Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on June 16th, 2008

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

What cities are you seeing that have increasing aboriginal populations or that are experiencing an increase in population?

[Eric Guimond]

I would say Winnipeg is the largest.

[Jane Badets]

It's Winnipeg, then Edmonton. It's really in those cities or urban centres out west where we've seen the most increase. It is even in the smaller ones, like Thompson, Manitoba, where about one-third are aboriginals. That's where we've seen the increases.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nancy Karetak-Lindell]

Thank you.

We're now going into the second round. This one will be the five-minute round. We'll go from the Liberals to the government to the Bloc to the government to the NDP. We've put your names down for the other rounds. You're welcome to share those times if you don't use the five minutes.

We'll start again with Mr. Eyking.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My first round of questions was about housing and water and sewage facilities. My second question would be this.

The UN does a survey every once in a while and comes up with the human index. There are various parts of the human index when they do an analysis of different countries. Of course housing is one of the main things, but health and education are also in that “humadex”. My question to Stats Canada—maybe also directed to the work the other people are doing—is, what is coming out of your research on levels of education and availability of education? Similarly, with the health part, what are we finding out about availability of health services and the health rating of the aboriginal community?

What do you have from Stats Canada on those two areas?

[Jane Badets]

Well, concerning education, in the census we have their highest level of education; that's in slide 19. I don't have all the levels of schooling, but you can see that there is a gap at the university level between aboriginal and non-aboriginal: 8% of the aboriginal population had university credentials.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

I'm sorry, I didn't hear it. Was it 8%?

[Jane Badets]

In 2006, 8% had a university degree or certificate, compared with 23% of the non-aboriginal population, whereas you may have just seen that there is a slightly higher proportion of aboriginals with what we're calling an apprenticeship or trade certificate or diploma: 14% among the aboriginal population, compared with 12% among the non-aboriginal population. If you look at the slide, you can see the other levels of education. Of course, this varies by group as well.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Do you have high school figures also?

[Jane Badets]

Yes, and 21% had completed high school among the aboriginal population, compared with 24% among the non-aboriginal population.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

So 24% of the non-aboriginal population in Canada reaches high school?

[Jane Badets]

Yes; that is, of the population aged 25 to 64, that was their highest level of schooling.

That's what we have on education. There's more information from the census. I think also, from the post-census surveys—those surveys I talked about at the end—coming out in the Aboriginal Peoples Survey, we will have more information on education and health.

On health, I don't have first-hand what the health status is. I think it is from the aboriginal surveys. I don't know whether my colleagues from Indian and Northern Affairs can help me on that one.

[Dan Beavon]

It's my own work, which replicated the work of the United Nations Development Programme in the Human Development Index. I first published this in 1998. Actually, the front page of the The Globe and Mail on Thanksgiving Day that year said Indians live in squalor.

That work is in my last book, published just half a year ago, called Aboriginal Well-Being: Canada's Continuing Challenge. It takes the Human Development Index and the subsequent Community Well-Being Index that we developed and looks at the data cross-sectionally and across time from 1981 to 2001. We'll be doing updates to update it with the 2006 census, but that takes considerable time, because we need to have the micro-level data in order to do the calculations for the Community Well-Being Index, and it won't be available until December of this year or possibly January. That is our highest priority for redoing that work.

But to answer your specific questions, since 1981 we have seen the well-being of aboriginal populations in this country, specifically for registered Indians and for the Inuit as well, improving over time. At the same time, conditions have been improving for the general population, but the gap has been narrowing—not as fast as we would like to see.

With respect to the two components—you talked about education—education was the component in which we saw the gap close the fastest, but that's probably because we set the bar very low. Two-thirds of the educational component of the Human Development Index is weighted towards basic literacy. We used grade nine level of attainment as a proxy for basic literacy. The other one-third was high school graduation. We have to recalibrate all of our indices now, because they changed the education questions in the 2006 census. They no longer ask what your highest grade-school-level attainment is. This means that we have to raise the bar, which may mean that the gaps we've seen closing may not narrow as fast as we've thought in the past.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Nancy Karetak-Lindell]

Thank you. Your time is up. You were just getting started, right?

Now we have Mr. Van Kesteren from the government side, for five minutes.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and I thank the panel for coming too.

I was up around your home, actually, last summer.

I have some really quick questions. You have a birth rate in your statistics about the population increase. Is that due to an increase in actual birth rates?

[Eric Guimond]

Yes, fertility is higher among the aboriginal population than the non-aboriginal population, but it's not the main driver.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

You also recognize, of course, that when you say it's six times the increase of 8%...actually, our demographics are falling in Canada, so it's really not six times eight. It's more than six times, because our population increase is due to immigrants, correct? So it's much higher, actually, than six.

[Eric Guimond]

The aboriginal population is increasing through another form of migrants, if I may use that analogy: those who change their self-reporting of ethnicity from one census to the next. That's a big driver, especially for the Métis. Up to two-thirds of the growth is due to this.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

In terms of major repairs, you don't break down ownership. Is there any particular reason you don't do that?

[Jane Badets]

We do have that--ownership--from the census.

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

Why did you not include that? I'm just curious.

[Jane Badets]

There was no particular reason, other than--

[Dave Van Kesteren, Conservative, Chatham-Kent—Essex, ON]

I could probably give you 100 reasons.

[Jane Badets]

I was limited to the amount of time I had today.