Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my New Democrat colleague from Saskatoon West talking about the calamity of violence against women. Once every six days, a woman in Canada dies at the hands of an intimate partner. The place where women should be the most safe is where they end up losing their lives at terrible rates. Therefore, we are right to ring the alarm on this in the House.

We are at the end of the 16 Days of Action to End Violence Against Women. It is a global movement, a global commitment to call out for action to end violence against women. At the all-party Status of Women committee, we have just finished studying how we can better fill the gap between need and supply for domestic violence shelters.

Every day women are turned away, women who are brave enough to ask for help in finding safety and often bringing their children with them. They are turned away because the shelters do not have enough space. We asked shelter operators across the country what they needed the most. They told us again and again that they were struggling to keep their doors open and to keep the lights on.

The #MeToo movement has really removed the taboo against complaining and ringing the alarm on gender-based violence in every form, but the funding to support the front-line groups doing this brave work has not come forward. In particular, it is operational, core funding that pays the rent, the heating bills and pays the front-line staff doing extremely difficult work with extensive training. They get burned out. We need to pay them well so they can make a sustainable living in this field. Again, core operations funding is what these groups have asked for from the government.

I will give a couple of quotes from this study.

Kristal LeBlanc from the Beausejour Family Crisis Resource Centre in New Brunswick said:

...at the end of the day, we can't do our jobs effectively if we don't have that core funding. The amount of bugging and pushing in trying to get a small grant to operate our first transitional housing in a rural community is unbelievable, when we were turning people away.

Lyda Fuller from the YWCA in the Northwest Territories said:

I would like to see core funding. I'd like there to be a funding model that is fair across the country and provides adequately for shelters for women....so that women have access no matter where they live in Canada.

Megan Walker from the London Abused Women's Centre in Ontario said:

It's just a no-brainer to me that if you value the lives of women, you're going to appropriately fund those organizations that are serving these women and potentially saving their lives....Frankly, what we need is money....We're failing those women right now if we can't serve them.

The government says that it wants to protect women from violence and that it is willing to spend on infrastructure in all kinds of areas, for example, buying a leaky old pipeline at a cost of $4.5 billion. It is core operations funding, sustainable funding for which these groups are asking. Why will the government not fund them in the way that have they asked?

Sheila Malcolmson