The committee resumed its study of women's shelters and transitional housing, hearing from five witnesses: Mary Hannaburg of the Kanesatake Health Center, Sandy Torres of the Observatoire québécois des inégalités, Brian Harris of the St. Felix Centre, Kelly Tallon Franklin of Courage for Freedom, and Mitzie Hunter of the Canadian Women's Foundation.
Mary Hannaburg described three decades of mental health and crisis work in Kanesatake, a federal territory whose residents lack policing and security. She said status and non-status community members are blocked from services without a ten-digit band number, affecting 1,194 people, and that Bill S-2, stalled at committee, must pass with Senate amendments to remove that barrier. She asked for shelters and transitional housing closer to the community, culturally grounded holistic services including help for men and families, and security, warning that women avoid reporting violence for fear of child removal and refuse to leave because distant shelters cannot accommodate larger families or children with special needs.
Sandy Torres presented research linking unaffordable and overcrowded housing to domestic violence, estimating a 7.8% higher risk for people in housing that is too small and finding that people who consider themselves very poor are 59% more likely not to leave violent homes. She said the lack of affordable options traps women in abusive relationships and pushes others into hidden homelessness, and that counts capture only the tip of the problem. She recommended a coordinated housing policy combining short-term action with a long-term vision and addressing root causes such as income and wealth gaps.
Brian Harris described St. Felix Centre's shelters, women-only transitional housing and permanent supportive housing in Toronto, noting that coed shelters raise safety and accessibility concerns for women. He advocated prioritizing permanent housing while adding dedicated women's shelter and transitional spaces, and cited a 31-unit rent-geared-to-income project built in 24 months under the rapid housing initiative. He asked that Build Canada Homes fund both capital and supportive programming, and said the main barrier women face leaving transitional housing is the lack of affordable permanent options, compounded by scarce addiction treatment in Ontario.
Kelly Tallon Franklin, a trafficking survivor, argued that human-trafficking survivors are being absorbed into systems designed for homelessness and domestic violence without specialized infrastructure, security, training or long-term supports, producing repeated transfers and re-exploitation. She made five recommendations: recognize trafficking housing as a specialized need, set trafficking-informed standards of practice, provide stable funding for security and wraparound supports, build a genuine housing continuum, and involve survivors in reviewing recommendations. She also urged coordination among child welfare, shelters, housing, health and justice systems, and highlighted coerced debt blocking survivors from rent-geared-to-income housing.
Mitzie Hunter said shelters are operating above funded capacity because survivors stay longer amid the housing crisis, and that the median gender-based violence shelter dates to 1981, with 45% needing major repairs and only 48% wheelchair accessible. She noted older women face a shelter gap, with only 15 shelters for them, and that rural areas sometimes offer tents instead of beds. She supported the renewed national action plan to end gender-based violence and asked the committee to back applying the $1 billion Build Canada Homes allocation to women's shelters and transitional housing, with all levels of government involved.
Witnesses largely reinforced one another, but Tallon Franklin drew a sharper distinction than the others by insisting that trafficking survivors' needs differ from those of domestic violence survivors and that merging the two populations shortchanges both, while Harris and Hunter framed the problem as a shared shortage of affordable permanent housing.
Procedurally, Kelly Deridder put two motions on notice, on biological males in women's sports and in federal women's institutions; Marie-Gabrielle Ménard gave notice of a motion for a study on hate, violence and discrimination targeting 2SLGBTQIA+ people; Ménard and Deridder each objected to the other's conduct; and Marilyn Gladu moved to adjourn, which members agreed to.
AI-generated summary — may contain errors; verify against the official evidence.