On January 26, 2016, the conscience of the nation was shaken. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal issued a ruling saying that the federal government of Canada was racially discriminating against 163,000 innocent children in this country by providing them fewer child and family services and less access to all other public services enjoyed by other children because of who they are and where they live.
Sadly this racial discrimination, this fiscal policy, has been with us since Confederation. As the evidence filed by government officials at the tribunal showed, it's not restricted to first nations child and family services, nor is it restricted to access to health care. We saw admissions in those federal documents that were never meant to be seen by the public: that first nations children are denied equal opportunity to an education; they're denied an equal opportunity to drink a clean glass of water; they're denied an equal opportunity to live in a house that won't make them sick.
When we looked at one of the pieces of evidence that came forward, which admitted the underfunding in child and family services, it showed how the department was trying to make up for those shortfalls. One of the slides that will be in your report shows that the infrastructure budget for first nations communities, according to the department's only estimates, falls $8.2 billion short of what it should be, yet the federal government was transferring $0.5 billion, over six years. Money that should have been spent on water and schools was being transferred to cover the shortfalls in this program, and it was not covering the shortfalls in child and family services.
What does it mean for kids when racial discrimination is being used as a criterion for fiscal policy by government? Between the years 1989 and 2012, first nations children on reserve and in the Yukon spent 66 million nights away from their families. Evidence before the tribunal showed little kids, four-year-old little kids, being denied equipment so that they could breathe because the federal government couldn't figure out a way to match the service that would have been provided to those little kids if they were non-aboriginal.
A non-aboriginal child told me that discrimination is when the government doesn't think you're worth the money. What would it feel like if you weren't worth the money, and what would it feel like if you were the parent of a child who is not worth the money? No amount of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is going to give your child that breathing machine. You have to rely on the conscience of the nation, of the people who were elected, to understand that although governments have to make hard choices in hard economic times, there are some things that are sacred and should never be traded off, and one of them is the childhood of the nation's children. There are criteria this Parliament and this government should never use as sorting mechanisms to make those hard decisions, and one of those is racial discrimination. An uncomfortable reality is that the government has been using racial discrimination against children.
And it's not because you're broke. The KidsRights Index, a prestigious worldwide ranking system for how well governments are doing for their children proportionate to their wealth, found this last year—it was released on Canada Day incidentally—that we ranked 57th in the world. In a subindex that looks specifically at legislation and budgets, Canadian governments ranked 134th in the world, right next to Uzbekistan. Our economy, as troubled as it is, is doing far better than Canadian children are and far better than first nations children are.
You know, even if my plea doesn't survive the ethical or moral analysis that I'm asking you to do bearing in mind that racial discrimination against kids is not okay, it can never survive the economic analysis either, because the very best stimulus for any government is not other than investing in children. The World Health Organization says that for every dollar you spend here on children, you save $20 U.S. down the line, which means about 30 bucks for us. Fail to spend that money and not only do you corrupt the soul of the nation but you leave little kids like Kennedy out.
There's a little girl right now in Alberta who had an ocular tumour. That would scare most parents in this room. Thankfully the surgeon was able to save her sight, but she required some specialized eye drops so that it would heal properly. The federal government did not want to give her the eye drops she needed, which were prescribed by her pediatric surgeon. The federal government said to use Visine instead. This little girl requires orthodontic treatment too. Without it, two pediatric orthodontists have said that she may not be able to talk, she may not be able to eat, and she will be in chronic pain. It costs $8,000 for the treatment, and if she doesn't get it, she's going to require 20,000 dollars' worth of surgery.
Are we really at such hard economic times and such polluted moral times in the country that we're going to say to Kennedy, “No, you're not worth the money”? We have on our website solutions for addressing that child welfare complaint. The tribunal made it clear that the Canadian government knew about the inequality, knew about the harms to kids, and has the solutions to fix it. You need to fix it in child welfare, but you need to fix it here in these committees too, and never allow race and discrimination against children to ever be permissible in your decision-making with this government, or any to follow.
Thank you.