Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Feb. 15th, 2011

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Good morning, members, guests and witnesses. The Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development is holding its 48th meeting today. On the agenda we have First Nations Child and Family Services.

Again this morning we welcome four organizations and their respective leaders, who we'll properly introduce at the correct time.

We'll just say at the moment, members, that we're going to try to get through at least two rounds here. We'll give each of our four organizations present today an opening ten minutes. I know some of you have more than just one person with you. If you want to split it between the two, that's fine, but you have up to ten minutes. We'll go through that in succession, in the same order that you see on your agenda, and then after each of the opening presentations we'll proceed to questions and statements from members.

Let's begin and introduce le sous-ministre adjointe Services à l'enfant et à la famille, Carolyn Loeppky. Carolyn is from the Government of Manitoba. We'll begin with Ms. Loeppky.

I hope I am pronouncing that correctly.

[Carolyn Loeppky, Assistant Deputy Minister, Child and Family Services, Government of Manitoba]

You are.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Okay. Thank you very much. Please go ahead with your opening presentation.

[Carolyn Loeppky]

Many thanks for inviting me to appear before this committee today.

As indicated, I am Carolyn Loeppky, with the Department of Family Services and Consumer Affairs in Manitoba. I have served the people of Manitoba in that capacity for the last four years and I have over 35 years of experience in the public sector.

I have witnessed much change in the various sectors of government in Manitoba, and none more so than in the area of child welfare in our province. Historically, Manitoba child and family services were provided either by non-profit private agencies, or in some of the rural and northern areas by regional offices of the department.

Prior to the mandating of individual first nations agencies under the Child and Family Services Act, on-reserve services were provided by regional office staff and the province was reimbursed for these services and costs by the federal government.

In the 1980s first nations agencies began to receive provincial mandates to provide on-reserve services. As these agencies received their mandates under our province's Child and Family Services Act, they began to receive some provincial funding for services to children in care under provincial jurisdiction.

With Manitoba's proclamation of the Child and Family Services Authority Act in November 2003, a unique model of governance was formed within Canada as four child and family service authorities were established. These are the First Nations of Northern Manitoba Child and Family Services Authority, the First Nations of Southern Manitoba Child and Family Services Authority, the Métis Child and Family Services Authority, and the General Child and Family Services Authority. These authorities are mandated the responsibility of overseeing the operations of their agencies.

This process of devolving child welfare responsibilities to first nations and Métis peoples came as a result of the aboriginal justice inquiry child welfare initiative. As a result of this, in Manitoba the province funds the authorities, who in turn fund their agencies.

Cooperation and communication between the Province of Manitoba and the federal Department of Indian Affairs has led to a new funding model for Manitoba. It's a funding model that recognizes Manitoba's unique and historical approach to child welfare and engages and acknowledges the unique authority, rights, and responsibilities of first nations and Métis peoples to honour and care for children.

The model differs from other provinces because Manitoba is the only province where first nations agencies provide mandated services both on and off reserve. We refer to this as “concurrent jurisdiction”, which means that first nations agencies serve those populations who are members of their communities and of their bands both on and off reserve.

The province, the Department of Indian Affairs, the authorities, and the agencies in our province have worked in partnership to develop the Manitoba model. Although not all requests that were identified for inclusion in the model could be accommodated at this time, the model provides significant increases to first nations child and family service agencies.

The highlights of our model include the following:

The province and INAC share funding for core positions within first nations agencies at a ratio of 60% for the provincial share and 40% for the federal contribution. The Manitoba model uses for the federal component an assumption that 7% of children are in care, rather than the 6% used in other provinces. For the provincial component we use actual numbers.

Prevention services in our model will be staged over three years, beginning in 2010-11, to accommodate for the capacity-building necessary to deliver prevention services. It will be a three-year phased-in approach.

The extensive resource development will be required on reserve to provide some comparable services for accessibility for prevention services. Over probably two and a half years, the agencies, authorities, province, and INAC have been working together to develop the terms of the funding model.

