 Sheila Wildman, I'm an associate prof here at the Law School, and it's my pleasure and profound honor to introduce Senator Kim Pate. I'm still getting used to the way that kind of trips off the tongue. Kim is one of my and many others. Biggest heroes. She's a living example of courage, integrity, also modesty, as you'll see in a second. She's also an example of all the amazing things you can do after surviving law school. Kim has walked with women and girls who are criminalized and imprisoned for over 25 years. Before that, she worked for a time with the John Howard Societies. It was in 1992 she became executive director with the Canadian Association of Lisbon's Fry Societies. That was a role that ended this past November after a 25-year run following her appointment to the Senate. Kim graduated from this law school in 1984, and she's right out front among our most beloved, brave, brilliant, noble-gent alumni. She's made a habit of making trouble or making trouble public. In her work with Elizabeth Fry, as you know, she's engaged vigorously and effectively in individual and systemic advocacy on behalf of marginalized, victimized, criminalized, and institutionalized women and girls. She's worked directly with women and girls in prisons at the sites where their interests and lives have been in most direct, urgent, ongoing jeopardy. She's been a friend to many women when they've otherwise been most alone. She's also been instrumental in building coalitions across the country with other equality-seeking women's groups and social justice organizations to pursue coordinated approaches to systemic discrimination and violence against women. Kim's in addition done graduate work in the area of forensic mental health. She's so modest she dislikes this kind of rundown of her various awards, but these are symbols of what she's done to bring unrecognized injustices to public recognition. In 2003, Kim received Dalhousie Law School's Weldon Award for Unselfish Public Service. In 2009, she received the Canadian Bar Association's Touchstone Award for Furthering Equality in the Legal Community in Canada. She's a part-time prof at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law. She's a member of the Order of Canada. She's the recipient of five honorary degrees. And then there's that Senate thing. This coming week, our students are those who are lucky enough to get into her class or being treated to her delivery of an intensive course on women, criminalization, and imprisonment. So I can go on and on, but let me give over the space to the woman you want to hear from, my hands down, favorite senator, the one and only, oh, Kim, wait, wait, before you applaud. I have to say, there's a group of women here making a documentary. It's an NFB collaboration on the subject of women in prison and prison rights advocacy. And they've asked me to say this, that if anyone objects to being filmed, I know this is a weird, awkward thing to say. If anyone objects to being filmed, please raise your hands so that the filmmakers know they're right there. Okay, don't just, you know, go on and on it. Or you could talk to them afterwards, all right? About the editing. All right, so, hands down, favorite senator, Kim Payton. Well, I'll start, how I always start, just by acknowledging the traditional territory in which we have the footage of the meeting. And my thanks to elders past and present and the people of the Big Monition who have kept this land as unseated as it is. And I bring greetings also from many people who have asked me to speak often with an honor. I don't presume to speak for anybody. But given the introduction, I do want to say that it's, you know, it is an interesting space to be moving into right now in the Senate. Interesting times. Some of you may have seen where my seat is. I'm in a bit of a rose gallery. But one of the things that I think is really clear to me and I want to underscore is that none of us achieves anything alone. And so part of the reason I don't like the words and these sorts of accolades is because it is never the work of one person. If ever someone tells you it is, and we get talk a lot when we're in law school, that is that you can be the one champion. You can be the one to lead the charge. You can be the one to change the world. And we're encouraged to think that, but I encourage you to not think that. To, in fact, make sure that you build coalition and partnership with those around you, those who have common interests, but also those who don't. And that making common cause has involved for the richness of the lived experience that I've been able to have is to make common cause with people across class, across race, across cultural lines, and across divides that involve global divides as well as personal interests, value divides. And the strength of that work, it really is when you can work in coalition and try to achieve some small measure of change or success as it's defined by the people whose oppression you are trying to address. So I just want to say that it's, I don't want it to be seen as in any way false modesty. I just don't think that it's valid to claim, claim the credit for things that are never the work of one person. So I thank you for acknowledging some of that work, but, and I thank all of you. There are many of you, too many to, in fact, to name who are in this room have been part of my life, my experience, my teaching, my mentorship for many, many decades. And so I thank you for that. And it's funny that when I get interested as a favorite law student, I'm not sure I'm gonna be described that way as I left law school. I certainly wasn't a stellar student. And for those of you who are similarly aren't stellar students, you know, maybe that gives me some hope, that's good. And my worst mark was in law. So the fact that this is the area that I work and one of the things that I most found problematic in law school is that we had to follow these precedents and none of the precedent law. But many of the precedents didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And so I wanted to see different kinds of lines of law and policy developed. And so I guess it's not a big surprise that we end up on a subjectory of, you know, a certain idea and certain philosophy. But today I've been asked to talk a bit about what are the injustices facing women in prison. And part of me wants to say, the list is too long. What would you really like to talk about? I'll do a bit of an overview. If there is anything that's really pressing that you came here really wanting to hear about, please let me know right now, because I'm happy to incorporate that into the comments that I have decided to