Yes. Systemic racism occurs at a number of different points. First of all, there's the point at which the decisions are made to apprehend children. The factors that are utilized and followed in order to make a decision as to whether to take a child into care exclude those factors, do not include those factors that are unique to indigenous families. For example, Manitoba, at this point in time, apprehends on average one newborn infant per day out of hospital. A young mother goes to a hospital, gives birth to a child, and the child is apprehended at the rate of about 370 newborn children per year, never mind the other children who are apprehended at later ages.
When you look at the factors that lead to that, it's because most mothers from northern communities have to go to two or three urban centres—Thompson, Brandon, or Winnipeg—in order to have children. They leave their home communities. If they have any kind of social or physical problem, they don't have the support system in place in that community to help them, so they have to involve a child welfare agency, and the first decision a child welfare agency makes is to apprehend the child. They'll take the child into care, and then they will offer support to the mother to get treatment or to get help. In the meantime, the child is in care. By the time the mother goes through treatment or gets the help that she needs, they'll often deny returning the child, or they will refuse to return the child to the mother, because they say that the child has now bonded with the family that they've placed the child with, and therefore, they're not going to interfere with the bond that the child has formed. Or they may say to the mother that she hasn't completed the program well enough, so she has to go to another program.
Systemic discrimination occurs because the factors and the standards to which indigenous people are held are almost impossible for them to meet because they do not have the same social benefits, social privileges, social options, and opportunities that non-indigenous families have. They have more negative factors that weigh upon their being caught up in the system to begin with.
As a result, the rules the system follows work against indigenous mothers.