Good morning. My name is Manon Monastesse and I'm executive director of the Fédération des maisons d'hébergement pour femmes. With me today is our policy issues advisor Julie St‑Pierre Gaudreault.

The Fédération des maisons d'hébergement pour femmes represents 60 shelters in Quebec, both first-line or emergency shelters and second-stage shelters. We're the only association in Quebec that welcomes any woman who is a victim of violence against women, not just women who are victims of domestic violence. So we take in women who are victims of multiple forms of violence, including sexual assault, domestic violence, sexual exploitation or honour-based violence, for example.

In terms of our capacity to accommodate, our occupancy rate is currently 106%. When women call us, we unfortunately have to turn them away because we don't have enough room. That translates into 11,000 women who are refused our services.

As you know, there have been about 20 femicides in Quebec. Of the women we take in, 26% tell us they have been victims of death threats or attempted murder. In addition, 25% want to file a complaint, as opposed to 38% who don't. In Quebec, we now have specialized courts for sexual and domestic violence, but they haven't yet been established in all judicial districts. We will see what impact they have on how much women who are victims of violence trust in our justice system.

You may recall the landmark report published in Quebec entitled “Rebâtir la confiance”, which was about rebuilding that trust among female victims. The report contained 190 recommendations. Some recommendations have been implemented, but only fairly recently. So in the next few years, we will be able to better gauge the impact of this report and the various measures taken.

We have concerns about the federal government's national action plan to end gender-based violence, more specifically about meeting the objectives and implementing the plan's foundation. We're also part of the Women's Shelters Canada network, and we can see that women unfortunately still don't have access to the same services or the same quality of service across the country.

The implementation of the national action plan is built on a solid foundation made up of three components.

As we know, the first component is leadership, coordination and engagement.

The second component is data. In this regard, it must be said that Statistics Canada reports pose a major problem for us, because they don't take into account power relationships, domination relationships and, among other things, coercive control. We're dealing with data that's based on a symmetric distribution of the genders, and that's not at all consistent with the data from our provincial reports. I think it's the same thing across Canada. We've been speaking out against Statistics Canada's methodology for years. Therefore, we need data across Canada that truly reflects the state of affairs when it comes to violence against women.

There's also the third component, reporting and monitoring.

In our view, the way progress on the three components is measured poses a problem. Accountability-wise, the measures implemented under the federal action plan should undergo a comprehensive assessment and should be aligned with provincial ones.

We are therefore very supportive of the findings in the report released by the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund, which calls on the federal government to create a gender-based violence commissioner. The commissioner's office would be an independent mechanism responsible for ensuring accountability, assessing the situation across the country and determining how the many provincial action plans align with the federal government's. The idea would be, first, to better identify best practices and, second, to see how federal leadership can—

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