make. Anything that people came here really wanting to hear about? I would just like to hear about your comments of education for women in prisons, please. Okay, that'll be short, but thank you. Thank you. So I can say anything I want. So part of the reason that we talked about this title as no justice for women in Canadian prisons is because it was one of the things when I first started working, and it's a long time ago now, as I said to the students who are in the prison law are in the course that we're doing right now. Most of them were still, may not even have been born when I was finishing law school. But when I first went out and started doing work it was actually here at Dalhousie Delay Service and I give credit to the clinical program that introduced me to some of the work that has become my life's work. I started doing work, virtually nobody in the group wanted to work with the kids that came into the clinic and I thought it was really challenging. I didn't done an independent research project on how long ago was it, the Juvenile Delinquents Act and moving to the Young Vendors Act which has now been gone for more than 10 years. And I wanted to do some of that work and then I started working with men, as you've heard. And when I first started, when I first took the job to work with women, I would have told you there probably wasn't much difference between men and women in the prison system and I could not have been more wrong. Despite the tutelage of many of my friends and mentors and profs who I had here, I still hadn't quite figured out those, some of those, that discriminatory aspect. So what did it look like when I first started to realize it? Call me a slow learner. I tend to learn more as I experience things and so when I went into the prison, the prison for women for the first time, the first thing that struck me was the massive outpouring of emotion which I had never experienced, not even in working with young people, the massive outpouring of pain and as I started to explore what that was about, it became clear it was about some very real issues that had evolved in their lives which also gives rise to some of the injustice that I'll talk about. So who were the women in prison? Well, at that time, about 15% were indigenous women. Now as I stand here, more than one in three, one, about 36, 37% of women in prison are indigenous women. About two or three or 4% would have been described as, by the self-described as either black or African-Obscotian, African-Caribbean. About, and now as I stand here, they're more than 10% to 11%. We now have more than half of the women who are in prison are racialized women in federal custody. There were about 91% of the indigenous women and about 86 to 87% of the women overall had histories of abuse, physical and or sexual abuse dating back to childhood. More than two-thirds of them were mothers, the majority of whom had been the sole supports of their children before they went to prison. And very few of them got to see those children. The majority of them had, both half of them had been jailed for what would be termed violent defenses. Almost all of that violence reactive in nature, some of it defensive. And if you want me to explain the difference in that, I will in a minute. And we're seeing the increasing, just starting to see the increasing results. Oh, I'll talk about what it was, and I'll talk about what I think caused it. The increasing numbers of women with significant mental health issues coming into the prisons. And so, that was a bit of the picture. What else was unusual? When I left the prison after that first visit, I had to split the headache that it took me several months really to, because every time I would go, I started going to the prison on a monthly basis. I would do a walkthrough of the entire prison. We first had to negotiate access. Now, many of you know that there isn't a right of access to, actually, out of access. Because the ones in my class will do well on this. So, this is how my example works. I give you the answers ahead of time. I'll just give you that in the comment section. So, who has a right of access to our prisons? Does anybody know? Okay, well, those are the only classes in there. Senators. Yes, senators have a right of access. So, the people who have a right of access by law in the legislation, the corrections legislation right now in our country, and since 1992, this has been true, are judges, members of parliament, and senators. And who else has a right of access? Well, we have actually negotiated, when I say we, I still include myself as I still volunteer with Elizabeth Frye Society. And in fact, the resources to touch on your education, I'll come back to education as well. But the resources that are paid to, when I do speaking or teaching, and that sort of thing, whether it's the University of Ottawa, Saskatoon here, wherever it is. Those monies are put into the organization, into the Elizabeth Frye Society. And we use those resources to help fund the education efforts for women. In addition, I want to shout out to Coralie, who donated money to the organization so that all women who need to achieve their secondary school education can, and that money has been used by women to be able to get their grade 12s and move on. We also first race, and we also pay a professional fee when women come and speak at our, whether it's at our conferences, or whether they come to speak in classes that we're offering, they're paid a professional fee in the same way that many people would expect to be paid if they're asked to come and speak or to give testimony or that sort of thing. So we use the money for that. But the right of access that we have to the prison, the federal prison, is one that I thank the law school for helping me. It was the legal interpretation and legislative development courses and initiatives that really helped me be able to figure out how to negotiate our access to the prisons. And the way we did it was argue that in fact, because our mandate was to be a voice within on behalf of women in prison, because our mandate was to monitor the conditions of confinement in prison, and our mandate was to be able to do something about that in terms of trying to advocate for policy and law reform, we advocated that because we had charitable status, the Minister of Revenue Canada, the Minister of Responsible Revenue Canada had authorized our mandate, because we had received some monies from Public Safety, it was then Solicitor General, the Solicitor General had authorized our mandate because we had to be registered as an organization under the Corporations Act, at that time it was the Corporations Act. We were also, our