We are currently just at the stage of starting to implement. The federal government has made a commitment, over five years, to begin this first stage of implementation.

The funding model will have to be looked at closely, reviewed, and monitored to determine how this new approach for Manitoba first nations will be implemented and to determine whether adjustments and/or changes will have to be made over time.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you very much, Ms. Loeppky.

I see our second witness has yet to arrive, so we'll jump down the list and invite Ms. Arlene Johnson, who is the director, Mi'kmaw Family and Children's Services of Nova Scotia.

Welcome, Ms. Johnson. If in the course of your comments you'd like to introduce your colleague, that would be great as well. Go ahead.

[Arlene Johnson, Director, Mi'kmaw Family and Children's Services of Nova Scotia]

Thank you very much for the invitation to be here to do a presentation. Also with me is Brenda Cope, our chief financial officer. She will be helping me answer some questions, if you have any.

I'll start my presentation.

The Mi'kmaw Family and Children's Services agency has provided child and family services to Mi'kmaq peoples throughout Nova Scotia for more than 25 years. We follow provincial legislation but are heavily regulated and funded by the Department of Indian Affairs.

We are proud of our families and children and are also honoured by the excellent reputation that Mi'kmaw Family and Children's Services has throughout Canada and the U.S.A., particularly for our innovations in family group conferencing and culturally based care.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Ms. Johnson, pardon me for interrupting you.

For translation, please go a little slower.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Go ahead.

[Arlene Johnson]

In Nova Scotia, the Mi'kmaw Family and Children's Services agency has recently been audited by the Department of Community Services to ensure that we are meeting the mandated responsibilities of a child welfare agency. The department identified several areas in which we have not met standards. We are working with the department to identify the resources needed to correct the issues.

We are funded under the enhanced funding approach. INAC advances the position that the enhanced approach is the solution, but this is not our experience. We are expected to provide the same services as the province with approximately 75% of the funding. This approach continues to place our vulnerable children at risk of harm.

Until 2006, Mi'kmaw Family and Children's Services of Nova Scotia was funded under Directive 20-1. Directive 20-1 has been reviewed by the Auditor General of Canada and the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, and both found that Directive 20-1 was inequitable and not based on the needs of first nations children and families.

INAC's fact sheet dated 2007 links the directive to growing numbers of first nations children in care and the inability of first nations child and family service agencies to meet mandated responsibilities.

INAC's Directive 20-1 also has an impact on our agency operations. Even though our agency and staff had won numerous national awards, we were working out of an office that was condemned by INAC's own building inspectors. Wiring was a hazard, sewage pipes regularly leaked into the building, mould was a constant problem, and staff were overcrowded. These are not the conditions that any federal government employee would be asked to endure.

In 2005 we were approved for a flexible funding approach, but still within the structure of Directive 20-1, which allowed our agency a set amount of maintenance expenses, which we were allowed to divert to a more proactive approach to child protection that was more consistent with the direction of the Department of Community Services in Nova Scotia.

This allowed us to provide services intended to keep children at home with their families. The average increased cost per year under Directive 20-1 and their reimbursement for actual expenses for children outside the family home from 1996 to 2004 was 25.3%. When we were able to divert funds to the more proactive model, the average rate of increase per annum from 2005 to 2010 was 4.3%. From 1996 to 2004, our cases increased from 81 to 279, an increase of 244%. From 2005 to 2010, our cases increased from 279 to 323, an increase of 12%. This is at least an indication that a more proactive approach is also more cost-effective.

The new flexible funding model addressed part of the need to work more proactively but did nothing to correct the lack of funding for operations. Directive 20-1 provides no funding for capital expenditures on premises, computer equipment, or any other fiscal plant needs. Funds for administration and staff were still inadequate. No agency can operative effectively without space, proper administrative support, or sufficient staff. How can INAC expect agencies to function efficiently without the resources to do so?

