Thank you very much.
I'm going to speak about my agency, because I think we are a pretty good example of what can be done when a community puts its mind to the care of its children and, above all, is given resources in fact to do that.
In 1985, for those of you who don't know, who are not from this province, the provincial legislation was amended to allow aboriginal communities and agencies to develop their own child and family services. Many people didn't think about the Toronto community as an aboriginal community, and it is probably not thought to be so right around this country, but indeed, we have the third largest aboriginal child population in the country. We suffered from the same social and economic conditions affecting other native communities, and like those communities, our rates of children in the care of the state were far too high and the outcomes for those kids in care were very poor.
Our community felt we could do much better and that a community-controlled and culture-based approach would result in the outcomes we wanted to achieve. By better outcomes, I should say, we meant fewer kids in care of the state, but it also meant that where they had to be in care, their placements were within their community, either within their extended families or with their community of origin.
We felt that children who grow up in their family of heritage will have a strong identity and can, with support—and often supports are needed—have natural and caring relationships with their community and families, relationships that most Canadians take for granted, but not relationships that can necessarily be taken for granted by aboriginal people.
In 1988 we developed our own service model, and it was a far different approach from conventional child welfare. In Ontario we still have an import from Britain called “the society”. These are chartered societies; indeed my agency is in fact a children's aid society under a charter with the province.
The society status allows you some flexibility, and we developed a service model that was a little different from conventional children's aid societies. It came from extensive consultation with communities, with elders, with stakeholders, if you will, including government officials, and we were given some pretty clear marching orders associated with doing something different. One was that our society, our child welfare response, had to have some level of accountability to the community we served.
The second was that they wanted us to address the circumstances that might lead to the apprehension of children, which is very different from a conventional children's aid society that focuses on investigations of child maltreatment.
The third was to wrap this all up in a culture-based approach, which is not easy when you're talking about culture in the context of provincial legislation, so we were very challenged in those days.
The accountability part was the easy part. We developed very quickly a conventional, non-profit charity with a representative board of directors of all native people, all professionals in their fields, to oversee our work. We hired an executive director. That was me.
The second was to create an agency that was not just a business plan for protecting kids but a business plan that would go beyond that. Quality of life for children goes beyond simply their protection. It is also the nurturing of those children so that they can live decent, productive lives as good citizens of their first nations and of Canada as a whole. We had lofty ambitions.
We say we are a full service agency that does child welfare instead of a child welfare agency. When you approach it that way, you leave the door open for all kinds of innovative servicing. Between 1988 and 2004, we developed over $8 million worth of services that were not child welfare-related. These were Head Start programs, dedicated day care spaces, and extensive youth programs, including transitional housing for kids on the street. We run a high school, and we have a number of services that relate to their particular needs.
We have culture-based healing and therapy programs for adults and children. We have family violence programs. We have a stand-alone addictions clinic and we do summer and recreational programs. In fact, if you were to ask the kids who are engaged with Native Child what their favourite program is, they'll tell you it's our summer camp. That's kind of moving into the normative expectation with respect to what many Canadian children have taken for granted but aboriginal kids certainly haven't.
The cultural base issue is handled by having an elders council. It has no authority under formal rules but in fact has tremendous and powerful authority from the cultural place. They guide us in our training and they help us provide our ceremonies—and we have extensive ceremonies.
You wouldn't know this, but at College and Yonge there are two things today that weren't in existence a few years ago. One is a fully functioning sweat lodge on the fourth floor of our building, and the other is an Algonquin teaching lodge that is built in the atrium of our new building. Both of these, for your information, have won design awards, including one of the most prestigious of all design awards by the art design institute in the U.S., who publish the large journal related to that.
So we do more than spend time on child protection, although we take that seriously. We do cultural enhancement and enrichment, and we try to do what the elders call showing the things that glitter: show that aboriginal people are not just people who receive services and have problems, that there is, with the appropriate nurturing, an opportunity to do much more. My agency is a good sign of that.