mandate was also sanctioned by the Minister of Industry Canada, that's now Industry Canada used to be Minister of Forensic and Foreign Affairs. So three government ministries supporting our mandate could not be undone by one agency of one of those ministries, i.e. Correctional Service of Canada, and so we argued that the mandate could not be interfered with by the Correctional Service of Canada. It took us up until, it took us about 20 years to actually get that in writing, but we now have that, so even though legislative we don't have to write a back says in fact, or organizationally, our agency teams, we have teams that go into every one of the prisons, the federal prisons across the country for women and do walks through the entire institution, meet with the organized groups and document what is or isn't happening in the prisons and then try to achieve change. Unfortunately, it's the only organization that does that right now and one of the reasons I mention it is because I think many other organizations could be doing that, I would encourage them to do that. It's also that I think that every single one of you, as a citizen of this country, or as someone in this country, and someone who is paying taxes in this country, you have a right of access because what is being done in our prisons is being done in all of our names. It's not just one person, it's not just one minister, it's not just one commissioner of corrections who decides what happens within our prisons. It is done in all of the names of all of us and so one of the challenges of how you identify what's happening in prisons is so few people have access to actually go in and interact and work with and walk with people who are in prison that there's very limited information about that. So I'll come back to that as well in the importance of that. But so why did I have a headache, you think, the way I'm coming out of the prison for women? I think that was a good, any guesses? Just being caught in pain, I guess. Just being caught in pain. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just gonna say, maybe recidivism, recidivism, sorry, recidivism rate, sort of women come to our prisons by going back in because of re-affining. Recidivism, it wasn't actually that because I was working in the federal system, but that would have been, I mean, that links to an issue that was raised this morning in the media. Is this something that you always assumed that the Americans always have the same right? So what do you wanna do to see that? How does it really affect anyone? Well, if I was as smart as you, I might have thought that I meant it. But it was, I mean, part of it was, it was the emotional impact of, it took me a while to realize it was the emotional impact of all of the pain and the stories and the grief and the trauma that I was hearing when, and I now realize it was in part because there were so few people going in to hear the stories that the minute someone was there, there was an outpouring. And it was because one of the things that was very different starting working with the women from when I'd worked with men and young people was that the first thing on their mind was rarely their case. Rarely was it about them and their legal position. Almost invariably, it was about their children or other members of their family, what was happening outside of the prison and an attempt to try to get assistance to deal with those issues. And so it was a bombardment of emotion, their emotion, and in turn, trying to respond in a meaningful way. And it was the volume of it, of trying to sort through what is it. You can't do something about everything. And part of the headache was trying to do something about every single thing. And to realize that some of it was providing a means for people to just be able to say it in a place and to someone who wouldn't then punish them for it, because women started to talk about if you cry too much, you get put in segregation. If you laugh too much, you get put in segregation. Because if you're crying, they might think that you're emotional and gonna be suicidal or self-injured. So you're put in segregation to be observed and watched so you don't hurt yourself. If you're laughing, they may think you're high and so you get put in segregation in case you're high to watch and see and if you're gonna pass something to see if you have. And so women would, there was that outpouring. The other thing that was very different is the very first time I went into the prison for women, I was asked about my own children. At the time, I had one, and then suddenly I was 26. And I was asked about whether I had children and asked if I would bring them to the prison. Which shocked me. I had worked for almost a decade of that time in and around prisons. I'd never been asked about children. I'd never been my own children. I'd never been asked to even think about bringing them in. And I naively asked, well, why would you want my child when you've got your own children? And I learned very quickly how difficult it was for women to get access. So one of the first injustices that I became painfully aware of is that although the majority of those women were mothers, and across the board it's true, the average is fewer than 10% of the children of women who end up in the prison system actually don't end up in the care of the state. But the majority of their children were, even though they made efforts, they were owned by the federal penitentiary, even though they had made efforts to try and let the children in alternative arrangements, many times those arrangements fell down after a period of time. They didn't have money to pay people. They weren't coming from means. People were struggling themselves to try and cope with their own children, plus the women's children. So the majority of their children end up in the care of the state. How is that different from men? Well, it's almost completely the inverse. When a man goes to prison, if he's a father, almost invariably, there'll be someone left at home, a mother, an auntie, sister, girlfriend, wife, someone who's looking after the children, not for them to get this woman going to prison. So that was the first. And so about the third trip I went in, it was they were having posting a family date, they called it, which was a huge euphemism for really a social, because there were no more than 20 children. There were 120 women in the prison for women. Then, and attached to those women, there were at least three, maybe 400 children that would have been related to them. But we had, there were 20 children there, and more than half of them were outside kids, my son being one of them. And some of you have