Thank you, Chair, and thank you, honourable committee members, for taking this time to learn about a great opportunity that's before us as Canadians--that is, to make a difference for this generation of first nations children and young people.
I understand that when Canada comes before an issue, it really wants to know if the problem is well defined. It wants to know if there's an evidence base around it. What are the solutions or options, and have they been well researched? Do we have the resources and the jurisdiction necessary to redress it? The answer in this particular case to all those questions is yes.
We have before us an opportunity to respond well to the needs of first nations children, based on an evidence package of well over 500 pages, done by some of the best researchers in the country. You might ask, how does this relate to education? Well, bilingual and holistic education, in the best of all worlds, needs to go beyond the great honour that we have for French and English in this country. It needs to honour on equal footing traditional ways of knowing, alongside of academic teaching. It also needs to look at the child, himself or herself, who is attending school.
Many of you may be aware that academic success for children is quite highly tied into their own sense of personal well-being and care. It makes sense, doesn't it? If the child is well cared for at home, he or she is going to be able to pay much more attention at school and profit by the type of learning that is before him or her.
We know, for example, in regard to children who are in the care of the child welfare system, not only fewer of them graduate, which is true, but even when they attend school, according to a study done by the Casey Foundation of the United States, they perform at about 15 to 20 percentiles less than their peers.
The other issue is that they'll have higher rates of absenteeism. Why, might you ask, would this be the case? Children in care typically will not only just experience one placement, the trauma of having gone through the child maltreatment and being placed once; it's not unusual for children in care to have upwards of 10 to 15 different placements during the time they're in child welfare care. So that type of mobility really infringes on their ability to stay in care.
Now why would a committee such as yours give any consideration at all to children in child welfare care? How much of a percentage do they make, the children that you're particularly concerned about? Well, according to a study that we completed last year, aboriginal children have long been known to be overrepresented in the child welfare system of this country. But our data systems did not tell us specifically by what amount those children were overrepresented. We thought baseline projections of about 30% of the 67,000 children in child welfare care were aboriginal.
What we found last year, out of sources of four sample provinces, is that 10.23% of first nations status Indian children were in child welfare care in those four provinces, compared to just over 0.5% of non-aboriginal children.
You may ask about Métis children. They too were overrepresented, at about 3.31% of all Métis children in those constituencies.
So we're not just talking about a small number; we're talking about over 10% of the population of status Indian children in four sample provinces being in child welfare care as of May 2005. That number is higher than the number of children in care at any other time of our history in this country, three times the number that were attending residential schools at the height of their operations in the 1940s.
According to John S. Milloy, the historian, in the 1960s, which we now look back and call the “sixties scoop” because of the mass removals of first nations children into child welfare care, 10% were in care as of then. We're now at 10.23%. So on any measure, there are more status Indian children in child welfare care right at this moment.
Why are these kids in care? That was a question we were unable to answer until 1998. But with two cycles of The Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect, we can now report to the committee that first nations children are less likely to be in child welfare care for sexual, physical, or emotional abuse than their non-aboriginal peers. They are more than twice as likely to be in care because of neglect.
Neglect can mean many things. For aboriginal children, what we found were the key factors were not at the level of the child, but rather, family poverty, the family's poor housing, and parental substance misuse were the key issues.
All these, according to Dr. Nico Trocmé and his researchers, really demand child welfare interventions of a preventative nature, which brings us to the question of what Canada can do.
You see, for child welfare services on reserve, the provinces have legal jurisdiction. But with the exception of Ontario, which is funded under a separate funding agreement, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada provides funding for the child welfare services. There's no link between the provincial statute and the level of funding that's provided by the department, and that has given rise to a number of concerns.
The current funding methodology provides money in two large envelopes. The first envelope is unlimited, and it's called “maintenance”. There is an unlimited amount of funding to bring first nations children into child welfare care and to put them in foster homes. The next batch of funding is called “operations”, and it is for taking care of all the operating mechanisms of the agency. But it's also for funding these preventative services, which are legally required by child welfare statutes to be exhausted before we consider removal.
In a review done in 2000 jointly by the Assembly of First Nations and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, it was found, even as of 2000, that there was 22% less funding in the federal envelope than there was for children being served by the average province, despite the overrepresentation of status Indian children.
There were 17 recommendations tabled in that report, authored by McDonald and Ladd, and none of those recommendations, which I would argue specifically impact the well-being of children, including providing enhanced funding for prevention services, were ever implemented.
