Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'd like to thank the committee as well for giving me some time this morning at the eleventh hour. We snuck in at the last minute to share some time with you this morning.
As most of you know, the AFN, the Assembly of First Nations, is the national organization representing first nation citizens in Canada, regardless of age, gender, or residence. I am the director of social development at AFN. Within the health and social secretariat we deal with a number of portfolios specific to our discussion this morning; however, we do deal with early childhood development, child care, the issue of special needs, FASD, and disabilities, just to name a few areas.
Many of our first nations people experience poverty in their early years. It's an issue that has had a lot press over the last little while. We have provided copies to the committee of the 2002-2003 First Nations Regional Longitudinal Health Survey. It's the summative document, not the entire document, but if anyone is interested in getting further information on the full report, please let me know.
That document and that research tell us that one in four first nations children lives in poverty, compared to one in six Canadian children. Over one-third of the homes in which first nations children live are overcrowded. There exists a direct correlation between lower family income, overcrowding, poor nutrition, lower levels of physical activity, and educational achievement among first nations children.
First nations children, we believe sincerely, deserve to be provided with safe and adequate food, water, housing, recreation, child care, and education since they are more likely to experience poor health and poor social and economic conditions later in life.
One way to improve the odds is to improve the financial situation of first nations families. The lack of child care and ECD services can prove to be, and are, important obstacles for first nations families.
Presently first nations families are benefiting from four federal programs. The current ECD programs are the aboriginal head start on reserve program, the aboriginal head start in urban and northern communities program, the first nations and Inuit child care initiative, and the INAC day care funding in Ontario and Alberta.
Some of the issues facing first nations children today with respect to ECD are of course limited resources. Resources are not only limited in the areas of capital, competitive wages, training, and culturally rooted ECD materials; since 1997-98, or for the last decade or so, there has also been an arbitrary 2% cap on spending increases for core services in first nations communities. This has had a devastating effect on the quality of programs and services for first nations people--not just for children, but for families in general.
Since 1996-97, health services and program budgets have been generally frozen at about 3%. The result of these caps is that first nations receive less than one-third of the average 6.6% increase that most Canadians enjoy through the Canada health and social transfers. First nations core program budgets, such as social development and capital facilities, have experienced budget numbers decreased by about 13% since just 1999-2000.
Today there are approximately 250 first nations without regulated child care. There is an important need for sustainable funding for child care and ECD services in general. Earlier this morning I heard mention of a suite of services, the notion that child care alone isn't enough. That's certainly something we firmly believe in, particularly in relation to the situation with the number of first nations children in care and the child and family services numbers that are now finally getting a little bit of attention, starting in the province of Alberta.
First nations are also dealing with a lot of structural and administrative barriers. Various layers to access resources often create confusion in roles and responsibilities among federal, provincial, and territorial governments. There's a lot of jurisdictional wrangling that first nations administrative bodies have to deal with; I don't think mainstream Canada deals with it as much, or on as regular a basis.
Over the last couple of years we have been working, or trying to work, with the federal government on ECD, or early learning and child care. We've dealt with the single-window discussion. We've dealt with the early learning and child care initiative under the past government, which had identified some funding for first nations.
We were actually getting ready, or at least we thought we were, to implement some of these initiatives regionally across the country. But that's not to say that the work has been lost, because we're continuing to try to figure out how best to provide coordinated complementary children's programs and services. The ECD discussion is still alive, and we are certainly attempting to move the discussion forward.
There have been setbacks in the past, as I mentioned. ELCC was contemplating some machinery of government changes at the time. With the change of government, it went by the wayside and we came back to the notion of ECD. Okay, we're really talking about the same thing. It's all about providing those programs and services in a coordinated and efficient fashion for our kids.
At one point, $100 million was identified for children in northern communities that came out of the first ministers discussions in Kelowna. This was lost, and certainly the new Child Care Spaces Initiative has no mention of specific funding for first nations either.
Also, I think there was a large concern that the department heard in their consultations across the country with respect to sustainability of the Child Care Spaces Initiative. That was certainly something we looked at as an obstacle to that particular initiative's success.