heard me talk about what my son, but I can remember what my son named the women in the prison for women. The mummies. The mummies, that's right. So his term for the women, and it was, we would call them by name, we wouldn't, I actually am offended by the term offender and inmate and those sorts of things. So he would either know them by name, but it was the first time we ever called them as something as a group. We were in the freeze wave, walking down towards the dining room at the prison for women. And a number of women were filing down from one of the wings to go to lunch. And he just looked up at me and put his arms up for me to lift him up, and he said, mummies, where are all the mummies going? And that's when I realized that's how he had experienced them. Why? Because my son would go in there, and even though he wasn't their child, he would get all the love and attention and care that they weren't able to, because physically able to, because their children weren't there, to provide to their own children. So my son, some of you know I'm a terrible cook. My son learned to bake in prison. He learned to dance the mapparene in prison. He learned to do karaoke in prison. He learned how to play video games in prison. And he also learned with segregation books in prison because he was the elf at Christmas time and he would go around with the Santa Claus who came in and give out presents. And I remember him once hearing me doing a radio interview and I was trying to describe what segregation was like. And he said, mum, you tell him it's like being in your bathroom your whole life. And our bathroom was both the size of segregation itself. Some people's bathrooms are much more luxurious. But it was probably the best example that I could ever hear from someone. He also once said, someone was asking me what it's like to go to prison. And I said, well, I've never been in prison except to visit, so I don't really know. And then it was a little girl and she asked Michael and I said, Michael, what's it like to go to prison? Because I said, well, Michael's been to prison too. And she said, what is it like to go? And again, he gave a far better response than I could ever have. And it was depends how you go. And so I've waited to hear what he had and she said, well, what do you mean? And he said, well, if you go, as you're going to prison, it's really bad, in a sense. If you go as someone to visit someone in prison, they treat you almost as bad. The best way to go is go with my mum. So, and what we meant by that is that we could go in and we could go out. But the other thing he pointed out to me that I had never noticed was that whenever we went for a social, for a powwow, or for any other kind of gathering, or family dating, any of those things, whenever we went to the prison, he said, people wait until my mum gets there and then they all come in with us. And I thought I'd never, I'd never really noticed that. But what I would do naively and it would think, I'm going to get treated like everybody else. So I would come to the prison and I would say, I want you to do all the security, invasive security, you're going to do it with everybody else. I want you to do it with me. So guess what that meant? It was everybody else got treated the way I got treated. I actually didn't get treated the way they were treated. And it took a four year old by that time to observe that, that's something that I hadn't paid attention to. And so those are some of the ways. So some of the issues around serving children. And I feel it incredibly now as I watch women trying to negotiate the situations and circumstances, not their children only, but their grandchildren. And it also gives rise to some of the other injustices that happen in prison because many of the women will make decisions about their legal, their cases or how their cases are managed based on their children. And now sometimes their grandchildren. Does anybody know what I mean by that? How would you make a decision based on your children and their grandchildren? You need to accept a shorter sentence. If you feel that it's inevitable that you're going to jail, your grandmothers and your mother-in-law are going to jail? Exactly. There are particularly women who are told that you'll get out faster if you're guilty. You heard the stats this morning. Some of you may have heard the stats released this morning. I have to quote about 68% of the people at Burnside at the Cretchell Center are not convicted. They're actually a waiting trial. If you're one of those individuals that I met with the other night who is a waiting trial and you're told if you plead guilty, you'll probably get whatever sentence and you'll get out faster than if you awake the trial. And then if you're found guilty and convicted and sentenced, you'll likely actually will be longer before you're back in the community. Huge incentive sometimes to plead guilty. The other reality is what I said earlier about the number of women who have used reactive violence or defensive violence. I was shocked by how many women were in prison where they, in situations where they were actually trying to protect themselves or someone else from violence, they were being, they were experiencing. And if you've got a woman and we saw it very clearly when we were working with people like Ann Derrick who was then counseled with Judge Rotushny doing the self-defense review, women who had been jailed for killing abusive partners. And when we were looking at those sort of situations, what became clear is part of the reason it was very hard to review their cases as many of them had plead guilty in the first place. Now some of the reasons they plead guilty is if you have the first degree murder charge hanging over your head and then opt the likelihood or the potential of life in prison with no plural eligibility for 25 years versus the opportunity to plead guilty to manslaughter or even second degree murder and know that you're then serving a life sentence with life with no plural eligibility for 10 years or maybe more depending on what the judge determines or the option of plead to manslaughter and a set sentence, what do you think your options feel like? And who do you think are the witnesses? We've come some ways on this, but at that time it was still true that you often required some corroboration, some, whether it's medical evidence of injuries, police reports, and so who do you think was, if there were witnesses to the violence these women had experienced, who do you think the witnesses were? The children. For many of them, it was their children and most of the women would not agree to go to trial because they did not want to put their