Human Resources Committee on Jan. 28th, 2021

[Heather Johnston]

The federal government, of course, has different forms of funding, but the provincial government is the main source of funding for community groups like ours.

As other witnesses expressed, we need simplified and clear funding systems. In our organization's experience, we often have to deal with different federal-provincial transfer programs, and we get stuck because of the tensions that exist between these two systems.

This is currently the case for the Reaching Home program for designated communities, where there is a federal-provincial transfer of management. There is a great deal of anxiety and angst among community groups about how this will be managed and what changes will result from this program. There are many unknowns in this transfer of the federal program to the provinces, which makes it difficult for those who provide housing on the ground. This is an example of the complexity of the situation between the two levels of government.

A similar phenomenon can be seen with respect to the differing priorities between Housing First and social housing strategies. The latter may be more likely to adopt social housing construction strategies. These tensions and the complexity they create do not, therefore, make it easier to provide housing for those who need it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Ms. Johnston.

Thank you, Ms. Chabot.

We'll have a final question from Ms. Collins, please, for two and a half minutes.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

I'm sorry, Chair. I missed the instructions from the chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Ms. Collins has the last two and a half minutes, and she's about to ask her first question. She's been thinking hard, and I know it's going to be really good.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

I'm sorry, Mr. Chair. I didn't hear you, as well. Thank you.

Ms. Johnston, we know that this government and consecutive governments have massively and systematically underfunded indigenous housing. I would argue that is systemic racism on the part of our federal government. You don't need to comment on that part.

I'm wondering about your organization. What kind of dollar amount would be required for your organization to be able to meet the needs of the people you serve, and how important is it that the funding is sustainable?

[Heather Johnston]

I'll start with last part of the question in terms of sustainability. Obviously a lot of community organizations providing housing work on these year-to-year annual budgets, where it's hard to see past the next nine to 12 months. Obviously stability of funding and the ability to plan are hugely important in any funding program that's designed.

The reality is that a small community organization like mine can provide a limited amount of housing to the indigenous community. We can provide housing that's responsive, that's culturally adapted, but the overall response to the crisis of housing for urban indigenous peoples requires a provincial response, a response at all three levels of government. I can't put a dollar figure on what I would need to resolve the issue.

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

That's okay.

Because we only have a minute left, I want to ask one more question to you and it's about indigenous peoples in Canada. They are the youngest and fastest-growing population.

With this in mind, how important is it that the federal government create and implement an urban, rural and northern housing strategy to meet the needs of young indigenous peoples and young indigenous families?

[Heather Johnston]

I'm very sorry. You were cutting in and out. Could you really quickly repeat it?

[Laurel Collins, NDP, Victoria, BC]

For sure. It was mainly about indigenous peoples being the youngest and fastest-growing population, and the urban, rural and northern indigenous housing strategy meeting the needs of those young indigenous peoples, young indigenous families.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Give a brief response, if you could, Ms. Johnston.

[Heather Johnston]

Obviously, it is absolutely critical. If we're going to stop what we see as chronic homelessness—and I see this every day—of people who have lived for 30 or 40 years on the streets, we need to respond to the needs of people when they are young. We need to have strategies in place to prevent homelessness.

We see huge waves of young indigenous people arriving in the streets of Montreal. We need strategies. We need programs to respond specifically to those needs, so that we're not, 30 years from now, trying to provide services for people who have chronically spent 30 years living on the streets of urban cities.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Ms. Johnston. Thank you, Ms. Collins

To all of our witnesses, thank you so much for being here and for your patience as we deal with this new reality and the technical challenges that come with it. Thank you for the work that you do and for your comprehensive testimony here today. It will be extremely helpful to us.

With that, colleagues, we're going to suspend to allow this panel to disconnect and to test the microphones for the next panel. We'll be back in three minutes.

We stand suspended.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

I call the meeting back to order.

We are continuing our study of urban, rural and northern indigenous housing.

I'd like to welcome our witnesses. As an individual, we have Elizabeth Sam; and from the Vancouver Native Housing Society, we have David Eddy, chief executive officer.

Ms. Sam, we're going to lead off with you. For your opening statement, you have five minutes.

You have the floor. Welcome to the committee.

[Elizabeth Sam, As an Individual]

Hi everyone. My name is Elizabeth Sam. I'm Dakelh from Nak’azdli Whut’en. I am a Lhts’umusyoo. That's the Beaver clan. My parents are Ruby and Brandon Taylor. My grandmother, who I live with and care for, is Lillian Sam. She is a well-respected elder here in Nak’azdli.

