The Canadian Council on Social Development did a study. What they found is that about $115 billion in funds are deployed by the federal, provincial, and territorial governments each year in voluntary sector services for Canadians; if you divide that by population, you get roughly that figure of $2,400.
As you know, I grew up in remote communities and I spent a lot of time on reserves. I also did social work on and off reserve. What I found is that in these areas where there should be food banks because there's the greatest food insecurity, there are no food banks, and those groups are not servicing on-reserve. I didn't see any emergency shelters. I didn't see any of these things that people in the cities and off-reserve take for granted.
So I did a study as part of my master's thesis when I was at McGill. I polled 70 national organizations that had child, youth, and family in their mandate. I also polled first nations child and family service agencies. I asked a simple question: have you provided services to a child on a reserve in the past year? Among the 70 voluntary sector organizations, none of them had. Of more concern, about 73% could see no relationship between their mandate and what was happening on-reserve. Among the first nations, there were about six individual children who had received any benefit from those publicly funded voluntary sector services in the year prior.
Since then I've been calling on governments to say they must mandate these groups to make sure that a proportionate amount of that voluntary sector funding is going to those of greatest need, who are often children and women and men on-reserve.