children through the torture really sometimes it is. Of being put on the stand. How many of you have ever testified as a witness in a situation in any context? What was that? What did that feel like? Punitive. Punitive? And presumably if you're a witness, you weren't on trial, so yeah. But you were being judged the whole way through whether or not you were credible. Yeah. When I give, even when I give testimony and I'm, you know, my opinion may be being tested, but I remember the first time I gave evidence in the sentencing as a support person to someone and being terrified on the stand and exactly that of, you know, question as to whether you were telling the truth, all of those sorts of things. So particularly women who have started through the process, even if they've never been on the stand, but have started through the questioning process, are very clear they don't want their children to experience it. So the question, I think that puts a huge responsibility on us, whether it's if you're a defense lawyer or you're a crown prosecutor or you're a judge or you're someone who's advocating with and on behalf of individuals, to actually urge the court to do its job and not leave those charges, or not proceed with those charges if in fact there's evidence, or to actually proceed immediately to the charge that is appropriate if it's a manslaughter or an assault or an assault of the weapon, not to proceed with the charge. So it puts that kind of pressure on people because that's one of the areas that we see and I would say huge injustice. We have two women who are now grandmothers who were eligible to have what was called, it's hard to get it now, 15 year review, which if you're sentenced to life in prison, no parole for over 25 years. There was a provision that allowed automatically for a process where you apply to have your case reviewed. Two women who had very strong cases would not allow us to assist them in a 15 year review when they were eligible because for them it wasn't just what had happened to them but they said that publicly they were from small towns, the publicity was so great when they were convicted 25 or 15 years previous that now they had grandchildren that they did not want any publicity to interfere with the lives of their grandchildren now and the way they've interfered with the lives of their children even though their children weren't testified, the stigma attached to them was huge. That was different. The number of women who had pled guilty who had taken responsibility but had no idea what the details of those guilty pleas were was shocking to me. So those were some of the ways that we saw. The other is we started to see and we saw it first from this region of the country from Atlanta, Canada, the number of people with number of women with mental health issues, I mentioned. And it started in 95, our desire to work more closely on this issue that led to some of the other work we've done started with one particular visit to the prison when I realized that the majority of the women in segregation were from the Maritimes. At that time there were 13 women serving federal sentences from the all four Atlantic provinces, 13. How many do you think are in Novo now? And yes. Is it 80? Is it 80? Yeah, it hasn't been as high as 88. And it can take up to 100 women. So a prison was built there at a time when there were no more than a dozen, 13 women in Kingston serving federal sentences. And but in that, of that 13 women who were there, about seven of them were in segregation. And five of them clearly had significant, both mental health and intellectual disabilities. And so it led us to say, you know, what is happening? It's not that it's disproportionately people from the Newfoundland mental health issues, but it was very clear that it was linked in some ways what was happening back in that period in Newfoundland. Do you remember or you know what it started with? Who was changed over in the school systems? I don't know if there was a change to that, could be. I don't know that. Class of the fisheries? Class of the fisheries. The economy was in a slump. People were leaving in droves to go out to places like Alberta and work in the oil fields. The economy was in a desperate situation. And we went over there and met with social workers, mental health workers, judges, lawyers. It's the first time and the only time yet to date in my life that a head of a prison has welcomed the media in with cameras and everything. And the man who was in charge of the prison at that time in the lockup in Newfoundland invited us to come in and invited the media to bring their cameras in, because he said to me, did you see the announcement today as well? I hadn't seen it, but anybody know what the Waterford is in St. John's? The psychiatric hospital in St. John's? Are you from there? So that day, they had just announced the closing of another wing of the Waterford. And he pointed out that it was a wing where the women went, because they would be the least likely to complain. And he said, and they may as well take a truck there. I think he said, my dear, and load those women up, because this is where they're going to end up. And everybody was concerned, and in fact, we were thus. So we first saw the trend develop there, but it didn't end as we know, because right now, all across the country, as we've seen more and more pressure on health care, social services, particularly mental health care, social services, and educational services, we're seeing basically the prison system being used as the catch-all for all of those other issues that are being dealt with. And so I think one of our biggest social problems has become our reliance on imprisonment, on incarceration, to address social issues, economic issues, to address issues of inequality. And it's the least effective and the most expensive way to deal with those issues in my opinion. If we took, so one of the women that I was talking to on the phone called yesterday, and was asking me about some things to do with the prison, she's been jailed for a shoplifting. And she's a waiting trial, because nobody, where she was, they didn't want to take her home. It's not here, it's in another jurisdiction. But it struck me, and I said, well, what was it? She said, well, I didn't get out the door. So no loss of, so no overt financial loss, yes, it's the loss of the loss prevention officer, the police officer, and other people. But I would venture, I guess, that, and minimum by the time she gets to, even if it's bail for them, she gets bail, we'll have spent at least a few hundred, maybe a few thousand dollars, on keeping her in that situation. And what about the option of