Thank you very much.
Thank you to this committee for the opportunity to appear before you.
I've taken a brief look at your employability study so far. You've been going to a lot of places and hearing from a lot of people, so I hope you have something to add in the dialogue.
I'm here from the National Association of Friendship Centres. We are the national body for local friendship centres across Canada. There are currently 116 friendship centres, which are community agencies from coast to coast to coast all across this country. It's important to say at the outset that we are not a representative body. I don't claim to represent anyone other than the friendship centres that are members of ours. We serve all aboriginal people: first nations, both status and non-status; Métis people from all regions of Canada; and Inuit peoples, in large, medium, and small communities.
Friendship centres are gathering places of hope and refuge, places for aboriginal women to take their rightful place in leadership and governance in our agencies and our communities. They are places for our young people to access programming and to become engaged and empowered. They are places to celebrate our culture and places to heal. Often, in communities, friendship centres are where urban aboriginal people come when they're hungry, to access training when they need it, to start on a path towards a better life for themselves and their nation.
Last year in these friendship centres across Canada we provided over 1.1 million client services. Now, if someone came 10 times it would be counted as 10, I want to be clear on that, but we provide 1.1 million client services through those agencies. Collectively they are an impressive capacity to provide services to the often-forgotten population of urban aboriginal peoples. Many friendship centres are involved in employment and training programs. Across the country there are 119 employment and training programs found in friendship centres. They include things like the O-G initiative, the Ontario Federation of Indian Friendship Centres, and Grand River employment and training initiative, or O-GI for short, which is a part of the AHRDS process that was just described.
We hire summer students. We're involved in that process. Many centres are involved with provincial and municipal partnerships to waive subsidies to hire people with disabilities; to do employment and training programs, job creation programs, first nation AHRDS partnerships, life skills programs, etc. We're involved in a variety of different ways.
Through those programs we provide around 87,000 client services across the country. They have done this, for the most part, through piecing together local and regional relationships.
We aren't really a part of the formal national process for employment training or through AHRDS. When people come to our friendship centres from employment training services, we hope we provide something we've been calling the friendship centre advantage. Clients are able to access cultural programming, economic development programming, education, employment, families, food bank, health, housing, justice, language, culture, sports and recreation, and youth programming. It's through all these various programs that people in communities have better labour market outcomes. People don't come in just without a job; they come in needing training, food, healing, addictions counselling, and all kinds of things. Friendship centres are the types of agencies that can do that.
Clearly there's an advantage to working with people like us. I said at the outset that we're not involved in the AHRDS framework formally. Friendship centres have been involved previously, and some have been able to have relationships regionally or locally. I'm not really here today to talk about that—the exclusion, things we could do—I'm just here to talk about employability and our observations based on how we are involved.
We do have some thoughts about the existing framework. We don't think there's enough access for urban aboriginal people to programming. We believe there are some very specific urban access issues—that clients in the urban areas are directed to other agreement holders. If a first nation person comes here to Ottawa for a job, they are directed to another agency in order to get access to those benefits. This kind of integration is counter to what the Supreme Court found was a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and there have been other court decisions that reinforce this. The current delivery structure supports separate and non-integrated systems, and we need to get around that.
I think we need to think bigger. I think we know about the worker shortage that exists in this country, in the oil sands and elsewhere. We know these companies are flying workers from Mexico and from Newfoundland into Alberta to do jobs, literally flying over our communities. Both literally and figuratively, they're flying over first nations people to get to these jobs, and there's something fundamentally wrong about that.
The same is true in many industries across the country. If we can't get to the issues of grinding poverty, we aren't going to get to the issues through employment and training. We have to make sure there are ways of doing that.
We're advocating that we have partnerships with the Conference Board of Canada, with the sector councils, to identify employment training fields and priorities that are ready. In fact, we train directly for those areas. We know that in B.C. the manufacturing sector is booming, and partly because of the Olympics. In Alberta it's the resource industry, and in Ontario it's manufacturing; in the east it's natural gas, and in Quebec it's forestry. We should be employing and training people directly for these industries as opposed to having non-targeted strategies. All these industries require employees, and all these employees require supports. So we need to partner with the private sector and the trade unions to train aboriginal people. And friendship centres are excellent ways of doing that because of the friendship centre advantage.
We need to make sure that our social and human services are providing a blanket of services around those clients who come into our centres, for all the reasons I'm sure you're only too aware of. We need to make sure we're helping aboriginal people to fully participate in the opportunities this country affords and to be part of the solution.
Friendship centres are ready to be engaged, and we're looking forward to sharing this vision with this committee and with the department, when they're ready.
Thank you.