Human Resources Committee on Nov. 19th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Welcome to Meeting No. 5 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the House order of September 23. The proceedings will be made available via the House of Commons website. Just so that you are aware, the webcast will always show the person speaking rather than the entire committee.

To ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to outline a few rules to follow.

Members and witnesses may speak in the official language of their choice. Interpretation services are available for the meeting. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of either floor, English or French. Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. If you are on the video conference, please click on the microphone icon to unmute yourself.

I remind members that all comments should be addressed through the chair. When you're not speaking, your mike should be on mute.

I would like to now welcome our witnesses: Carol Camille from the Lillooet Friendship Centre Society and Juliette Nicolet from the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres.

Ms. Camille, you have the floor for five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Carol Camille, Executive Director, Lillooet Friendship Centre Society]

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee for rural, urban and indigenous housing.

I would like to acknowledge the traditional territory of the Stl'atl'imx and the St'at'imc people, which I both work and live on, as well as the traditional territory that all of you are on while we are having this meeting today.

My name is Carol Camille. I'm with the Lillooet Friendship Centre. For the past 12 years, I have been their executive director.

The original purpose of the friendship centre movement across Canada was to support the migration of indigenous people from reserves to cities or urban centres. We were a place of coming together and referrals for community services. Today, friendship centres have expanded so much that we offer services in education, employment, health, addictions, stopping violence, recreation, emergency shelters and so much more.

Friendship centres reflect our communities and are identified as a hub for services. We have a small budget and about 36,000 points of service, so we know the importance of overlapping our resources. We know how to make a dollar go a long way to link up services for multiple purposes. We have a strong history of collecting evidence to show funders that supporting organizations is a good investment.

Lillooet Friendship Centre has six Upper St'at'imc bands surrounding our community. There is an urgent need for housing in all the communities. Currently, there is inadequate housing rentals within the Lillooet area. Many houses are sitting empty and they leave our community with a gap in services. A lot of out-of-town owners are renting out to contractors at an overinflated price. For the landowners and the homeowners, it's less energy and commitment on their part, so it's easier to rent to those contractors as they come into town for short stays. However, with almost a zero rental ability in the Lillooet area, we are seeing families of three generations and sometimes even four generations living in the same household.

The local indigenous communities have long wait-lists for housing on reserve. Therefore, these wait-listed families are forced to reside in urban communities sometimes even a great distance from their own immediate families.

Some larger urban friendship centres have housing programs, but most rural and remote friendship centres do not and, like the Lillooet Friendship Centre, those friendship centres are then tasked with seeking safe, affordable housing for indigenous individuals and families who require housing, or are homeless or at risk of being homeless. We work with families and landlords to find new housing sources and even to develop relationships with those landlords.

These are just a few tasks that my staff and I at the friendship centre do off the corner of our desks for our clients who come through our doors. We deal with these gaps in services in our community and start seeking funding support to fill those gaps.

All our support staff work with clients experiencing homelessness with personal healing from the harmful effects of colonization, residential school traumas, addictions and homelessness. For the past few years, we've provided meals and accommodations through our extreme weather shelter from the beginning of November to the end of March. Most recently—just last week—we got some additional support from the reaching home program to enhance the services provided for a 24-hour shelter service for our clients.

Indigenous communities all across Canada have said that they will take care of their members no matter where they live, but in the midst of the COVID pandemic that we are facing, friendship centres have seen that many band offices and client services have become hard to access. Services at friendship centres have seen an upward climb in supporting the indigenous clients that are in our community. Housing is one of those areas that we are having to face.

We are looking forward to being able to apply for urban, rural and remote funding for housing within our communities and working with community members to make that happen.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you very much, Ms. Camille.

Next, Ms. Nicolet.

You have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Juliette Nicolet, Policy Director, Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.

I am in Toronto, and I would like to acknowledge that Toronto sits on the traditional territories of a number of different first nations who shared this area for all sorts of reasons. My house in particular sits very close to a former Seneca encampment.

I want to thank Ms. Camille, because she gave an excellent description of the work of friendship centres in so many communities across Canada. Her experience is reflected in Ontario.

With respect to the range of services provided and the challenges around housing, in Ontario we have a demographic situation that is slightly different from other provinces. For example, 85.5% of indigenous people in Ontario live off reserve. Ontario has the largest population and the largest proportion of indigenous people living off reserve. Many seek housing and experience extreme housing insecurity. Of course, COVID-19 has made that worse.