saying, hang on, if we're gonna invest this money in putting her in prison and detaining her and putting her in prison and criminalizing her, why aren't we instead looking at some options that allow those resources to be used to rent a place, to insist that she actually do something if she needs to be held accountable, I would argue that as well. If she needs to be held accountable, why not have it in the community, and why not devote those resources to something that would benefit her ultimately and likely be more likely to actually prevent her from ending up back in the system than put her in prison. Any support that she may still have out there, even if it's not considered support by the court at this stage or by her lawyer or by others around her, may be evaporating as we speak, as she's in that custody. So we see that evisceration of social programs, healthcare, education, meaning that we're increasingly relying on prisons to do a job they were never intended to do. Prisons, remember, were an experiment. They were an experiment that was supposed to be more humane from the days when we killed people and physically maimed them. They weren't supposed to be, I would suggest they weren't supposed to be forever in our midst, and I think we need to challenge ourselves and take clear instruction from many reports that have been made, but most recently, the Truth and Reconciliation calls to action, which call on us, in particular, to look at the overrepresentation of Indigenous people and the matter in which that is not isolated. The overrepresentation of Indigenous people in prisons, we all will say is colonization, but to unpack that is to say, it is the class and the race and the gender bias that results in Indigenous women being the fastest growing prison population, particularly Indigenous women with mental health issues, and that's fundamentally linked to the inadequacy, the work that people like Cindy Blackstock and others are doing, the inadequacy of social services and healthcare, the inadequacy of even drinkable water and basic resources and basic protection of human rights in Indigenous communities, is fundamentally linked to the inadequacy and inequality of educational services and supports, and it's also fundamentally linked to the creation of infinitely criminalizable people by the inadequacy of our social services and social assistance networks, and yet we don't tend to question those today when I was asked by our reporter about this stat of the number of people in pre-trial custody. He said, well, doesn't it mean, before we did the interviews, that shouldn't we just be hiring more police and crowns so that we don't have a backlog in the courts? How would that exist? It might exist in the short term. I would argue that by the time they were in place and hired it, we might have even more of a backlog. But if we fundamentally want to address these issues, we have to look at some of the measures that contribute to why so many people, and particularly those who are marginalized and racialized, end up criminalized in the first place. So we need to be looking at those inequality. And I often talk about the fact that all of those measures are essentially an acknowledgement or an acceptance that we cannot have substantive equality in this country. And I don't know about you, but I'm not willing to go there. I am not willing to say that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Equality provisions in particular that were put in place to ensure that every person would have what Luisa Arbor is described as the fundamental human right of freedom from want. I'm not prepared to say we should abandon those. I think we should be calling on our governments at various levels. And certainly one of the things someone asked me when I went into this new job, one of what my objective is, and I know it sounds a bit out there perhaps to some people, but I want to see renewed and invigorated and strong national standards around healthcare, social services, education, and not just in name, but negotiations with our provinces and municipalities to ensure resources are in place. Because we know that those countries that have the best social services, the best healthcare, the best educational services, and by that I mean not only good, high quality, but free, not reliant on class to have access to them. Also have the lowest crime rates and the lowest incarceration rates and the best quality of life. Why can't we and why shouldn't we demand that for everyone? It's not acceptable that when the United Nations comes and visits our country and looks at the quality of life on reserves, that a whole proportion, percentage of our population is deemed to be living in conditions that are lower in terms of level quality than most developing countries. Same thing when they visit other areas in terms of where new Canadians and immigrant refugee populations are, where people who are poor who are struggling are living in. So I think we shouldn't be demanding all of those things. So when we talk about no justice for women in Canada's prisons, we're also talking about no justice for many other people and the links that has into the roots into the community. And so one of the things I think we should also be talking about is how we then go from this place and how do we do it? Because many people say, well, you can't just leap into that immediately. Even though I'm reluctant to accept that, I mean agree, so I'll reluctantly agree to that. There are ways we can be doing it, but when we're doing it, if we're going to do incremental change, we should make that incremental change to be really meaningful. And so some of you will know there are things like, right now, challenges to things like solitary confinement and lens of time and capacity. We would argue that any of those challenges, if they are not about actually getting people out of prison and challenging fundamentally the notion that we are accepting prisons as a way to deal with these issues, then we should be rethinking that. And some have been asked, well, I've been here, why aren't we, why isn't our organization, for instance, involved in the challenges to solitary confinement that are happening throughout the country? Well, one of the reasons we're, does anybody know why we're not involved, except for maybe the class? Why aren't we involved in limiting the use of slavery? So it's not enough. Limiting is not enough. Excellent, thank you. Yes, limiting is not enough. And those calls are actually to end solitary confinement with just 22, 23 and 24 hour a day lock up. They're not to end the practice of isolating people. They're not to end the practice of keeping people in the environment that the United Nations has called tortuous after 15 days. If it's torture after 15 days, what is it at 14? 