I would like to acknowledge that I am on the unceded territory of the Dakelh people.

I am a third year sun dancer, a woman's pipe carrier and a fire keeper for our local sweat lodge. I have lived life on the red road for six years, which means no alcohol. That is my form of resistance against the powers that want me to be a drunk, uninformed indigenous statistic.

I am a newly elected councillor for our band office and will be serving a four-year term, but I don't represent them today. I speak as an indigenous woman who has struggled with intergenerational trauma and has overcome many obstacles, including homelessness.

I want to talk a bit about the earth, the land and the connection that indigenous peoples have with the earth. The earth is our home, so it is a reciprocal. If you think about sharks, whales and the small fish that eat the plankton and bacteria off the whales, that is like humans and the earth. We take care of the earth, and the earth takes care of us.

I know that we need more houses here in Nak’azdli and on other reserves in the nation.

The thing about Mother Earth is that our culture, language and ceremonies are all connected to the land. This is why we protect the land and want to ensure that first nations' traditional lands are protected from industries and infrastructures that will pollute the water and the land, because if we don't have the water and the land, none of us will survive and we won't be able to build homes on the land.

With intergenerational trauma and colonization—being disconnected from the land and having your identity taken away, being removed from your land and told to live somewhere else—this is where you get mental health issues, depression and anxiety. If you're away from home you lose your culture, your ceremonies and your pride in being an indigenous person.

I know that when I was living in Vancouver, before I moved home when the pandemic hit, I was feeling the effects of depression and anxiety from being away from home. Then, when I moved home in March, it was instantly just a weight off. I was feeling more at home, more myself and feeling safe again.

I feel like it's not just indigenous people who are connected to the land; non-indigenous people come from the land also. I know a lot of Caucasian or white people who do ceremonies on the land, and cherish and protect the land because they get so much from it.

Unconditional love is what helped me to come back from addictions, self-sabotaging cycles and all of that trauma. I just think that unconditional love is what we need to be giving to the homeless people, to all people, and unconditional support. If people feel like they are valued, loved and heard, they will want to try harder to live a better life.

How can the government help? It can be through more education in elementary and high school about how to rent homes, interest and mortgages, loans and saving money. I didn't learn any of that stuff in high school. I'm sure we all learned some stuff that is not even relevant in my life today, so more education on those types of things. We did touch on mortgages and interest in some of the math, but it wasn't what it should have been. They should have been teaching gardening and stuff like that.

I don't have too much more to share, other than the importance of unconditional love for other human beings.

Since we're talking about reconciliation and the era of reconciliation, I wouldn't be able to reconcile.... Let's say, Mr. Chair, I was in a fight with you and I was supposed to reconcile with you. I wouldn't be able to reconcile with you until I reconciled the issues within myself, and then you reconciled the issues within yourself. Then we could reconcile. That's kind of how it is for indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in Canada.

Were there any questions?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Ms. Sam. We're going to hear from Mr. Eddy and then there will undoubtedly be questions. Thank you very much for your remarks.

Mr. Eddy is next, on behalf of Vancouver Native Housing Society.

Welcome to the committee. You have five minutes for your opening statement.

[David Eddy, Chief Executive Officer, Vancouver Native Housing Society]

Before I begin with the body of my presentation, I want to acknowledge that I am privileged to be speaking to you today from the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

My name is David Eddy and I am the CEO of Vancouver Native Housing Society. We were created to serve the urban indigenous community in Vancouver in 1984. We have about 850 residents within 20 buildings.

I am here to speak about the urban indigenous community and the federal plan for an indigenous housing strategy. I'm on the working group of the CHRA indigenous caucus. CHRA is the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association and their responsibility and raison d'être is to ensure that every Canadian has a safe place to call home.

I am on the indigenous caucus working group and we are trying to convince the federal government of the importance of looking at the urban, rural and northern—or as we say, URN—indigenous housing community as a distinct sector. Right now, the federal government only looks at indigenous people in Canada as three distinct entities. Those entities are first nations, Inuit and Métis.

It strikes us as incomprehensible that there is not a separate distinction for the inhabitants of the urban, rural and northern native communities. We know from the last StatsCan survey that only 13% of indigenous folks live on reserve. There is no question that the vast majority of indigenous people in Canada are urban, rural or northern constituents and call these areas home. For them to be more reasonably supported, represented and accounted for, we've come up with a proposal that we call FIBI, which stands for “for indigenous, by indigenous”, that supports our contention for a fourth strategy: the urban, rural and northern strategy.

