Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Nov. 2nd, 2016

[Patricia Vickers]

I was just saying you're trying to get your mind into ancestral law and cultural protocol. It also connects with 203 communities, and who we connected with was a federally imposed leadership. Sometimes those leaders are also hereditary leaders. On the coast in particular, our hereditary leadership is still very strong. We still have our chief. The guiding force for us is that cultural protocol.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

What I'm getting at is that you have the cultural protocol and then you have the provincial and federal health authorities. It's kind of going in and out of the relationships along the way to create this wraparound service. You deal with it at the front end when children are very young. These are the social and economic determinants that impact your lives, and this is the violence and blah, blah. You're educating them on that front and then if they do get into a crisis situation, a suicidal situation, you deal with that, and then you deal with the post side of the wraparound to try to come full circle, to bring them back around.

How do we formalize this relationship of starting at the beginning, going through educational forces, mental health forces, and then dealing with the provincial-federal forces, and then coming back around again to the cultural protocol? Do you know what I'm saying? I think it's so important. We need to formalize this so that we have some process, some method.

[Dr. Shannon McDonald]

This is in the B.C. Tripartite Framework Agreement, in the memorandum of understanding that preceded that, and in the regional partnership accords between health authorities and the B.C. First Nations Health Authority. We have those structures in place. What we've done historically, however, is a little bit of this, a little bit of that. The first 15 years of my career were year-at-a-time funding and special projects. Then I went back to medical school and got a job. The historic way of dealing with this has always been very reactionary. There's been northern Saskatchewan—

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

That's why I'm trying to figure out how we get out of that so we can formalize a process.

[Dr. Shannon McDonald]

We need long-term, sustainable, predictable funding.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Thank you. That's exactly what I wanted to hear.

And we need structure around that, right?

[Dr. Shannon McDonald]

Yes.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

We need to formalize the structure. Once we formalize the structure and the relationships, then we can determine the resources that need to be brought to bear to make that formalized process a reality. This takes long-term, stable funding and self- governance.

[Dr. Shannon McDonald]

Right now you're only seeing it from a western, government point of view. What Patricia is talking about is that we also need that other point of view, the cultural point of view.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

Yes.

[Dr. Shannon McDonald]

We need the structures that existed historically, the responsibility to care for the people in the community.

[Mike Bossio, Liberal, Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON]

That's what I'm saying. That's the wraparound piece. It's community driven, and the western piece exists in the middle, but how do we transition through that? It has to be community-driven.

[Dr. Shannon McDonald]

It has to work in partnership.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

Thank you.

[Dr. Shannon McDonald]

I warned you about the soapbox.

[The Chair, Liberal, Andy Fillmore]

That's true.

The final question for the panel goes to David Yurdiga.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Based on our committee round tables and various discussions with the youth, there seems to be this need to identify with their language and their culture. Are any of the services provided in their mother tongue? Do you think it's important that it be implemented within the program?

[Patricia Vickers]

Not in my home community, they're not. Within the last 30 years, there has been despairing language loss. I don't speak my father's language. However, there are Ts’msyen who are going to UNBC to study Sm’algyax to become language teachers. In a way, this is really unfortunate, because the best way to learn is in your family and in the community, to be immersed in it, which is the way it was when my mother, an English woman, went to Kitkatla in the 1940s. Everyone was fluent in Sm’algyax—everyone. In a really short time, there's been enormous change.

Yes, that's what we're working towards also in mental wellness, to look to the language Those of you who speak more than one language know that you lose some meaning when you translate to English. That's one of the things we're doing, looking to our fluent speakers to define what it is we need to describe in mental wellness, to understand what spiritual balance is.

[Dr. Shannon McDonald]

Again, in B.C., there are more than 30 languages. It's a big piece of work and it's not just ours. It's education. It's social welfare. It's all of those pieces. They have to come together to do that work.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

I can see there's a huge challenge, obviously, with 30 languages, but I thought that would be appropriate, considering how the youth are reaching out. They want to grasp on to their heritage, which includes language. Working toward that is a very positive thing, in my opinion.

Moving forward, I know mental health is a big portion of your program. What portion of the budget is dedicated to mental health?

[Dr. Shannon McDonald]

We'd have to pull pieces from a whole bunch of things. Some of it lives in primary care, some of it is direct service, and some of it is in these project pieces of work, so I don't know that I could land on a particular number. With direct service delivery, I would probably say close to 30% to 40%.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

That's a huge number.

[Dr. Shannon McDonald]

Yes, and it's still not enough.

[David Yurdiga, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Cold Lake, AB]

Ideally, what kind of budget would you like to see? Would it be a 20% increase to do what you have to do to deliver a program that meets the needs of the people?

[Dr. Shannon McDonald]

It's not just mental health programming that is going to make the change. It's all of those other pieces, as well, in the social determinants, in housing, in employment, in economic opportunity, and in education. When all of those pieces are moving forward, then there won't be as much need. Does that make sense? That's the long-term vision.

In the short term, the whole envelope is constantly a challenge in trying to balance all of the needs within it. Ideally, more would be good, but realistically that's probably not going to happen in the short term.