13, 12, 11? And why is it that it's predominantly those who have the least, even in prison, who are more likely to be in segregation? People with mental health issues, racialized, and women. And so we need to be looking at, really fundamentally challenging some of those ideas and why we end up with so many people in custody in those situations. And so calling for the end to those, and to those who are in custody. And it's not just organizations like ours that are taking that position. Canadian Human Rights Commission who is our core, the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and increasingly we're hoping all of the, so we're hoping Nova Scotia will join us in that as well. And really it's an aim to start to decarcerate and to start to, if we're going to work incrementally, work incrementally on working to get whole groups of people as well as whole prisons and whole groups of people out of prison and whole prisons closed. And so that's really fundamentally what one of the things we're trying to do. We're also working in ways, some of you are familiar with Connie Oaks and the Oaks decision and some of the work we're doing and we're going to overturn convictions and have the commission reviewed. Another piece that we'd love to see and those of you who have created legal, especially young legal minds, would love to see you working on some avenues to breathe life into recommendations that were made 20 years ago by Lois Arbor that have yet to be implemented is when you see that the way a sentence is managed by corrections amounts to correctional interference with the lawful sanction, the lawful sentence, we should be going back. I would argue we could bring habeas corpus actions. I would argue we can bring other actions to try and put that information before, if not the judge that sent us that individual, a judge to talk about was this the sentence that the sentencing judge intended to impose when this person went to prison and if it wasn't then let's revisit that and as Lois Arbor recommended 20 years ago either have the sentence reduced or have the person brought into a different and more open places so that they can actually start to move out. We can also make recommendations about what kinds of services and community-based services should be available. There are provisions right now in legislation that allow people to be moved out of the prisons for mental health reasons. Section 29 of the Corrections and Conditional Rehabilitation Act. Section 81 and 84 apply predominantly to indigenous prisoners and federal prisoners and allow them to be moved into the community to serve their sentence as well as on conditional release to learn the world. We should be using those mechanisms. It's in the section about Aboriginal prisoners but the intent was for it to apply to all people but particularly indigenous prisoners so it could be used in this morning when I was talking with some lawyers and judges who were doing some work in this area was encouraging them to actually call upon us to get the people who were part of the legislative drafting team for the Corrections and Conditional Release Act to talk about what the intention was of those provisions even when they're in court and Corrections says that's not what was ever intended. Corrections is one of the areas where I would argue it gets away with the most intervention in curtailing legislative intent of probably any other area. Maybe I could be wrong, I'm not. So I'd be interested if there are other areas. It's not a rush to the bottom to talk about this but in terms of legislation if you look at our laws in terms of how they govern and what applies to prisoners particularly our federal legislation it looks as though we have one and we do have one of the most progressive legislative regimes in the world. So how do you end up with a situation with such mass of inequality, with such incredible overrepresentation of indigenous people? Will you do that in part by how you interpret it and people's attitudes and values and who gets criminalized and why they get criminalized but you also do it by what happens in the prisons and how the policy is limited by the interpretation that's placed upon it by the correctional authorities and that needs to be challenged and routinely we'll see people accepting the policy as though it is law and when in fact the law has to accord obviously with the policy and if the law doesn't accord in turn with the charter then we can and should be challenging. There are many, many potential challenges there and I encourage you to think about them. What's really interesting is since we started law students and there are now about 100 after this week there'll be about 165, 170 law students have done prison law who have worked on folks like this. We have provincial ones and federal ones that are available on the Elizabeth Fry website if you're interested download them. We provide hard copies of the prisons because they have no access to computers and so but since these books have gone out and since the information is being circulated one of the things we're seeing in addition to a broader access to justice issue which is the lack of representation for many people is we're seeing increasingly prisoners freeing their own actions and some of you may know the hand decision and decision that was brought by four prisoners in Edmonton in the last year and they brought the Havis Corpus application to get themselves out of segregation and those four men are part of a group who are reviewing now the final exams of the law students from University of Ottawa. They're part of their exam was to develop a self help guide on Havis Corpus and judicial review and it's some of the men who actually did their own application who are reviewing those exams without the names on so students don't worry if they kept all the in the hand of the committee or reviewing those to determine what is the best information that would be most useful to send out to prisoners all across the country so they can have that self help guide and so there are all kinds of innovative things where our regional advocacy teams now are also comprised of women who are inside serving sentences who are advocacy work internal advocacy work because when we developed these when women in the law students and our advocates developed these these guides that was in response to women saying it's fine for you to come in once a month and try and assist us but what about the other 29 or 30 days that you're not here what about after hours when we don't know what's happening