Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Nov. 19th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

I call this meeting to order.

I start by acknowledging that I am meeting with you on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabe and Chonnonton first nations.

The committee is meeting today to consider the supplementary estimates (B), 2020-21.

Remember to select the language of your choice at the bottom of the screen for the interpretation version that you wish: “Floor”, “English” or “French”.

With us today by video conference for the first hour is Minister of Indigenous Services Marc Miller, accompanied by the following senior officials: Christiane Fox, the deputy minister; Valerie Gideon, the associate deputy minister; Mary-Luisa Kapelus, the assistant deputy minister; Chad Westmacott, director general; and Philippe Thompson, chief of finances.

Welcome, everyone. It's time for Minister Miller to make his opening statements. We allow six minutes for that opening statement.

Minister, please go ahead.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Minister of Indigenous Services]

Thank you, Chair.

Kwe. Unnusakkut. Boohzoo. Good evening.

I am speaking to you this evening from the traditional territory of the Algonquin people.

Mr. Chair and members of the committee, I'm pleased to join you virtually today.

I also want to note the presence, as the chair did, of Christiane Fox, deputy minister; Valerie Gideon, associate deputy minister; and the senior officials from Indigenous Services Canada named by the chair.

I appear before the committee today knowing that, despite these very difficult days, we continue to make great strides in reducing socio-economic gaps between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. In these unprecedented times, we must not fail in our commitment to reconciliation or our efforts to address the inequality experienced by indigenous peoples.

Colonial practices and decades of inequality and discrimination have compounded the challenges faced by indigenous communities during the pandemic. Once again, we have witnessed the tremendous resilience and determination of indigenous communities and leaders all over the country, both during the first wave and now in the midst of the second.

As of November 18, we can confirm that there are 1,170 active cases of COVID-19 in on-reserve first nations communities, for a total of 2,890 confirmed cases. Of that number, 1,668 people have recovered and, unfortunately, 22 have died.

Nunavut has 70 confirmed positive cases. Nunavik, in Quebec, has 29 confirmed positive cases. Nunavik has one active case, and the rest of those affected have recovered. Nunatsiavut, however, has no confirmed positive cases at the moment.

Lastly, the Northwest Territories have 15 confirmed positive cases and 10 cases in which people have recovered, for a total of 25 confirmed positive cases. The Yukon has 25 confirmed positive cases, 22 of which are people who have recovered.

I remain convinced that, thanks to first nations, Inuit and Métis leadership during this crisis, lives will continue to be saved as the appropriate measures are taken and support is made available to community members.

I will now turn to the topic of today's hearing, which is closely related to the pandemic response.

These supplementary estimates include total authorities for Indigenous Services Canada in 2020-21 of $16.3 billion, a historical high in line with these unprecedented times. They reflect a net increase of $1.8 billion.

Of that $1.8 billion in new funding, $1.1 billion in both voted and statutory appropriations, or approximately 60%, is related to various COVID-19 responses, measures that have been integral to our response to date.

Most of the remaining funds, including $740 million in vote 10 grants and contributions, are providing further support to indigenous businesses impacted by COVID-19 as well as to maintain essential services through the non-insured health benefits program, child and family services, Jordan's principle and long-term care engagement.

Key programs and initiatives included in these estimates directly linked to addressing the impacts of COVID-19 include $305 million for the first wave of the indigenous community support fund, allocated directly to indigenous communities off-reserve or to urban indigenous service delivery organizations that were so key in fighting the first wave.

There is an amount of $298.3 million to address the specific needs of indigenous businesses impacted by COVID-19; $245.4 million in funding for a safe restart and reopening and for health and safety measures for schools and child care centres on reserve; $105.9 million to support students and youth, primarily delivered through the post-secondary education program and first nations and Inuit youth employment strategy; $82.5 million in support of surge capacity and adaptation of indigenous mental wellness services; and finally, $75 million for first nations, Inuit and Métis businesses and indigenous businesses in the tourism sector, which has been hit so hard.

To continue our effort to support children and families, $240.9 million has been assigned to child and family services in these supplementary estimates.

I will close by saying that while our commitment to sustained attention and action to address the challenges faced by first nations, Inuit and Métis during this pandemic will be maintained over the course of the next several months, we're not losing sight of the broader need to advance on our government's and Canada's shared priorities with indigenous leaders. These include infrastructure;supports for children, women and families; health legislation and transformation; new fiscal relationships; economic development; and the recent universal broadband fund announcement, under which $50 million will be dedicated to mobile Internet projects that primarily benefit indigenous peoples.

As COVID-19 continues to progress, we will continue to do everything in our power to ensure that indigenous peoples have all the supports they need to protect their health and safety in both the immediate and the long term.

I am encouraged to say that tomorrow, along with the Prime Minister, we will be announcing support on this matter in light of the various surges, notably across the Prairies.

I look forward to taking your questions.

Meegwetch, nakurmiik, merci, thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thank you, Minister.

