 I want to thank you for allowing me to participate in your conference in this way. Although it's a little different for me to be doing this by video because normally when I'm speaking I'm watching people's reactions to facial expressions and all that same right now are the facts that you're getting. So I definitely need to turn around from time to time. I appreciate that. All right, good. I want to acknowledge the whole thing that was given to this event by the elder and acknowledge the fact that this event is occurring in the course of the unceded, unsurrendered and big-mouthed territory. And I'd also like to acknowledge the presentation of Minister Wehler and the words that I heard and also the representative of the Department of Justice. I think it's important for us to hear those words and for us to know that there is a support level that we should try to take advantage of in order to move forward. I have a short amount of time with you today, so let's get right into it. I need to begin by saying a couple of things that are very important for me to say and for you to think about as we go forward. And that video has shown us the impact of residential schools and colonialism upon Indigenous people is one that we need to keep in mind. When we are talking about incarceration rates in this country and in particular the impact of over-incarceration, the group that's most impacted by the overuse of incarceration in Canada are Indigenous people. When we looked at the incarceration rates that have been reflected, for example, 25% of federal incarceration last year were Indigenous people across the country, but in Western Canada the incarceration rates are higher than that. In traditional institutions, for example, in current provinces over 70% of the adult men who are incarcerated are Indigenous men, about 90% of the women incarcerated are Indigenous women, and at least two-thirds to 75% depending upon which province you're looking at, youth being incarcerated in the West are Indigenous youth, and that's where the highest population of Indigenous people are. People in Eastern provinces think that because their numbers, their broad numbers are lower that there's not an issue, but in reality the proportion of Indigenous people being incarcerated are one in six or seven. But in Ontario, Quebec, and in America times, the proportions are closer to nine times the incarceration rate, so when you think of the fact that the population may be lower but they're being incarcerated proportionally in the higher, then you have to be concerned about the approach that's being taken. And what that video I hope has shown you is that the social situation that young Indigenous people face and the adults ahead of them as well as what they're going to be contributing to when they become adults are a direct reflection of the history of colonialism in this country. And I was at a conference some time ago with survivors from residential schools and we were talking about young people being incarcerated. And one of the survivors said, worse than the fact that when you keep on punishing people just because they stumble with those of us who are walking with broken legs will always be over incarcerated. And that's what we need to keep in mind is that incarceration in Canada tends to impact those who are in socially inferior positions or those who are suffering from social conditions that have a relatively easy solution. And yet we continue to do that. In fact, the stubbornness of those people who are purveyors of the use of a period of approach to justice to recognize the failure of that approach when it comes to people like that is actually quite remarkable. And it should alarm all of us because they continue to dominate the conversation. The fact that the most recent criminal code amendments that were made by federal government called for minimum sentences in certain situations caused us at the TRC to have a significant concern to the extent in fact that one of our calls to action were to take a closer look at the use of minimum sentences. In order to address the ongoing impact that they have upon people who are caught in those kinds of situations. I do want to point out though as we mentioned that this is not a situation of either incarceration or reform of justice. It's a case of trying to figure out how reform of justice and incarceration need to be utilized so that they balance what society needs because incarceration does have its utility, does have its purpose. And we need to recognize that what that is is it does protect society from those people who are infecting themselves or behaving or have a history of behaving in such a way that society needs to be protected from them. So the truly evil people, if I can use that phrase for the moment and the ones that it should be focused on, is those who are not caught in that situation that we need to understand are going to continue to be victimized. I wanted to also point out that in a study that was done by Corrections Canada almost 20 years ago, maybe longer now because I seem to remember reading it when we were just finishing the work of the Aboriginal Justice and Fire at Manitoba. So a study was done with Aboriginal offenders who had completed parole and had successfully remained uninvolved with offending behavior for a period of 10 years or so. And one of the questions that was asked was too much. They attribute their success of being able to complete parole successfully. And about 80% of them said that it's because they learned their culture and it was their culture and the teachings of their people and the support from their communities and elders that kept them out of trouble and gave them a better recourse to addressing their needs. But unfortunately almost all of them reported that they have learned their culture while incarcerated. And it seems really quite astonishing that we have to incarcerate people in order to give them back the culture which we have taken from them through the use of residential schools and public schools as well as other social institutions. And so we need to recognize that incarceration in and of itself can cause further social harm and that we need to figure out a way to take such a benefit as has been reported in that study and see if we can't be able to deliver that to those people who are caught in offending behavior without having to incarcerate them. And the problem is that we spend a lot of money on incarceration, we spend a lot of money on maintaining prisons and jails and we do not spend the same amount of money that we need to spend in order to keep people out of jail and we need to rethink that old approach. I just wanted to draw to your attention that we got a number of calls to action in the truth and reconciliation commission report that directly talks about the importance of addressing this both from the perspective of ensuring that to those who are in the system, who are enforcing the system, who are administering the system are more capable of making both decisions that they need to make. So we call for cultural competency training on the part of lawyers and those who are judges and law students and we also call for the creation of indigenous justice systems so that indigenous people to take more control and better control of the way that those who are behaving within their communities are dealt with. And we also call for better and more aboriginal programming both before and after incarceration and then in polls, but also while incarcerated healing lodges for women should be considered in the more better cultural programming in half of our houses, which