what about when we can't get access even though you tell us we have a right of access to the law and policy when we can't actually get it and so that was the impetus for developing these and then women said well once we had a federal one we needed a provincial and then they said we need more teams and so all of our teams became richer and we now have a lawyer a woman who with lived experience of imprisonment and usually a defri person involved in those teams and then they said well what about us and so the iterative process of that is incredibly valuable and I think there are many opportunities to achieve more justice and now one of the things that we're looking at that again I wish I had been bright enough to think about before is one of the law students who's doing some work with us that started to do our research on brain injuries and the impact of acquired brain injuries and traumatic brain injuries on women and men and individuals who've experienced incredible trauma and the impact of that in terms of whether in fact they are capable of forming the criminal intent to because of lack of ability to form abstract and to think long term and have abstract thinking which I have never thought about arguing and so there are all kinds of innovative things that I'm hoping that if I have the privilege and responsibility of coming back some year or other places in 10 years it will be able to say the situation has changed and now we don't have a situation of it being massive inequality as exemplified by how we treat people in our prisons in particular those who are most marginalized but I will be actually looking at a situation having increasing equality and so sometimes I'm accused rightly so of being a bit Polly Annish and I do think that there is great hope and even though it's a bit of sunny days in Ottawa for sure and not always sunny days I do think there is real opportunity for a huge change to happen in this country and we have a moment particularly I hope that it doesn't get dulled by being seen as positive just in juxtaposition of what's happening to the south of our border but I do hope that we can seize this moment and certainly I invite and hope that each of you will be part of the accountability mechanism for me but also for others who are in positions of relative privilege and power to try and do and exercise that in a responsible way but in a progressive way and in a revolutionary way and in a way that will actually really achieve some change in this country so I want to end as I often do by, before we invite questions unless there's any questions right now I hope that I have often used and was first given to me in my first month in the job with Elizabeth Fry by a woman named Gail Bore who is also a woman if you want guidelines to advocacy look on our website they were the first edition and the final edit was done by Gail and a group of other women serving life sentences about how you advocate and why you should advocate and what you should advocate about when you're talking particularly about women prisoners but she also in that first meeting I met her in a segregation area of a men's prison she had been moved to that prison because she had been forcibly moved there she had applied to go, she was at a prison for women she had applied to go back home to there was a prison that had been opened up that had a federal provincial exchange or very much would have meant she could stay in the provincial prison if the province accepted her she was such an advocate that when she applied to go back the province said forget it we don't want her back at that time they could still say that later they weren't able to they said we don't want her she went on a hunger strike and refused to come off the hunger strike until the warrant of transfer was signed for her to go back to British Columbia because her husband had had a heart attack and she wanted to be closer to her sons and in her own community when she got there because the provincial jail wouldn't take her under the exchange of service agreement she was put in a men's prison mask week which is now beside the Fraser Valley institution which is the federal prison for women out there she was put in a mask week and because she was a woman the only woman there she was put in segregation and because she was in there the only thing she could do was she was the only program she was allowed out for was to go to school so she got her degree while she was in a mask week and then when the exchange of service agreement was finalized and they said she had to move to the women's prison when she found out that there was no post-secondary education available she brought an injunction stopping them from moving out from the men's prison even though it meant keeping it kept in isolation because she recognized the value of education for her in being able to go out and make a living once she got out of prison and when I first met her there and many of our organization had refused to see her because they felt that she was challenging our notion of you shouldn't put men and women in the same prison which we still have that position I still stand by that I think there are very many differences which I can wax on if you really want to but one of the things I asked her is well what do I need to know to do my job the next fall I'm new and she had just bombarded me with a million legal issues that we could take on and I still kept it that but also you know what all and she said well basically you need to listen to us but if you don't respect us enough to engage with us then listening will mean nothing and it took me a while to process that she said it's just as disrespectful when people come in and then parrot what we say without really understanding what it means as it is to never come in and listen to our voices and it took me a while and then she said well just think about this quote it was a quote by a woman named Lilla Watson who I later met she lives in a terrible country in Australia and what we know is Brisbane area and Lilla Watson's quote was like this if you've come here to help me you're wasting our time if you've come here because your liberation is bound up with mine then let us work together now I suggest to you that we all need to work together because for as long as one person is in prison as long as one person is segregated is isolated is experiencing the torturous conditions that sometimes exist in our prisons then every single one of us our liberty is at risk so thank you for inviting me to come today and I do have grateful that we can change things in a huge way and I look forward to your questions and challenges and anything from here so thank you very much