Excerpt from nationalobserver.com
The federal government must ensure $2.2 billion earmarked to address violence against Indigenous women and girls goes to organizations in remote areas, not just major cities, witnesses told the Standing Committee on the Status of Women on Friday.
“We need to put ourselves in the communities’ moccasins … (they) are far from urban centres and they may not have direct ties with these federal organizations,” Sen. Michèle Audette, a former commissioner of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, told the committee. “It’s very rare that they will receive long-term funding.”
Earlier this month, the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) pointed to “the importance of sustainable, long-term funding in order to end the ongoing genocide of MMIWG2S,” as outlined in the national inquiry’s calls for justice. But a “lack of transparency” on how the money set aside in Budget 2021 is being given to community organizations has “made it challenging to evaluate the federal government’s progress,” NWAC said in its annual scorecard for the MMIWG2S national action plan.
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