were some of the first programs that got touched from land-based internet approach was taken. Reformative justice programs were specifically addressed in the call to action 31 so those of you when you're looking at the TRC call to action and what you say about it should take a look at that provision because it specifically calls for additional attention to be given to reformative justice as a unit approach for aboriginal offenders. But also the point is that mental health parts and addiction treatment parts are also better services that need to be put in place to address the fact that many people who attend and get caught up in offending behavior are due still because of problems that are not their fault and that could be better covered through a more healing approach. One of the things that we pointed out is that two years ago a number of years ago the government of Canada reduced the amount of data that was compiled in regard to indigenous people caught up in the justice system and we felt that we needed to have a more accurate picture of where indigenous people are in the system and what's happening to them. And therefore some of our calls to action talked about the need for there to be a better information source for what it was that we needed to do. But the bottom line for me in terms of the importance of reformative justice is to understand that incarceration for most people is just not going to work. Most of almost two thirds of the aboriginal people that we looked at in 1991 when we did the aboriginal justice inquiry report who were incarcerated have been incarcerated for regulatory offenses and that is essentially for reaching their probation or reaching their parole. And in those situations it clearly has been handled better and incarceration has been prevented if we have a better approach to community data sentencing. I was the first judge who presided in the Hollow Water Circle Healing Initiative and we conducted about 200 sentencing circles with that initiative and other communities who wanted to move in that direction. But unfortunately the funding that they were needed in order to be able to do the kind of thing that they were doing stopped relatively shortly after the federal election in 2002. And so the reality is that they have now continued to do their work struggling as they can with the provincial funding. But there needs to be a solid commitment to the federal funding for reformative justice approaches for those individuals who are caught up in breaches of the law when there is a need for us to recognize as many of those people can be better dealt with without having to do that. Because incarceration is expensive, if we continue this route of utilizing incarceration as we do it's going to be the indigenous people of this country who are caught up in similar times of social circumstances who are emancipated of people with evictions, people with social problems, who could be easily treated in the community, who are going to be responsible for those higher incarceration rates. And as a society we have to question whether we want to continue to spend money in that way. But incarceration is not chosen to be successful other than the ability to keep people out of society for a very long time. And those who have come out of that system have often come out of it more damaged than when they went in. When we did the HDI report back in 1991 there was no indigenous street gang problem in Winnipeg to speak of and certainly not in western Canada. The use of incarceration during the 1990s contributed to the expansion of Aboriginal street gangs not only in Manitoba but throughout western Canada because young indigenous street gang members were exported to other jurisdictions in the federal correctional system where they then brought that information and created those gangs inside the institutions. And so the proliferation of indigenous street gangs were directly applicable to the use of incarceration. And yet we have so much more that we could have done with those young people than we did. And the use of institutionalization of youth started with residential schools and continues to this day with the use now of jails and the child welfare system. And we need to look for a better approach. So I just wanted to make sure that we had a chance to think about the things that we needed to do to recognize that the use of incarceration is not penetrating the indigenous community. In 1996 the criminal code was amended to establish the use of incarceration as a tool of last resort. And we all kind of hopeful that that sentencing reform that occurred at that time was going to have a dramatic impact upon indigenous incarceration rates. Well it didn't. It had a dramatic impact upon the incarceration rates of non-indigenous people. And that's because the way that prosecutors worked, the way that the police officers worked resulted in higher numbers of people being apprehended and brought into the system. But indigenous young people, indigenous men, indigenous women did not benefit from those sentencing reforms that were there. Even with the utilization of what are called the value principles that came out of the case, section 718.2e of the criminal code specifically requires that judges have to take into account the unique circumstances of Aboriginal offenders when they're incarcerating them. But in order for that to happen, judges have to inform themselves about the circumstances in a general way. But they also have to have proper information about the individuals before there and how those general circumstances, residential schools like their residential schools, child welfare system and social conditions affect the individuals before there. And part of the problem is that the system is not been properly funding or properly providing for the preparation of those reports. Every judge gets glad every court when they ask for it, but mostly glad every court that I've seen are not very well done. And in fact they're very poorly done. And given nothing by a way of tools or alternative ideas to the judge in order to deal with it. So that particular approach, while theoretically the right way to go, suffers from the fact that it has not received the attention in terms of funding and support that it needs to have. So, reformative justice is really about justice. We definitely need to remember that. It is not about taking easy on the offenders. So, reformative justice we need to understand is about ensuring that the accused individual, the victim and the community are able to come up with a solution which will benefit all of them. That was the approach that was taken in all of the water. And despite what others have said about the Honowater program, it dealt with major sexual offenses for a long period of time and their cynicism rate was quite low. And their success rate was very high. And now they've decided to concentrate their efforts with youth, which is mainly because they don't have the resources anymore to deal with all of that, all that. But also because the impact that they've had on the community when it comes to sexually appending behaviors in a positive way. So, overall I want to congratulate all of you for working in the area of reformative justice. I encourage you to continue that work and to understand that reformative justice is the only way that we're really going to be able to address appending behavior for Indigenous people in the future. We also have to empower Indigenous communities to do what they inherently want to do with their own teachings, their own traditions and their own customs. Thank you very much.