Our first round of questioners, for six minutes, are Gary Vidal, Marcus Powlowski, Madame Bérubé, who is not yet with us.

If she's still not here, we'll move to Ms. Blaney and hope that Ms. Bérubé—

[Arnold Viersen, Conservative, Peace River—Westlock, AB]

She is in the committee room here, Mr. Chair.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Mr. Naaman Sugrue]

She is here now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Okay, thank you very much. Great. Everybody is here.

Mr. Vidal, please go ahead, for six minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank Mr. Miller and his team for being here.

As I've said before, I know your worlds are very busy, and we appreciate your time.

Mr. Miller, it seems that you and I have had this conversation too many times over the last few months, with a serious outbreak in northern Saskatchewan.

I want to ask you about another serious outbreak we have, this time in the Athabasca region, and particularly in the Fond du Lac community where, according to a call I was on yesterday, they had 49 active cases and 233 people on their contact lists.

To add to that, they have a very significant water treatment plant issue. They had a breakdown of some pumps and whatnot in their water plant. Obviously, in a fly-in community, that's putting the front-line health workers and the whole community at a pretty significant risk, when they're trying to do swabs and make health calls and at the same time can't wash their hands in the middle of a pandemic.

I also had the opportunity to discuss this situation with the vice-chief of the P.A. Grand Council yesterday. We were on a conference call with the people from these communities yesterday, and you could hear the desperation in their voices. You could hear the trouble they're experiencing.

My question is pretty simple. What is the department doing to provide the leadership of these communities and the health care workers and the people in these communities with the help they need right away?

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Thank you.

Gary, thank you for your question, and thank you for the briefings you took with my team to keep you up to date in real time about what is going on. Again, I'm willing personally to do it if you reach out.

I did have a chance to speak to Chief Louie Mercredi yesterday to ensure that he was getting the service that was due in this time of crisis. He identified a number of issues. The ones you identified, particularly the shutdown of the water services, is exceedingly alarming, for the reasons you mentioned. There are ways to work around it, but it's obviously unacceptable that this is the status quo.

There were talks about some pieces that would have taken a little longer to get into the community. We've accelerated that, in particular in relation to the pump and the service to the plant. Up to now, we're confident that it is either in the community today or will be tomorrow, with work being done to make sure that the water comes back on.

We've been assured that they do have enough water and we've ensured that they've had supplies of water shipped into the community. That's key, but so is the pandemic response. As you've alluded to, part of tracking down COVID is ensuring that those people you are doing contract tracing on are identified with very short delay, or else you just expand the number of people that positive cases come into contact with. We are hopeful that not all of those 200-plus contact cases will be positive, but we can't take anything for granted.

As part of that, we're are assisting in enhanced PPE and enhanced resources. The chief recently expressed concern with respect to food security, and we've employed some financial resources to assist with that on an immediate basis. Our teams are working around the clock in those communities that are affected.

Sadly, I suspect that these conversations you and I will be having on that response will continue. We're not through this second wave by any stretch of the imagination. If you look at the numbers that I identified in the introduction, they're essentially four times the total numbers that affected indigenous communities in the first wave. Therefore, this is hitting indigenous communities hard. The role I have, along with other ministers in government, is to deploy resources and funds as quickly as possible and allow communities to implement those pandemic response plans that they've been so good at implementing up to now.

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

Thank you.

I want to ask you a couple of really quick questions, because time flies here in our six-minute segments.

Are there actual adequate testing machines and supplies in this community to do the rapid testing, and are they getting the results back in a very quick manner?

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Things could always be more expedient, but we have deployed resources into the community.

If Valerie Gideon is on the line, I'd perhaps allow her to talk about the specific assets in the communities at this time.

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

Ms. Gideon, if you would, just a quick response, please. I really want to get to some other things.

[Valerie Gideon, Associate Deputy Minister, Department of Indigenous Services]

Absolutely.

I think we are ensuring that they have the necessary supplies and access to testing. So far, we've provided over $3 million and will continue to provide support to the community as is needed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Gary, you have one minute. Go ahead.

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

Thank you.

Minister, I'm going to shift gears quickly.

I'm also hearing today from another first nation, not in my riding but just on the edge of my riding, the James Smith Cree Nation, where they're having a bit of an outbreak. They're locking down their communities.

I talked to the chief today, and he expressed a very significant level of frustration with his interaction with the department. He expressed a concern about not getting answers to questions and not being engaged. They have not had any meaningful response or dialogue from the minister and from the department to address their requests and they remain without PPE to protect their community.

Can you maybe explain, in the time you have left, why this chief would feel that he has such frustration and lack of response?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Do it briefly, please.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

It's very hard to speculate on precisely the concern without speaking together. We've had a number of conversations, organized by FSIN, with the chief in question. We do have numerous amounts of medical-purpose PPE that have been sent into the community to assist them with their needs, and we will assist them throughout this and their lockdown.

We've had a number of exchanges of letters. They've had a Canada-wide request to distribute PPE. It is a complex matter of significant financial proportions that would exceed what their community has requested for their own purposes and needs. It's an initiative that we are looking at and continue to look at internally, but it is something that I will do with the chief in question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

Thanks very much, Minister.