The friendship centres in Ontario and the OFIFC have really been at the front line of providing housing for a number of years and have seen that activity increase in the last six to eight months. Friendship centres directly provide 151 units of housing. There are 29 friendship centres across Ontario that directly deliver 151 units of housing. That number is increasing all the time. This is a relatively new development because the need is so great. The friendship centres have actually begun delivering housing directly themselves.

The OFIFC is also one of three shareholders in a housing non-profit, the Ontario Aboriginal Housing Services Corporation, which owns upwards of 2,400 individual units that are supplied in a variety of ways, with preference to indigenous clients.

I think the critical thing to understand is that the success of friendship centres in Ontario in creating a real kind of economic, social and civic shift in the indigenous community relies very much on the provision of culture-based services. When the national housing strategy came out, it was a great disappointment to us that there was no specific indigenous set-aside. This would have created space for culture-based services in housing and self-determination in housing by organizations such as ourselves and others to address the issue of housing in this country. Of course, COVID has come along and has demonstrated just how dire the situation is, so here we are.

It's important as well to understand what “indigenous-led” means. When we talk about things being indigenous-led, we're talking about things being governed by indigenous people, managed by indigenous people, administered by indigenous people, delivered on the ground by indigenous people, research done by indigenous people and evaluated by indigenous people. This approach has led to the great success of the friendship centre movement across Canada, and certainly in Ontario.

With respect to what the OFIFC would like to see, which is the development of a national strategy on urban, rural and northern indigenous housing, it is also important to understand how this might intersect with enabling legislation on the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and that the self-determination aspect is a critical piece to ensure that service providers with the greatest expertise are able to continue to do their work.

I'm going to leave it at that for now.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you very much, Ms. Nicolet.

We're going to begin now with rounds of questions, starting with the Conservatives and the member of Parliament for Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon. Mr. Vis, please, for six minutes,

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

Thank you very much.

Carol, I'm very pleased that you were able to take time out to be on the call with us today for my committee members.

Carol is a rock star in my riding. She just does incredible work. Every time I'm up in Lillooet I am impressed by how she's able to manage so much with so little.

My first question for Carol is as follows. In your experience, how does proposal-based funding impact the ability of indigenous organizations such as the Lillooet Friendship Centre to undertake long-term planning and address housing and homelessness needs in the Lillooet area?

[Carol Camille]

Thank you, Brad.

Proposal-based funding is always very challenging for friendship centres and other organizations, especially for housing, because housing is a long-term issue and project within our communities. Every year we're having to rewrite proposals. Mostly those proposals are for a maximum of three years. Quite often it's once a year that we're doing them based on our work plans as to what we need within communities.

The purpose of those short-term proposals is not beneficial to communities in the long run. I strongly believe that, when money is out there for our program, important issues like housing need to be longer-term projects so that we can look at guaranteeing that the funding is available for that long term as well, not just for a three-year period before we're back on the ground rewriting those proposals again. I know things change, but we could do those within the proposal writing time as well.

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

That's very, very helpful information on extending the terms of the proposals.

I think you mentioned in your testimony a number in the $300,000 range. Is that your total budget?

[Carol Camille]

We get core-like funding. It's not core funding, but core-like funding that is under $300,000 per year, but we have 30,000 points of contact or services that we provide over a period of a year with clients.

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

With that base funding you reference, you're not only providing language training from elders, but you're also operating substance abuse programs, you're providing personal mental health and addiction support, you're referencing people who are facing homelessness issues, you're working with youth who don't have a place to go after school and you're operating an emergency shelter.

[Carol Camille]

Yes, we're doing it with very limited funding and limited resources available for our community.

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

Okay. Wow.

During the pandemic, there was an envelope for indigenous organizations to receive money to deal with some of the specific needs you outlined in relation to the ongoing homelessness struggles you face and how these are related to COVID-19.

Was enough funding provided to mitigate the pandemic's impact on indigenous people's experiencing homelessness in the Lillooet area? In your view, where is the funding needed most?