INAC seems to prioritize actions related to reducing federal cost and thus the well-being of children, even when multiple expert reports and its departmental records indicate that more investment is needed to ensure child safety and well-being in these regions.

As can be seen from the experience in Nova Scotia, actions to prioritize the safety and well-being of children actually appear to also have the effect of reducing cost.

We were funded under Directive 20-1 until 2009, and our previous executive director, Joan Glode, was very involved in the three INAC-sponsored reviews of the directive in the 1990's through to 2007. Mi'kmaw was pleased to work with our first nations colleagues across Canada and with INAC to document the inequities and to develop solutions to the problems that would ensure culturally based and comparable services to our families.

We experienced first-hand how the lack of family services was undermining the success of families and driving Mi'kmaq children into foster care.

We also experienced some success when we were able to take a more proactive preventive approach. We were in a very difficult situation of delivering services to our peoples knowing we could not do so at the same level as our provincial counterparts because of INAC's restrictive policy regimes. As noted in this INAC document obtained under access to information, INAC agrees that its programs are causing harm to children and undermining INAC's own requirement that agents meet provincially mandated responsibilities. Instead of relying on the evidence-based approach of Wen:de, INAC staff developed the enhanced model unilaterally and presented the enhanced funding model to us as the exclusive option to Directive 20-1, even though the Auditor General had found it to be inequitable in 2008.

INAC's own records indicate they have an inflexible national template to guide implementation in the regions, and their documents emphasize that INAC is only mandated to discuss the enhanced approach with provinces and first nations, not negotiate. Although the Auditor General of Canada found enhanced funding to be an improvement over Directive 20-1, it continues to be inequitable and incorporates some of the flaws of Directive 20-1, such as not basing funding on the actual needs of first nations children and families. This is consistent with our experience in Nova Scotia.

In 2009, the agency went to the enhanced funding approach based on the Alberta agreement. This increased our funding by $10 million, approximately $2 million per annum over a five-year period, and was badly needed in order for us to avoid significant deficits. This new funding merely brought the agency closer to the funding available to a provincial agency in the 2007 year but does not address the current inequities of funding. This increase does not represent the actual real needs of the agency but was simply an amount decided upon by INAC. Enhanced funding is public policy somewhat akin to funding the building of a bridge over three-quarters of a river. INAC can say it has done something, but it is not enough for children to cross over safely. The vulnerability of our families cannot be underestimated, and shortchanging the children will lead, in our view, to a much higher cost to government later on.

INAC undertook an internal evaluation of the implementation of the enhanced funding formula in Alberta and summarizes the findings in a presentation deck entitled “Implementation Evaluation of the Enhanced Prevention Focused Approach (EPFA) in Alberta: preliminary findings, May 14, 2010”. This evaluation demonstrates some significant shortcomings in the enhanced prevention-based approach. INAC, however, continues to offer the enhanced approach with all of its flaws as the exclusive funding alternative. It does not appear that INAC has taken any meaningful steps to redress the flaws of the enhanced approach identified by the Auditor General in 2008.

Mi'kmaw Family and Children's Services of Nova Scotia is in the third year of the five-year business plan. As we predicted at the outset, we are again experiencing difficulties meeting our mandates due to inadequate resources, particularly staffing. The 2010-2011 fiscal year will almost certainly end in deficit. During the year, the province increased the board rate for children by 5%. Staff salaries have increased by 6.8% since the inception of the EPFA model. We are experiencing an unusual increase in children with exceptionally high special needs. All of these factors have heavily impacted costs, and yet there is no provision for additional funding to cover the increased costs.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

If you can, Ms. Johnson, please summarize and bring that to a close. We are a little over the ten minutes there. So if you could, that would be great, and if there's a part that you've missed, you can maybe pick that up in the answers to some of your questions.

Go ahead.

[Arlene Johnson]

All right.

We have recommendations that we have included:

One, INAC must take immediate steps, in full partnership with first nations, to fully redress the inequities and structural problems with Directive 20-1 and the enhanced funding approach as identified by the Auditor General of Canada in their own evaluation of the Alberta model. There is no acceptable rationalization for ongoing inequities affecting first nations children given the range of solutions available to the department to redress the problems and the wealth of the country.

