Legislative reform to reduce Indigenous women’s manufactured vulnerability

Recommendation 4: Implement independent civilian oversight of officials responsible for responding to and investigating violence against Indigenous women. Ensure that administrative, disciplinary, or criminal measures are available to hold such officials accountable when officers are found to have failed to act on reports of missing women or to have carried out biased or inadequate investigations of violence against Indigenous women.

Immediate services needed in the DTES

Recommendation 23: Fund an Indigenous legal clinic in the DTES that can support Indigenous women in all criminal and civil legal matters including but not limited to family, criminal, mental health, and poverty law issues.

Recommendations to guarantee economic security for Indigenous women in the DTES

Provincial income assistance

Recommendation 69: No reduction of welfare for families in cases of child apprehension, so that income support and housing is maintained while mothers are in the process of getting their children back.

Recommendations to keep Indigenous families together in the DTES

Accountability

Recommendation 131: Require that all child welfare decision makers and courts must mandatorily consider the impact of the residential school experience on children and their caregivers.

Recommendations to end criminalization of Indigenous women in the DTES

Legal and judicial reform

Recommendation 149: Repeal all mandatory minimum prison sentences for non-violent offences. Implement legislation to allow trial judges to depart from mandatory minimum sentences and restrictions on the use of conditional sentences.

Recommendations to end criminalization of Indigenous women in the DTES

Legal and judicial reform

Recommendation 150: Repeal laws that criminalize or increase harm for women in the sex trade.

Recommendations to end criminalization of Indigenous women in the DTES

Legal and judicial reform

Recommendation 154: Repeal the mandatory imposition of the victim fine surcharge and give judges the discretion to waive the fine for those unable to pay it.

Recommendations to end criminalization of Indigenous women in the DTES

Legal and judicial reform

Recommendation 155: Reform the drug treatment court process so as to not require a guilty plea to access the program.

Recommendations to end criminalization of Indigenous women in the DTES

Legal and judicial reform

Recommendation 156: Increase the ways in which failures to appear and other violations can be quashed early in the judicial process and take proactive steps to clear bench warrants for Indigenous women.

Recommendations to end criminalization of Indigenous women in the DTES

Legal and judicial reform

Recommendation 157: Legislation should require Gladue factors to be used as mitigating factors only, unless the victim is an Indigenous woman in which case her wishes should take precedence over an offender.