[Carol Camille]

In answer to the question, no, there's never enough money when you're dealing with that number of people. As Ms. Nicolet referenced as well, our number increased phenomenally around there, and so when we have clients who come in and they're accessing services like that.... During the pandemic we had on- and off-reserve clients who come in. What we've noticed is that a lot of the on-reserve programming was shut down or hard to reach because everybody started working from home.

Friendship centres left their doors open. We dealt with the pandemic on the ground. We just deal with what comes up. Our service has seen a really large increase in demand for those, because the addictions and mental health people were struggling to reach their clients or their workers on-reserve, so those clients were coming over to the friendship centre to still get services provided to them when they needed them, not when somebody was able to call them back.

The funding that came out in the first round definitely did not meet the need within our community. I find that straight across the board for friendship centres in B.C., that was the same response. The second round of funding that has come out—

Go ahead.

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

I'm running out of time, and I want to interject with one more quick question.

[Carol Camille]

Sure.

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

I hate to cut you off, but we're so limited in time.

Just so everyone on the committee knows, when you're doing a government grant application, how many hours do you normally have to dedicate to a single grant application?

[Carol Camille]

If it's a new one, three staff members are probably putting in close to 60 hours apiece to put that together. If it's something that is a repeat, then it's a little bit easier, taking a bit less fewer hours, but those are a substantial number of hours at the administration department.

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

Finally, did the Reaching Home funding make a bit of a difference for you guys?

[Carol Camille]

We just received that last week, so we're hoping that it will. It definitely increased our program hours, and we're able to offer a 24-hour emergency shelter from now until the end of March.

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

Thank you for your testimony today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sean Casey]

Thank you, Mr. Vis, and Ms. Camille.

Next we're going to go to Ms. Young, please, for six minutes.

[Kate Young, Liberal, London West, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and good afternoon.

I'm very happy to be a part of this discussion this afternoon on urban, rural and northern indigenous housing. I'm from London, Ontario, where 26% of the general population identify as indigenous, but represent 30% of the population struggling with homelessness, which is a staggering statistic. We have the N’Amerind Friendship Centre in London, which recently celebrated their 50th anniversary. They have done such great work.

Maybe Ms. Nicolet you could talk about the origins of friendship centres and how housing grew to be one of the areas you have to address.

[Juliette Nicolet]

N’Amerind is a venerable friendship centre in the Ontario friendship movement. It's one of the first. It's becoming more actively engaged in housing and housing delivery in the city of London, which we're very pleased about, and the executive director there, Al Day, is doing a really good job around the urban indigenous homeward bound project.

Friendship centres grew out of the migration of indigenous people from reserves into the cities, particularly following the wars. They came about as a result of people needing to get together to identify where services could be found that would meet the needs of the community, and grew to become social gathering places with a major cultural function. Across Canada friendship centres have been major players in the creation of housing service corporations in cities and towns. A number of smaller indigenous housing delivery organizations emerged directly from friendship centres in the sixties, seventies and eighties—more in the seventies, eighties, and nineties—to directly address this problem of people not having adequate housing, and particularly not having housing where they would not face discrimination from landlords on a regular basis. Racism in the housing market certainly continues to be a challenge across Ontario. Access to housing and access to affordable housing is difficult to begin with, and it's made more difficult because of the racism of landlords.

We know that some of our sister organizations, one of them the Ontario Native Women's Association, did a little experiment a couple of years ago in Thunder Bay. They sent a visibly indigenous woman to ask a landlord if something that was advertised was indeed for rent, and then got the answer “no”. Then a white woman asked 30 minutes later and was told to come to see it. We know that housing continues to be a significant challenge in our communities beyond simply the affordability issue. Friendship centres have stepped into the breach and are beginning to deliver.

[Kate Young, Liberal, London West, ON]

This committee decided to do this study prior to COVID. COVID has made the problems so clear. How do you think friendship centres can help the gap moving forward, help us make sure we find housing for people?

[Juliette Nicolet]

Friendship centres have the advantage of being able to position a large range of services— described very well by Ms. Camille—that can be delivered either in conjunction with the housing or parallel to it, but in any case connected to the housing. That is really critical not just from a crisis intervention perspective, but even beyond that in providing cultural supports and recreational supports, all sorts of different kinds of things that are tied to culture-based delivery that increase the adequateness of the housing, and also obtain far better outcomes over the long-term for a variety of intersecting issues.