Two, INAC must support other funding and policy options proposed by first nations for first nations child and family services, other than the enhanced approach, Directive 20-1 and the 1965 Indian welfare agreement, which the Auditor General has found to be inequitable.

Three, INAC needs to plan on changes to funding levels necessitated by McIvor, as the increased numbers of children and families served will strain even further the existing funds of the first nations child welfare agencies.

Four, INAC must fully and immediately implement Jordan's Principle across all government services to ensure that no first nations child is denied access to government services available to all other children. It must avoid the inefficient and ineffective case-by-case approach currently being advanced by INAC and other federal departments.

And the last one, five, INAC must immediately provide training to INAC staff, so they are fully briefed on all reports, including the reports of the Auditor General of Canada on INAC's first nations child and family service program, so they are in a better position to implement outstanding recommendations.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you, Ms. Johnson.

And now we'll go to Ms. Elsie Flette. Elsie joins us from the Southern First Nations Network of Care, which is Manitoba as well, I understand.

Ms. Flette, go ahead with your presentation.

[Elsie Flette, Chief Excutive Officer, Southern First Nations Network of Care]

Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee this morning.

In Manitoba there are 14 first nations child and family services agencies operating throughout the province providing CFS services on reserve. Eight of those 14 fall under the umbrella of the Southern First Nation Network of Care, or what I'll refer to as the Southern Authority. The two other agencies provide services only off reserve.

In Manitoba, the first nations CFS agencies were established in the early 1980s. Many of us have recently been celebrating 25- or 30-year anniversaries, so they're agencies with considerable experience. However, until late 2003 the agencies were limited to providing mandated services on reserve. In Manitoba, with the restructuring of CFS under the aboriginal justice inquiry child welfare initiative, those mandates were extended, so all of our agencies now provide services on and off reserve. They are funded both provincially and federally, so they have lots of experience in dealing with two different funders and sometimes inequity in that funding.

The Southern Authority was established in 2003 through the CFS Authorities Act. It's one of four authorities. As an authority, in addition to being responsible for regulating and monitoring the services that agencies provide, we also have the authority to mandate them or limit their mandates or in fact remove their mandates. We are also responsible for funding them for their provincial services. So we are well aware of the funding they receive from the province, and through our monitoring role we are very well aware of what they are receiving from the federal government.

Also, with the Southern Authority we, along with our agencies, were quite involved in working with both the province and INAC on the working group to establish the new funding model under the enhanced prevention approach.

In addition, up until 2003 I was the executive director of West Region Child and Family Services, which is a first nations agency that has been involved with INAC on unique around-the-block funding of maintenance. So we have some experience with a funding model that takes a proactive approach and tries to reinvest savings on the maintenance funds.

Given that Manitoba is moving towards the prevention-focused funding model, I'm not going to dwell too much on Directive 20-1. I'm told the committee is already fairly well informed about that directive. But I do believe there are some experiences we have had concerning the directive we should pay attention to, because there are lessons that should be learned from that. As we move together with the province and INAC into a new funding regime, some of those experiences and those lessons will in fact be learning opportunities so that we don't repeat the same mistakes and end up in the same situation that agencies have found themselves in.

I personally was very involved when Directive 20-1 was first implemented. At that time, the agencies rejected the directive. INAC went ahead with it anyway and implemented it. It was clear to us at the time that INAC had established a bottom line and then developed a formula that would kind of fit into that bottom line. It's one of the concerns we have again as we move into the enhanced prevention funding.

There are a number of concerns with how the funding formula in that directive was arrived at, and we see some similar concerns arising with the new prevention-focused funding. For example, the long-term effects of the model are essentially driven on child population. Child welfare is not a universal program; it is specific for children at risk and their families. So a model that is weighted heavily on child population does not really always address need. Large communities don't necessarily have more child welfare needs. In fact, we have a number of examples of smaller communities that have much higher caseloads. In the larger communities you often have more resources, such as day care, schools, and so on, that help families that are struggling or that support families in raising their children, and those resources may not be there in smaller communities.

