Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on May 26th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

You have one minute.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Chief Mckenzie, do you have anything to add to that?

[Chief Mike Mckenzie]

There were problems when the pandemic started. Policy-wise, there were too many discussion units involving the provincial government and the federal government. In the coming days, we may be able to find a better solution that enables first nations, the provincial government and the federal government to talk about what's needed to deal with the second wave. It would be better to have one single meeting rather than three or four conference calls a day. This has been very trying for all first nations, especially at our level.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

We're right out of time, Gary.

Ms. Zann, you're up now, for five minutes. Please go ahead.

[Lenore Zann, Liberal, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Thank you very much. I'm coming to you today from the unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia.

Hello. It's nice to see all of you. Thank you so much for your incredible presentations.

I am so deeply sorry that your nations are concerned about and going through so many different things. However, at this point I'm very glad to see that there have not been too many illnesses yet on reserve. I really hope that the second and third waves don't hit you at all. We've seen what diseases like this can do to first nations people and Inuit people, and we don't want this to ever happen now, in this day and age.

On May 15, we had a presentation at this committee from Ms. Hilda Anderson-Pyrz, the co-chair of the missing and murdered women coalition of Manitoba. She told our committee that youth mental health is a critical area requiring action, particularly since many indigenous communities were dealing with mental health crises prior to the pandemic.

We also had Ms. Redvers, who is the co-founder and executive director of the youth support organization We Matter. She explained to us that indigenous youth are finding new ways to remain connected online. However, she noted an increase in anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, self-harm and hopelessness, and she said the youth are turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms.

I would like to ask if somebody can explain to me how the current pandemic is affecting the youth in your communities and what we can do, what the government can do in the long term, to address the mental health crises affecting many indigenous communities and their youth.

Could we please start with Mr. Therrien Pinette? I'd also like to hear from Dr. Vollant and Madam Meawasige, if possible.

[Jean-Claude Therrien Pinette]

Thank you for your question, Ms. Zann.

I work with eastern Canada's only treatment centre for young indigenous people, the Walgwan Centre, which identifies vulnerabilities and threats. As you know, the challenge facing indigenous community leaders today is the demographic pressure of youth. It's important for our organizations to offer young people something other than income supports once they reach adulthood. Our people are and can be in the workforce, but we have few options to offer our members.

We're also dealing with highly toxic and destructive substances that compromise some young people's future. We must not downplay the impact of these substances on the developing brain. Young people have amazing hopes and dreams, but unfortunately, their peer group and their environment can be hostile to achieving those hopes and dreams. Earlier, I tried to answer the question about our psychosocial needs by mentioning other elements that must be in place to prevent problems coming up in our communities. In other words, prevention is key. We need specialized teams. We need to take a more medically focused approach because now we are talking about medication in a psychiatric context. We need to integrate a medical approach into our interventions.

The only substance dependence program for first nations is Health Canada's oldest program, the national native alcohol and drug abuse program, or NNADAP. There's also the national youth solvent abuse program, or NYSAP. These are the only direct supports available to our communities.

The pandemic has limited access to the treatment centre and group therapy. That's something we need to address. The common denominator for all these measures is public safety and reducing the availability—

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

We're at time right there. Sorry about that.

[Lenore Zann, Liberal, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

I'm sorry. I would love to hear from every single one of you.

We can continue this conversation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

We will.

Mr. Zimmer, please go ahead. You have five minutes.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Maybe we'll catch up where we left off before. This is a question for Chief Mckenzie. Some of my colleagues, including Mr. Vidal, have also asked it.

I want to get into the regimen for testing and the availability of the test a little bit more. I'll say it is a credit to the Inuit communities and Dr. Vollant that they are trying to stay ahead of this. We were concerned back in March when COVID was just breaking. We had talked to Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada about preventative measures, about how to keep the COVID situation out of these remote communities. It is a credit to those communities that they said they were going to put up their own walls to make sure this virus didn't get into their communities in the first place. Again, it is a credit to those communities that it has not been so pervasive in those indigenous communities.

Let's get back to the testing. What do you foresee in terms of the number of tests in these communities? You spoke a bit about it. I don't know what the availability has been. I think the numbers are still a little bit vague.

