ever came across, and, again, it was shared with me by my friend Carol La Prairie. Many years ago, she embarked on a piece of research that was seminal and never replicated. She took a research team into a number of inner city locations across Canada and interviewed people living on the streets. Each city was divided into a series of rings from inner city to what we would call the suburbs, but not quite, the inner one to the outer. She spoke to people who had started out in the inner city, and they made it out. She said that without exception they all said the same thing. When they were asked how they got out, they all said, ``One person; I crossed paths with one person who was in the right place at the right time, and they saved me.''
I thought this is so empowering. This means that if we can put those people there, we can achieve positive change. It was also the most terrifying thing I have ever heard because what if that one person is not there? In far too many communities and in far too many contexts in this country, that one person is not there.
Senator Enverga: You mentioned a resource-based industry coming into a community. Apparently, a lot of the people there did not get the proper job, so what happened to the community?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Attawapiskat is not far from the De Beers diamond mine. The promise of employment has never been realized there. What does the community do? The community goes to the people with whom it has a trust relationship. The company has a fiduciary obligation to provide employment and to support and resource that community for the use of its land and the extraction of its resources, but nothing really happens.
Senator Enverga: Do the people just remain there?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: They just give up.
Senator Enverga: The community must have grown.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: There is a community of workers from the South who are working in that mine. Very few people from the Aboriginal community are working in the mines.
Senator Enverga: Somehow they did not assimilate?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: It is not about assimilation; it is about the job being there, getting the job and being able to hang on to it. Part of that, again, is about the challenges these communities face, the implications of historic trauma and intergenerational effects. There are days when just getting out of bed is damned difficult. If you do not show up to work, you lose the job, and ultimately they just stop hiring you.
Senator Patterson: You have been talking about the need to develop a different political will. I read some studies recently that predicted a very worrisome thing. Because of the problems you have outlined and the demographics, the high proportion of young people and unemployment, this country could be facing rebellion and protests of the kind that have paralyzed and transfixed the country in the past, such as Ipperwash and Oka. In your studies and in your work, do you have worries about that kind problem arising if something is not done?
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Sometimes you have to scream to be heard at the level of a whisper. That is the reality for Aboriginal people in this country. Bear in mind that the Oka crisis was the result of an unresolved specific land crime and the hubris of municipal governments. None of that had to happen.
Senator Patterson: But it happened.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: But it happened. I say this now, putting on my long-removed Indian claims commissioner hat. We have not done any better since the dissolution of our commission in responding to specific claims, and those are Indian Act claims, fiduciary claims and treaty claims. The comprehensive claims process is not moving as quickly as it should.
We have seen how little has been accomplished in the past six months, when you still need Idle No More and when you have Indian leadership, women, choosing death and starvation just to be heard. Can it really be that difficult to hear Aboriginal people when we have two buildings in Hull supposedly dedicated to hearing Aboriginal people?
Someone is not listening. It is not that Aboriginal people are not speaking. Someone is not listening. If you have to scream to be heard at a whisper, you will start screaming, and there are a number of non-Aboriginal Canadians who will be right there screaming beside them.
Yes, I think it could happen. If that is what we have to do to achieve change, so be it, but that too will be the result of a political choice, not by Aboriginal people but by the rest of Canada.
The Deputy Chair: Ms. Dickson-Gilmore, you have given us a lot to think about and you clearly have engaged the committee. We have had numerous questions at different levels.
I myself have taken down quite a few things you have said that have really struck me, and I do not usually do this. One of the things that really hit me was when you said, ``If you find a way out, you go,'' talking about living on a reserve where conditions are so incredibly dismal.
One of the things I did try to find out a number of years ago from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs was to get a picture across Canada of what is the state, and nobody seems to be able to answer that question. I always thought it would be nice to know about all the 620-odd reserve communities, if we had somewhere we could go and at least get a picture of which communities are well off and which are in dire straits.
My mother was born on the George Gordon First Nation, north of Regina. She went to residential school. The last residential school to close in Canada was in 1996, the George Gordon First Nation, so historic trauma. She left the reserve and she married my dad, who was Chinese, not a status person. I thank her every day because she got out. I think that was the smartest thing she could have done because, as a woman, you know you are likely going to get married and have children, and she did not want her children to grow up in those circumstances. She was the one person. The other person was a teacher.
As you have said, to institute change can be so daunting; however, if you have the people there, one person can lead to that change. Even though what we have been talking about is depressing, I still see a lot of hope, and I see a lot of hope in the Idle No More movement.
Ms. Dickson-Gilmore: Absolutely.
The Deputy Chair: With that, I have the final word. I shall close the meeting and thank you immensely for stimulating great discussion.
(The committee adjourned.)