Other concerns include the lack of prevention funding that existed in the directive and the base amounts that were used in the formula. I think the lack of articulated methods to review that funding in an ongoing way has been one of our biggest issues with the directive. It's been in place for over 20 years, and up until recently we were still working with 1992-1993 dollar values, and there had been no formal review of the directive.

Although INAC and the federal government's policy is that the agencies have to be mandated under provincial law, there is often no connection between what we get in funds and the standards and the requirements of the provincial legislation.

A number of issues played out with the formula. For example, it did provide agencies with cost-of-living increases. But after the first two or three years, we saw the federal public service implement a freeze on all salaries and we were not exempt from that freeze. But we were exempt when the freeze was lifted, and we continued to not get cost-of-living increases. They were not done until very recently. So agencies cumulatively lost a lot of resources that way.

The funding model also did not deal with the realities of what you pay in salaries. We have to remain competitive. We struggle to build an aboriginal work force. Qualified aboriginal social workers are in high demand in the province, and our agencies have to remain competitive, at least with the provincial pay scale. Directive 20-1 did not pay any attention to that.

The other problem we had with the directive is it didn't clearly define what was included and what wasn't. It had an operations line, and in general it said this is there, this is there, this is there.... What we saw play out over the years were things that INAC had funded on reimbursables, under maintenance. All of a sudden INAC took the position that it was included in our formula, and they were no longer going to pay it.

A good example of that was the services to families money was 100% eliminated within three or four years of the directive coming in. Those were dollars that were given to agencies to provide services to children while still in their own home, to reduce or mitigate the risk for those children. INAC's own documents indicate they have seen the result of that: increased children in care. Certainly in Manitoba, when you look at our statistics from the time that cut happened, the increase in maintenance costs and the increase of children in care are very apparent.

Another example of that was legal costs for children in care. Prior to the directive, agencies were able to build those costs against that child's maintenance. Those are costs agencies have no control over. They have to go to court, they have to have a lawyer in court, and those costs can be very substantial. We had one agency this year that had $250,000 in legal bills, just on one case alone. INAC now expects agencies to take those out of operations, although there was no adjustment to operations to factor that in. There is a need to be clear about what is covered in the new enhanced formula and what isn't, so those surprises don't happen.

Manitoba is just moving now into the prevention enhanced model. We are just in the process of our agencies completing their business plan. We are in year one of that model, and our funding is effective back to October. No one has yet seen any of that money flow because it is conditional on those business plans being done. The model's being phased in and is expected to be 100% funded by year three.

In Manitoba, we are expecting a $144 million increase over the three years: $36.9 million for operations, $91.5 million for prevention, $46 million for maintenance growth, and $2.5 million for capacity building. As Carolyn Loeppky has already indicated, the new funding model has the following elements: it establishes core funding, which is shared with the province--60% is the provincial contribution, 40% the federal. It includes key positions like the executive director, finance director, child abuse coordinator, human resources manager, and quality assurance coordinator; and factors in some variances for large, medium, and small agencies.

There are two categories under the service delivery: protection and prevention. Those are case-sensitive. The province will be adjusting on an annual basis, based on cases. As with the directive, the federal model is once again heavily weighted on child population and they are making assumptions that 7% of your child population will be in care--note, that number reflects your cases--and 20% of your families will require service. That's how they factor in the cases.

We have agencies right now who are already beyond those percentages, both on the family line and on the children in care line, and they will very quickly be in some difficulty in having adequate resources.

Going into the model, all of the agencies will see increases. In Manitoba, in year one when the model is funded, it will be around $6 million for the southern agencies—the eight agencies.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

I will just ask you to bring that to a wrap-up, if you could, Ms. Flette. Thank you.

[Elsie Flette]

All right, maybe some of the other issues will come up when you ask the questions.

