Evidence of meeting #149 for Indigenous and Northern Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was c-92.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Dan Vandal Liberal Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB
I want to read another section of the bill, paragraph 9(2)(d):
child and family services provided in relation to an Indigenous child are to be provided in a manner that does not contribute to the assimilation of the Indigenous group, community or people to which the child belongs or to the destruction of the culture of that Indigenous group, community or people;
Can you comment on that?
Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs
Yes. To cut to the chase, how are you going to be able to do any of that work if there's no financial commitment to ensure that those things happen? It's not being done right now, and it's not magically going to happen tomorrow.
Liberal
Dan Vandal Liberal Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB
Are you suggesting that there needs to be a financial commitment within the bill?
Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs
Absolutely, in order to do all these things.
Liberal
Dan Vandal Liberal Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB
Natasha, thank you for your presentation. It was very powerful.
We don't have a lot of time. Do you have a recommendation on what we can do to improve the lives of young indigenous people in the child welfare system, going forward?
Director for Manitoba, Youth in Care Canada and Foster Up Founder, As an Individual
Yes. I think funding is a key component. Without adequate funding, services and resources, we are failing these children and youth in care. We leave them unsupported, and unable to thrive and reach their full potential. I think it's crucial that we have legislation ensuring that there is funding allocated for this and that these resources are given the utmost that we could possibly give, because these are children's lives we're talking about. They deserve an opportunity. They are kids, at the end of the day.
Liberal
Dan Vandal Liberal Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB
Thank you very much for all for your presentations.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal MaryAnn Mihychuk
Questioning now moves to MP Arnold Viersen, who is splitting it with MP Kevin Waugh, I understand.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
It depends how long the minutes you give me are. That's always how it goes.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal MaryAnn Mihychuk
Go ahead. Now that it's you, I will have to check the clock twice.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
Ms. Morgan, thanks for your testimony today. You mentioned that just this week, you were intervening in four cases. I was just doing a Google search of Manitoba Child and Family Services. They were interfering in a case where some kids were playing in the backyard, unsupervised. It seems like a significant overreach, in my opinion.
Maybe it's a privacy issue or something like that, but can you tell us a little about why Child and Family Services were even there in the first place, in these four cases?
First Nations Family Advocate, Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs
One of the typical practices is that if a mother has any children already in care, any child she has after that is automatically taken. When young people age out of the child welfare system and have their own children, they are often automatically targeted with birth alerts. It's a common practice.
One of the cases on Monday was a mom who was actually from Ontario. In Ontario, they have their own inherent laws and they have been guiding the way child welfare works in their five first nations in Treaty 3. Because the young mom had to deliver her baby in Winnipeg, it automatically brought her into the realm of the Manitoba child welfare system. The Ontario leadership asked us to be there, because the Manitoba child welfare system was getting involved. Their position was that the baby should easily go back with mom, but because they were in our province, it brought them issues they didn't have in their own.
Then we had a mother whose baby was sick and on medical. There was a racial profiling of her and her partner. They believed the parents weren't healthy, so child welfare intervened and took the baby away. We intervened to bring the baby back to the hospital and have them sent back north.
It's a common occurrence. Any single day in Winnipeg, there will be a newborn baby being apprehended from our hospitals.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
One of the areas of the bill is the best interests of the child. Somebody presented to us and they said we should add into that some impermissible reasoning. It appears to me that some of these cases might have.... For example, if you have survived the foster care system and you're now having your own child, it seems like CFS shows up by the way. Perhaps we could make that part of this impermissible reasoning, by saying something like that's not a good reason.
First Nations Family Advocate, Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs
We have that right now in our current Child and Family Services Act in Manitoba, that it's in the best interests of the children. That's how Manitoba operates; it's in the best interests of the children. So when I saw that in Bill C-92, it's frightening for us because apparently we're working in the best interests of children and in our first nations' opinion that's not—
Conservative
First Nations Family Advocate, Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs
Right. Then there are all these contorted definitions that aren't of our best interests and aren't of our first nations definition.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
That's the opportunity here. The best interests of the child is something that's grown over time through the court system, but we have the opportunity to legislate what that actually means.
Would you have a recommendation, if you were the one defining what the best interests of the child were?
First Nations Family Advocate, Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs
Our elders ultimately have a definition of what's in the best interests of children from our inherent ways of viewing children as being our most valued and prized, and we're there to care for the children. At the end of the day, those definitions have to be fleshed out because we're not going to be any better off if we're leaving it up to other people's definitions of what's in our best interests.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
Precisely.
Chief, this discussion that we're having, fundamentally for me, is about parental rights. Has your organization worked on a bill of rights for parents or something like that?
Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs
We've actually done a lot of extensive work. We've developed our own legislation. We've done engagements with communities. We've created our own laws based on the five indigenous languages in Manitoba. We've done very comprehensive things. If this committee would rather do our bringing our children home act, it would suit everybody else's needs. That's actually the way to go.
Amending anything in here, other than literally deleting it and allowing us to rewrite it for you...that's probably the only solution.
Conservative
Conservative
Kevin Waugh Conservative Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK
Thank you to my colleague.
I'm going to go to the Inuit, because Natan Obed of ITK talked about the challenges that you have. I would think the Ottawa area would be the second most populated area—certainly it would be the first in southern Canada—of Inuit. This was an issue where they're spread out so much up north and then they come into your hands here in the Ottawa area.
Talk about that, because that is a concern with ITK. We don't really have a lot of family foster homes up north. When they come down here to Ottawa, I'm sure you're struggling with that also.
President, Ottawa Inuit Children's Centre
Yes. Part of that struggle is that we get the burden of those services and what we need to provide in partnership with other agencies such as CHEO, for one example.
We have to do this work based on the type of agency we are. The vast number, as you mentioned, of Inuit come to Ottawa directly from Iqaluit and Baffin Island. We have that burden on our shoulders without the support at some times of the provinces or territories.
On our side, we take on these roles on our backs, and I think I'll let Karen also speak to that a little more extensively.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal MaryAnn Mihychuk
You only have five seconds, so maybe you're going to have to save that.
We move on to MP Rachel Blaney.
Executive Director, Ottawa Inuit Children's Centre
I just want to say it is very complicated when the kids arrive right here in Ottawa. Right now we have approximately 60 children living in group care who are from Nunavut and 15 kids who are here for complex medical reasons.
We have applied for funding to be able to support those kids. On the medically complex kids, it was heartbreaking to know that they were here. I did not know until about a year ago, when CHEO brought it to my attention. They had not seen an Inuk face or heard Inuktitut since they had left their homeland. We are there now doing visits.
The complexity is that they arrive here without documentation and they go to the school system that says, “Where's your documentation?”, because in Ontario we document kids until they're blue in the face so that we can prove the services that they need. There's a real gap there.
We've been to Nunavut a number of times to talk about this gap, but the reality is that from a legal perspective the guardian is still Nunavut social services, yet they're living in Ontario. It is a complex issue that we have brought forward to ITK and we look forward to working with them on solutions that work for these kids.