Have you been able to see any of your community members tested for COVID, and what have you heard in terms of plans for the future? Are there plans to test more? What does “more” look like? Is that in the tens, hundreds or thousands?

Chief Mckenzie or Dr. Vollant, please answer as well as you can.

[Dr. Stanley Vollant]

I'm going to answer that question because our medical team has looked at the issue of screening.

We've calculated that it's about 3% of the indigenous population. That's 3% per village and 3% of all Innu communities. That adds up to 20,000 people, so that's 500 to 1,000 tests per month. That includes people who have symptoms. People coming back into the communities must also be tested. We have to start screening asymptomatic people to find out the percentage of asymptomatic COVID-19 cases in our villages.

That 3% is a conservative estimate, and it could be higher. In order to better understand the epidemiology and behaviour of this virus in our communities, we'll have to do serological tests, which will be available soon. That will tell us who has been in contact with the virus and who has antibodies in their blood, and from that, we can figure out when we'll achieve herd immunity. About 70% of the population has to have had the virus for us to achieve herd immunity and be protected from the virus.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Dr. Vollant, is 3% what you aspire to? Just to be clear, is that what you aspire to or is that what's already happened? What is the number for testing that has already happened as of now? Is it 3% or is it less?

[Dr. Stanley Vollant]

It's less than 3%. We've had a very hard time getting tests.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

I'm sorry. I didn't hear. The interpretation was slow on that response. What was the number?

[Dr. Stanley Vollant]

We don't have 3%. We might just have less than 1% of testing so far. It was probably due to the lack of testing in Quebec. We had so many problems in Montreal. There was a lack of testing outside of Montreal. Three per cent would be at least the number that we would like. It should maybe be more but at least 3% would be a good start.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

I see Chief Mckenzie went offline. Maybe I could ask just one last.... I probably have a few minutes left.

What do you think, other than testing, is necessary to get us back to normal? Is it masks, social distancing measures, screens and those kind of things? Maybe you could give us a snapshot of what you're looking at to get to that normal again.

[Dr. Stanley Vollant]

We have asked people to continue their hand cleaning and physical distancing of two metres. Also, we have asked our people to wear a mask when they are going out in public spaces. The mask is, I think, key in the process.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Do you have enough masks, Doctor? Do you have the masks available to use if you require them?

[Dr. Stanley Vollant]

We don't have enough, but our communities are making masks for our population. It would be nice to have more funding to have more masks for our people.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thank you very much. Thanks, Mr. Zimmer.

Mr. Powlowski, please go ahead for five minutes.

[Marcus Powlowski, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Wow, I'm back again. I didn't know I was going twice.

The federal government's funding for first nations and indigenous communities in relation to this pandemic has been on an individual community basis, rather than taking a more global approach. Do you think that was the right way to do it?

I know some communities have more expertise than others. Dr. Vollant is the exception with the Innu community having surgeons, but some communities don't have a lot of medical expertise. Would it have been better to have taken a more global approach to find global solutions in indigenous communities?

[Dr. Stanley Vollant]

I think so.

Many communities in Quebec aren't lucky enough to have an indigenous strategic unit. We Innu have been very lucky because our chiefs have taken the initiative to set up that unit. The Anishnaabe, Mi'kmaq and Atikamekw nations haven't been so lucky. Several nations weren't able to benefit from that expertise.

Yes, the federal government should implement a wall-to-wall strategy for all indigenous nations in Canada, from east to west and north to south.

[Marcus Powlowski, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Maybe I can ask Ms. Meawasige for a response to the same question as to whether we should have taken a more global response, rather than leaving it to each individual community to come up with plans.

[Amanda Meawasige]

It's hard to say. It's hard to know whether that would have been a better approach. It's never been done that way in the past.

As mentioned, I think there could have been a streamlining of how proposals were requested from communities. There were no guidelines. They had to submit a plan, but people weren't sure about what was eligible or ineligible. The fear was that there was a lot of time wasted with guesswork. There's also in our communities a fear of retaliation from funders for submitting ineligible costs, so there's a lot of uncertainty with how this was rolled out.

As I mentioned, there's a bit of a jurisdictional quagmire between Indigenous Services Canada and FNIHB in terms of who's responsible for paying for what. Therefore, the onus was on communities to develop two separate proposals when, really, it should be flipped back to the funders to determine that in-house and make a seamless, single-window kind of approach.