Maybe I'll go to the recommendations then.

We are recommending that INAC establish an understood process for reviewing the funding model. At the present time INAC is not prepared to review it for five years. They have told us very clearly that they are not going back to Treasury Board for five years. We see some of the same difficulties that we had with the directive surfacing in those five years. In particular, because this is a new model, we believe it's very important that we stay on top of what is happening with that model and make those adjustments.

We also believe that INAC, together with first nations agencies and child welfare experts, should rework the proposed method of funding maintenance and they should come up with a method that has a reinvestment strategy. As agencies are hopefully able to reduce the numbers of kids in care, those dollars will not be lost, they will be reinvested into preventive programs.

We also believe that INAC and the province should take the lead on operationalizing Jordan's Principle; that plays out in child welfare with high-needs children, who cause a funding pressure for the agencies.

We also ask that INAC, together with the agencies and child welfare experts, determine appropriate outcomes for first nations CFS, including how to measure those outcomes that cannot be unilaterally done by INAC; and that INAC itself, within the department, also seek to have qualified staff who understand child welfare so we have subject-matter experts who take our case forward to Treasury Board and to governing bodies.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you, Ms. Flette.

Mr. Lemay, you have a point of order.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chairman.

Ms. Johnson and Ms. Flette, I believe you were to make recommendations and submit a brief or documents. I don't know whether your have submitted them to our clerk, but if that is not the case, I would like you to do so, please, so that they can be translated and we can get them, because your recommendations are important, and I would like us to be able to have them so that we can work, please.

Do we already have those documents?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

In fact, we have the documents, but in English only.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

From both witnesses, Mr. Chairman?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Yes, from both.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Perfect! So you'll have them translated and sent to us. All right, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Thank you very much.

For the first round, the first member to speak will be Mr. Russell.

You have minutes.

[Todd Russell, Liberal, Labrador, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And good morning to each of you. Thank you for being with us.

Your presentations, Ms. Johnson and Ms. Flette, in particular, were quite illuminating when it comes to the whole situation of child and family services.

When INAC testifies before our committee, they never make a public admission that services are not comparable or are not being funded at an appropriate level. Even under Directive 20-1, there's never been that public acknowledgement that this situation exists. Now we're being told in their testimony that the new way forward, and the only way forward, is the enhanced prevention model. They use Alberta, because that was the first province where it was instituted, as the frame in which they assess it. They continue to say that it works in Alberta, even though preliminary evidence says it's problematic.

I want to go back to the analogy used by Ms. Johnson about a bridge going across a river. If it was two-thirds of the way across with Directive 20-1, and now it's a little further along under the enhanced prevention model, it's still not across the river, still not providing comparable services, still not delivering what's required for children and their families in first nations either on or off reserve.

I know your recommendations. I would love to hear from the Province of Manitoba as well, Ms. Loeppky. Are we going down a wrong road? Are we not shortchanging first nations children and their families if we put all our eggs in this enhanced prevention basket? Can each of you tell me that there will be services comparable with those of provincial agencies? Will you be able to meet the standards as prescribed by the provincial legislation in each of your provinces?

Second, I'm not getting a clear picture of where Jordan's Principle is under this enhanced prevention model. Is it being fully implemented, or are there excuses being made? Are there still internal squabbles over who will pay in particular circumstances?

The three of you can respond.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bruce Stanton]

Go ahead.

[Brenda Cope, Chief Financial Controller, Mi'kmaw Family and Children's Services of Nova Scotia]

With the enhanced model, no, we can't provide equitable services. The enhanced model merely brought us up to about the 2007 standard, and we're now in 2011. So, no, we don't have sufficient funds. We're short-staffed, and we're still experiencing difficulties.

Yes, we are still having problems with Jordan's Principle as to who will pay, particularly in Nova Scotia, between Health and INAC. It's always the other person who's supposed to pay. We have to provide these services, and we just go ahead and do it and worry about who's going to pay for it later.