Good morning.
It's an honour for me to be here. I'll try to bring an administrative perspective to you on Bill C-92 and what we hope it means for an agency implementing that legislation.
As Chief Roulette has mentioned, through what I'll call convenient interpretation of provincial acts, we've been able to return approximately 50% of our children in the last two years. We've gone from approximately 600 children in care to approximately 298. That was through our interpretation of standards and legislation that were actually in direct contradiction sometimes, because the rules wouldn't allow certain things.
One thing we find is that Manitoba is a unique province in terms of devolution and of services being turned over to first nations. We still operate within the context of original provincial legislation as drafted in the 1980s as we move forward with customary care, which has the community involved in decision-making around what happens to families, and resource sharing, whereby you have housing, education, health and the chief and council as parts of a customary committee in which we sit down together and make plans around how each service delivery body can contribute to the case plan for families in the community.
In addition, there's the block funding model, which your government more or less does already. Our federal funding flows directly to us. On the provincial side it flows through an authority that we're dealing with as well, because we don't think it's necessary for our funding to flow through an aboriginal authority to us, which would involve administration fees. We see such an authority as an extension of government, another level of bureaucracy that's unnecessary.
We deal with those kinds of things. Your government, as I said, is already there in terms of how our funding flows, and we're hoping that this bill will allow first nations, instead of being in contradiction of legislation and standards, to begin to develop their own, which would allow us to continue our unique way of providing services on reserve as they pertain to our families.
We're hoping that such a bill would mean that regardless of where children reside, whether they're on or off reserve, they're funded 100%, that the system is 100% and we get away from the sixty-forty split in Manitoba whereby the feds fund us 40% and the province funds us 60%. That is based on cases in which children are brought into care, if you aren't familiar with it.
We're hoping that Bill C-92 addresses this and that, regardless of where our children are, we are a federal responsibility and there are mechanisms in place for us to continue our own service delivery model and serve what has been mentioned, the best interests of children in care.
I know there are some documents such as “Bringing our Children Home” out there, and for Sandy Bay CFS that means something different, in terms of best interests. We've had discussions with our chief and council about whether the reserve is the best place for our children when there is no housing, high unemployment, huge health risks, gangs and drugs. Is that the best place to bring children home?
Child and family services is sometimes the dumping ground for other services, such as justice. They seem to think that child welfare can solve all of those problems, when we're currently certainly not equipped to address socio-economic conditions on first nations.
Through our customary care model and the sharing of resources, we can certainly change the outlook for kids in care. From an administrative service delivery perspective, Bill C-92 is something we're very excited about.
There are some cautionary things that we're also afraid of. Not every first nation in Manitoba has the relationship we have with our chief and council, and there is certainly a risk of agencies being enveloped by their chief and council. When you have elections every two years and faces change every two years, that can certainly be detrimental to the continuity of service of a child welfare agency. Be mindful of that. We're certainly mindful of it.
We're hoping—and it has already been documented—that Bill C-92 will supersede any provincial or federal legislation.
There was fear that such a bill would only apply on reserve, and then agencies would be forced to implement both provincial legislation and federal legislation. People would receive different services depending on where they were coming into contact with the system. We're being mindful of that, but we are highly optimistic about Bill C-92.