In 2004 we were asked, as the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, to undertake a large multidisciplinary research report, which we did, which was called the Wen:de series of reports, which you have before you in both official languages. The key in these research reports is that we were able to determine, using an evidence base, that the level of underfunding by the federal government in the current child welfare area is $109 million per year. And where is that critical gap? It's in services intended to keep status Indian children safely in their homes, a statutory range of services known as “least disruptive measures”.
The other shortcoming is for inflation. There has not been an inflation adjustment since 1995, resulting in the very limited funds that are currently available falling further and further behind. As we show in the Wen:de series of reports and in all the economic charts we have there, that means that really, there is a shortfall of a minimum of $21 million on inflation losses alone.
The other thing we came up with was jurisdictional disputes. And in terms of dealing with those, we found that first nations children fall into the gaps between jurisdictions many times, and I'm just going to share with you one example.
There was a young boy by the name of Jordan, and Jordan was born in Manitoba to a first nations family. His family placed him in child welfare care, not because he was abused or neglected, but because on reserve there weren't sufficient services for children with disabilities. The only way to get services was to place him in child welfare care. For the first two years of his life, he remained, necessarily, in hospital, until his medical condition stabilized. But the community and the family fundraised $30,000 to refit a van so he could go to his appointments and visit family, and they also found a medically trained foster family. So after the doctor said he could go home, there was an approved plan, and he was to be cared for in his community.
If he had not been a status Indian, on his second birthday or shortly after the doctor had said he could go home, he would have gone home. But because he was a status Indian, the province said they would not fund it, that it was a federal responsibility. And Indian and Northern Affairs said that these were health issues, so Health Canada should fund it. Health Canada said no, the child is in care, so Indian and Northern Affairs should fund it.
The end result was that the collective bureaucracies decided to leave Jordan in hospital, at twice the expense it would have been to keep him at home, not for one month, not even one year, but for two years, while they argued over itemized expenses for Jordan. It wasn't until legal proceedings reached a point where the Government of Canada decided it would put Jordan's interests first that the issue was resolved, but not in time, sadly, for Jordan and his family. Jordan passed away in hospital, never having spent a day in a family home, unnecessarily.
And in our study in the Wen:de reports, 393 of these incidents had happened in 12 sample first nations agencies across the country.
We were diligent and we asked if first nations were responsible for these jurisdictional disputes, because we wanted to know who was. Our bottom line is making sure these children get what they need. In well over 90% of the instances, it was federal or provincial governments alone.
We asked for the adoption, with the support of Jordan's family, through something called “Jordan's Principle”. It's very simple. Where governments provide services that are otherwise available to Canadian children, and a jurisdictional dispute arises, the government of first contact must pay for the service without delay or disruption, and then they can figure out the jurisdictional dispute later. If that had been adopted, then Jordan would have gone home on his second birthday.
Keep in mind that some people have said there's no authority for this. Well, someone has authority. Some level of government must have authority for these services, because they are otherwise being provided to other Canadian children. We're simply saying include first nations children in that suggestion.
We have been at this work--and by we, I mean collectively as first nations agencies in Canada--of trying to get the evidence base and get the support necessary to deal with this inequality for well over ten years now. We feel very confident that we have a solution here that could make a fundamental shift in the number of first nations children in child welfare and therefore really help them in their social success, including in education. It will take political will.
We have costed this out as a package, and it would cost less than 1% of the entire federal surplus budget to do the right thing for these kids. Going forward, the cost savings to Canadian society would be significant. Not only would we have fewer draws in terms of the maintenance budget for the Department of Indian Affairs, in that the cost of keeping children in care would go down over time, but we'd also see savings in the justice system, where children in child welfare care are much more likely to be. We'd see savings in social assistance and those types of things.
I am going to ask that this committee request of the Department of Indian Affairs, the Honourable Minister Jim Prentice, to immediately and fully implement the recommendations of the Wen:de report, including the $109 million needed in full. The $109 million represents the base amount that would ensure first nations children on reserve get equitable child welfare treatment. Anything less than that would mean they would continue to receive second-class service. Without it, we can only expect that the numbers of status Indian children will continue to rise.
When this generation looks back at us, let them say of all of us that we had a solution, we had the opportunity to make a difference, and we did. It's what we would have hoped to have done with the children in residential schools, and it's the opportunity we have before us right now.
Thank you, Honourable Chair.