I think we have done very successful work. Our agency is holistic in its orientation. It tends to the life-cycle needs of kids and families, and not just, as I've said, as part of the immediate and difficult realities of child maltreatment.
We have close to 200 staff, multiple locations, and an operating budget of $24 million. On average, we interface with 1,200 aboriginal people a day.
We have more than 70 funding agreements, very few with the federal government, and of course we have a tremendous administrative burden as a result. It's interesting to note that not one of these agreements comes from INAC. In fact, I cannot recall a single dollar ever being directly funded to this agency by the federal government through INAC, although 70% of our clients are status Indians and the other 30% would be Métis, Inuit, and self-declared aboriginal people.
After 20 years of service provision to our community, we have made some huge differences in some areas and very little difference in others. Our best results, our pride, is in our work with kids who have become permanent wards of the state.
Previous to the emergence of Native Child and other organizations like us, native children were apprehended by the state and quite often—and this is a tragedy—simply disappeared to non-native places, often not just in the immediate area but out of province, and sometimes out of the country, and sometimes internationally.
We have stopped this culturally genocidal behaviour. Kids not only do not disappear; they stay within their community, many within their extended families, both on and off reserve.
We are proud that close to 90% of our long-term placements are with native families. Evidence is mounting that says that this will produce better overall outcomes for the kids involved. They are mostly doing well in our care; some are doing very well. We are having kids, for the first time, graduate from universities and colleges. Most of our kids were dropouts from the high school system. The kids we bring into our care tend to do a lot better.
The area in which we have not been successful is in handling and making a difference in the circumstances that lead to the apprehension of children. In fact we are apprehending more kids than ever, and this is a phenomenon right across the country. In Toronto, almost 10% of the children in care are aboriginal, and we represent less than 1% of the population. We have to ask ourselves why this is so. Why, after so much effort on the part of the community and an investment of close to $24 million annually, are these kids still coming into care?
I believe you know the answer. This is a committee that has heard from many. It has to do with a legacy of colonialism, the residential schools, and the disenfranchisement of aboriginal people from living a life that would normally be expected to be lived by any Canadian. That history has probably been articulated to you, so I will not go into it, but that history is experienced in the everyday life of the caseloads at Native Child and Family Services.
We have an overrepresentation among the families we work with of families who are in poverty. They are plagued by violence, have addictions, and are alienated from themselves and everything around them.
As you know—and I hope this would be a wake-up call for any concerned citizen—the migration to the city is accelerating rapidly. If you consult with StatsCan, you'll see that in Toronto alone, every census shows a 20% increase in aboriginal children. Thankfully, agencies such as Native Child and Family Services, and a similar initiative referenced here in Vancouver, have developed to receive this migration. I think we are developing an expertise and securing the resources and doing all things necessary to create agencies that will assist these kids in making a healthy transition. But there's lots of work to do, and while I was not asked, I can't help but make a few recommendations. They will be short and sweet.
One is investment in native children. There's lots of investment dealing with the problems of native kids. I can get more money to support a kid I've apprehended than I can ever get for a kid who's actually in the community. I don't think anybody would see that as a good, no matter what end of the political spectrum you might be on. We need to get at some of these fundamentals: investment in the Head Start program—and by the way, it has been an excellent program that has made a dramatic difference in the lives of some of our kids—day cares, which we have taken on; early education, zero to six. All of those investments, I think, pay off tremendously.
I don't know what the formula is, whether a buck invested saves...but I will tell you that I have kids in care, because they have not had investments in their lives, sitting in foster homes and group homes that are costing over $200 a day. So just the business side would tell you that these investments are good.
The other is, treat kids fairly. That has been articulated in Jordan's Principle very well, and I think you've heard it before. No matter who they are or where they live, and whether they're aboriginal or not, kids should have equal services in a country such as ours. This is fundamental, I think, to our values as Canadians, whether we're native or non-native.