In the seventies through the mid-nineties, Canada was regarded as the envy of the western world in terms of its housing programs, which were created and supported mostly by the federal government. In 1978, CMHC came out with the urban native housing program. It was an innovative, well-thought-out, highly regarded and, some even said, well-funded housing initiative. It took into consideration the unique needs, challenges and obstacles that members of the urban indigenous communities had to face. It recognized, for example, that capacity needed to be built, and to an extent, it funded that. It was ahead of its time, and looking back, I don't think it would be a stretch to say that it was a sincere attempt at reconciliation before reconciliation was regarded as the concept it is now. That's the kind of government recognition we would like to see again for our residents.

This is not a complicated matter from the point of view of mathematics or fairness. Where it seems to get tricky and intractable is in the political arena. We have never received an opinion from the federal government as to how our rationale might be faulty, ill-conceived or nonsensical. Whenever we present to government, we get asked questions that imply those asking understand and are empathetic to our dilemma. We see folks nodding their heads, scratching their chins pensively and it's like Archimedes in the bathtub, a eureka moment. We think that finally they get it. Then the session ends, people go on their way and we never hear back from them.

It has been a rough row to hoe over the past number of years, but we are finally starting to get traction. These committee sessions are the most obvious evidence of that. There have been statements made and different resolutions passed recently by various bodies to look at URN as a viable fourth distinction. There are over 100 urban native housing organizations across the country, many with over 40 years of experience in providing housing and services to this distinct and unique population. It would be bordering on criminal to separate these residents from their long-term, trusted and caring providers. This system ain't broke; please don't try to fix it.

In B.C., we have the first grassroots indigenous housing authority operating and managing urban indigenous housing providers in the country. The Aboriginal Housing Management Association, known as AHMA, oversees the operations of 41 member organizations and has done so independently for the last nine years. Ontario Aboriginal Housing Services does similar work out of Sault Ste. Marie and is the largest housing provider in the province.

From Newfoundland to Yukon, our sister organizations are delivering essential housing services to members who do not fall under the three distinct categories recommended by the feds. That is a massive amount of experience and expertise that stands to be lost, to say nothing of the lives and communities disrupted if a fourth distinction of urban, rural and northern housing communities is not recognized and embedded into an indigenous housing strategy.

Thanks for hearing me.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you very much, Mr. Eddy.

Now we're going to proceed with questions, beginning with the Conservatives.

Mr. Vis, you have six minutes.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you.

Mr. Eddy, it's nice to see you again. I want to just touch on some of the comments made about the co-investment fund by members in the previous allotment. They talked about the applications being overly cumbersome.

Can you share with us how much time and how many supports the Vancouver Native Housing Society has to put in just to complete an application with CMHC?

[David Eddy]

In fact, we are on the cusp of putting in a co-investment fund application—we have to go through our provincial funding first because that's the nature of the co-investment fund—so I can't speak to direct experience. I can tell you that nobody I've spoken to in housing across the country says it's a walk in the park by any stretch of the imagination. It is complicated and cumbersome from what I've heard.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

With regard to FIBI, in the last hour we heard about $25 billion over 10 years to compliment the existing federal national housing strategy. Under FIBI, if the Government of Canada was to invest that type of money into urban indigenous, rural and northern housing, what would be the economic benefit for young, indigenous people in Canada?

[David Eddy]

It would be massive. As was stated earlier, the indigenous demographic is the fastest growing and largest demographic of any in the country, including the immigrant demographics. There is a massive need. I think it's something upwards of 60,000 to 70,000 units that would be required in the next 10 years to put a serious dent in any kind of effort to make housing more available and affordable for indigenous folks.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Would it be right for me to assume that all of the construction would be undertaken by indigenous tradespeople as well?

[David Eddy]

I don't think you could say that. We would make efforts to engage as many indigenous folks as possible, but we talked earlier about capacity and such, and the lack of programs for indigenous people to be trained in various trades. That would have to dovetail in. It would be part of the FIBI effort to build this housing. Definitely, there would be a portion of that money going towards training indigenous constructors.

[Brad Vis, Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Indigenous Services Canada does operate some programs for urban indigenous folks. Unfortunately, it still has not gotten back to our committee with a full breakdown of how much money and staff are involved. Do you ultimately believe that it would be better if we reduced the size of Indigenous Services Canada and the services it provides to indigenous people today, and transferred those services to indigenous-run organizations to serve indigenous people?

[David Eddy]

I'd have to defer to my boss to answer that question, as he works for ISC.