Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak to you all today and for your work on this important topic and legislation.
I'd also like to thank our indigenous elders, leaders and politicians who assisted in bringing forward the issues faced by indigenous people when working with and for the welfare of indigenous children.
I would especially like to thank the leadership of the Métis people, both nationally and provincially, for supporting Bill C-92. For the Métis people most especially, this bill can lead to substantive and meaningful change.
I have had the honour of being the executive director of Metis Child, Family and Community Services in Manitoba for only the past one and a half years. I came to this role after working within and around child welfare systems for more than 25 years, and I have seen many changes in that time. I've worked in three different provinces during that time.
In child welfare, we see ourselves as helpers. One of the important lessons that we all learn eventually is that, without hope, there is no change. Bill C-92 gives me hope that we can finally have a child welfare system truly designed and controlled by indigenous people. Metis Child, Family and Community Services, for those who are unfamiliar, is a fully delegated child welfare agency. We deliver services in the city of Winnipeg, as well as in the Interlake and Eastman regions of Manitoba. Our specific mandate is to deliver services for Métis and Inuit, although the structure of devolved services in Manitoba is such that we also serve some non-indigenous and first nations people.
As a fully delegated agency, we provide services both to families to prevent children from entering into care but also to families as they work toward the reunification of children in temporary or permanent care.
Currently, 929 children of the 1,200 that Ms. Schibler referred to are in my agency's care. We are a very large agency. This number of children in our care has remained generally stable for the past five years, but it's disturbing that the proportion of those children who have been permanently removed from their parents is steadily increasing. At the end of the last fiscal year, 668 of these 929 children were in permanent care. In our agency, we still support families to have regular involvement and meaningful engagement with their children, even though they're in permanent care. They see them as often as weekly. Hopefully, they're placed within their families, and those families are involved in every important decision regarding them. It's a very important principle that we follow within our agency.
The reason for this change in the proportion of children in care being more permanent than temporary is not only that we're working hard to reduce the number of children coming into care through apprehension or temporary orders, but permanent orders are relatively long-lasting. That's the main piece of that, but there are systemic issues within our legislation and the justice-related systems that have really impacted how children end up staying in care.
Those of you familiar with the state of child welfare in Manitoba will recognize that we've been in a state of crisis for many years, despite having travelled a path toward devolving powers to indigenous agencies more than a decade ago. Where some would see this as a cautionary tale about empowering indigenous people, I would counter that it's cautionary insofar as Manitoba did not go nearly far enough with the meaningful sharing of powers, and Bill C-92 provides a mechanism to resolve this.
Currently, as a fully delegated agency, we can do what any other child welfare agency in the province can do. That's the problem. We can't do things differently. We have to do what child welfare has always done. The legislation in Manitoba is set up so that, once children enter care, the only exit point is adoption, except for those children we have a guardianship application for. The legislation supports adoption and the funding structure supports adoption, and we cannot follow that path.
When a child comes into care in Winnipeg, it's long been the policy that children be placed with their family or extended family. It's been that way precisely as Bill C-92 proposes. It's been that way for decades.
We have 270 related family caregivers in our agency. However, before a decision is ever made that a child must go into care, we created a family conferencing program to support and engage families and extended families. In many cases, the families themselves are the ones involved in the decision to have the children leave their parents' care, and they have come up with their own plan for that child's care.
Even though the provincial policy is for children to be placed with family, we receive no dedicated funding from the Province of Manitoba for either our kinship care program or our family conferencing program. Instead, I have to divert funding that is meant for child protection staff for that.
The province funds shelters and emergency care foster homes through private agencies. The vast majority of the children in these third party homes are indigenous, and yet the vast majority of these homes are not. As a result, we have had young Métis children speak Tagalog as their first language, and teenagers tell us that they're Filipino, not Métis. We've had other children raised within traditional Mennonite communities, and this has been a fact since devolution.
This continuing practice of funding third party care providers rather than funding culturally appropriate agencies is continuing the process of colonization. The historic funding structures and the relationship simply do not match the outcomes we are trying to achieve. This bill would allow us to work around these remnants of the colonizing structures and processes to further create specific Métis resources.
Another example of a Métis-specific resource, which has received considerable attention, is our living in family enhancement program. Within these homes, children live in a foster home along with their parent, ensuring that attachment is never broken or that it can be restored if they had previously been separated.
I want to emphasize the incredibly hard work and deep caring that is prevalent within the child welfare system across the country. However, listening to some critics, one would have to agree with a provincial MLA, who expressed to me in the context of a legislative review in Manitoba, that social workers act like they are crazy.
Child welfare systems are supposed to be designed to help families and protect children. People working within child welfare were attracted to it because they want to support families and protect children. Yet, we are caught between finely written principles that we wholeheartedly believe in and the dangerous situations we find children to be in. The only solutions that are funded by mainstream government are the removal of children from their family and nation, and bringing our own people into an intimidating court system that they have only experienced as being punitive towards them.
By supporting indigenous people to create alternative solutions, Bill C-92 creates hope. As noted earlier, with hope, we can create change.
Thank you for your time.