Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on March 18th, 2010

[Nicole Jauvin]

Absolutely. I will undertake to do that. We'll look into that.

Would you like an answer to your question to the minister with respect to the other regional development agencies? Of course, I'm not going to speak for them. I'll just state that apparently, these are renewals to core funding programs they already had. An equivalent would be that for CanNor, in budget 2009, under SINED, which was renewed for another five years, there is an innovation and knowledge provision. This is, I would venture to say, the rough equivalent of this. And this was renewed in budget 2009 for CanNor in the north.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Okay, thank you, Mr. Bagnell.

Did you have something else you wanted to add, Ms Swords?

[Colleen Swords]

I just might answer the question on the shelters. We had funding for an additional five, to bring us up to 41 across the country. The new shelters are now finished and are open in Alberta and Quebec, and the other three are still being finished. But we'll give you a full answer.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Before I let you go, you mentioned, Miss Jauvin, that there were about 20 projects, in total, that you referenced under, I think, the RInC program. We're also doing a study on northern economic development, as you know. It would be helpful if you could give us a list of those, just so we can perhaps append that to our work on the north. That would be helpful.

[Nicole Jauvin]

In fact, I'd volunteer to give you a list of all our projects, if that would be of interest to you. There are 149 of them. I'll give them in caucus, and you can decide what to do with them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Okay, fantastic. If you could follow up, we'd appreciate that.

Okay, we'll let you go. Thank you very much, witnesses.

Because of the time constraints here, members, we 're not going to take a recess. Let's just continue.

We have two motions that have come before us. One is from Ms. Neville. I note that Ms. Neville is not able to....

[Todd Russell, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

Defer the motion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

You want to defer the motion? Is that okay? Okay, let's do that. So what happens is that this motion will just stay, and we'll bring it up at a later meeting when Ms. Neville is here or whenever one of her colleagues might wish to move it.

The second motion is from Mr. Bagnell.

Mr. Bagnell, did you want to speak to the motion at this point?

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Just before I do, can I ask a brief point-of-order question? How come this meeting wasn't televised?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

That's a good question. As you know, we're under pretty compact timelines here. We did seek to get a room with a televised format. There was no room available, so we chose to go without. That's the simple answer.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Okay. That's fine.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, just about our meeting on Tuesday and it being three hours, I now understand that we're going to have a substantial number of votes on Tuesday because we have to vote--

[An hon. member]

Three votes.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

--on the estimates.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Yes, the estimates, so where do we build that in? I don't know how long it's going to take.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

The idea would be that we have the second part of the meeting after the vote. We'll run for as long as we can, until 5:15, break for the votes, and then return here for the second part of the meeting. Okay?

We'll go back to Mr. Bagnell.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you.

I'm an easy guy to get along with, so I don't mind amending my motion. I just want to give you the intent behind it. As you probably heard in my question, and as some of you may have heard from constituents, there's a lot of really good work going on.

As the minister said, there's a little bit of residue money left, so some projects will go ahead, but a number of projects are closing. I know, because they phoned us specifically. They're doing good work, as the minister said. He had nothing but praise for them. Some of them are going to be closing on March 31, as you may have seen in the media.

As you know, once you get something up and running but you close it down, people go to other jobs and you lose the continuity. Some of these people are pretty desperate. They're not going to go into a government office or a fancy hotel meeting room. These organizations are kind of special. They're often run by aboriginal people, by people they trust, and people go in and get some basic services.

As I said, I'm not stuck on the wording, but my intent is to somehow get the funds so these people can carry on, so these good projects can carry on. As I said, the statistics show that there are thousands of people involved, just in one of my projects. That's out of 133 in the country. So this involves tens of thousands of people who still need the healing somehow, healing that they can't get elsewhere. There are no other real provisions for it.

Health Canada has always provided some services. That's good. I applaud the government for that. Those services are going to continue, and I applaud the government for that, but they're certainly not at all serving the same need, financially or technically.

That's the intent of my motion. I'm willing to hear suggested changes or improvements, or something that people might be able to agree to. I don't think anyone here, because we're all familiar with it and have heard aboriginal witnesses, thinks the healing is complete. That's the introduction to the motion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Okay.

Ms. Crowder, then Mr. Duncan.

Go ahead, Ms. Crowder.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

I don't know how we would go about doing this, but I wonder if we even have enough information to talk about this today given some of the things the department talked about. I mean, there's a lack of clarity around it. There seems to be some dispute about the amount of money that's available through Health Canada. I think it's difficult to judge what the mandate of Health Canada is with regard to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation projects, and I didn't get a clear answer from the department around whether they've actually assessed the impact.

I know that sort of feeds into what Mr. Bagnell is talking about in terms of doing a study, but I wonder if we can even scope this out until we get a bit more information from the department. I don't know how many of us have had an opportunity to actually look at the Aboriginal Healing Foundation report that they tabled in the House this week. I actually haven't looked at it.

I just wonder if there's a way that we could ask for some information from the department before we fully consider this motion, because so many things are up in the air with it right now.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

In terms of procedure, of course, the motion has been moved. It could be withdrawn by the mover pending further developments. We did that at the last meeting.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Procedurally, can we table it pending some information from the department?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Essentially it would take another motion to that effect.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

I'll hold off on that for now.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Okay.

Let's go to Mr. Duncan.

[John Duncan, Conservative, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Just a question for the chair. Is the motion to table it debatable?