Mr. Powlowski, it's your turn. You have six minutes for your questioning.

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

Thank you.

A lot of the supplementary estimates money is going to the COVID response. So far in northwestern Ontario, there hasn't been a substantial number of cases in the indigenous community, but I think it's pretty inevitable that this is going to change, since we seem to be in the process of an outbreak at the moment. I think we've had something like 100 cases in the last week, whereas we were getting one or two cases per week up until then.

Certainly there's a concern that it's going to spread to first nations communities, many of them in Mr. Melillo's riding, like the Nishnawbe Aski Nation communities, the NAN communities, but Thunder Bay is the conduit. People fly from Thunder Bay to those communities. A lot of the medical services are in Thunder Bay. If for whatever reason people come down to Thunder Bay, get it and go back to those communities, there's certainly a concern.

You're probably not going to be able to answer my first question because it's a medical question, but I found your numbers interesting. I think you said that so far in first nations communities, there have been 28 deaths and over 1,700 cases. This is somewhat reassuring, because there was a concern that in the indigenous communities the death rate would be above the national average, especially based on the fact that H1N1, an influenza, seemed to hit those communities particularly hard, with higher rates of mortality.

From the experience so far, is the mortality rate higher in the indigenous community than in the non-indigenous community? That was the first question.

If there is an answer to that, my second question is, what have we done to try to protect those communities? They have largely, shut down, but the risk has certainly gone up as of the last couple of weeks.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Members will note that a Liberal member has posed a question that he knows I can't answer with the proper expertise. I think during this pandemic, those of us who are called upon to act quickly have all become armchair epidemiologists and have been diving into some of the numbers.

What we do see when we look at comparables in the U.S. is that indigenous communities there are being hit 3.5 to 5 times more, if you look at Alaska, than the already soaring rates that exist in the U.S. If you look at the numbers from the first wave, they're much lower in comparison to those among non-indigenous Canadians. It's not really something we look at so we can pat ourselves on the back. Particularly when we look at how severely the second wave is hitting, we're still under the national non-indigenous averages, but what we are seeing is really, really dangerous. The trends are alarming in a number of ways.

We know about the leadership and work that's been done in indigenous communities, most notably on reserves, to shut down and take these things seriously. Indigenous people have faced historic epidemics over time. Tuberculosis is not only present but still fresh in their minds in the communities that have been hit in the recent past. The Inuit still have rates that are 300 times the national average, and they're 60 times higher in first nations communities. There's also pulmonary disease, with very much the same symptoms and the same comorbidities. Overcrowding in housing has been a source of that. These things aren't going away because of the pandemic, and the risk still remains.

The alarming numbers that I see are now in urban areas in Manitoba, where you see higher rates of hospitalizations and higher rates of people in intensive care who are indigenous. That is very alarming to me. It challenges the borders of our effective capacity of execution in our jurisdiction in Indigenous Services Canada, which is to help the urban populations that are hit harder.

Now, there are things that have been done well. Communities have stepped up. We've supported them with funds. We know about COVID as it's developing, but we're not out of the woods yet. There is no magic to keeping COVID out of the community. When people let their guards down, mostly at emotional events like funerals and weddings or at large social gatherings, COVID will hit and hit hard, and it will affect indigenous populations in a disproportionate fashion.

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

Minister, for someone who's not a doctor, you did a very excellent job—far better than I would have managed.

What about the second part, the preparation for those NAN communities?

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

We work with NAN, and Grand Chief Fiddler in particular. We know the challenges that NAN communities face. The one that will probably be raised is the water advisories. If we look at the wellness indexes that we track across Indigenous Services Canada through the wellness survey, we know that those communities face a number of disproportionate inequalities. Not every community is the same, but this is the card we've had to deal with going into this.

I also note the hidden pandemic with respect to mental health. NAN has some really incredible initiatives that deal with that, but if you look at the mortalities that have occurred in the NAN area, more have occurred from suicide than from to COVID.

Therefore, there are challenges that remain, but they start and end with co-operation through, first and foremost, local leadership, but also through regional organizations, and in this case, as you've named, NAN.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Bratina]

You're right on time. Thank you very much.

Good evening, Ms. Bérubé.

You have six minutes. You may go ahead.

[Sylvie Bérubé, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My question is for Minister Miller.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the council of Gespeg has taken the necessary measures to reduce the impact of the crisis on its members. However, like many other communities in similar situations, the community of Gespeg was shut out of government support programs.

That is still the case, so should the government introduce programs that fairly and more effectively address all the needs of communities, to give all indigenous people access to supports?

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Thank you, Ms. Bérubé.

Another layer of the challenge I was describing concerns urban indigenous communities. We provided funding to the Gespeg nation to address many of its needs. Whether a community is covered by an agreement or not, whether a community is located in an urban area or not, our goal is the same. All indigenous communities deserve appropriate high-quality health care, something they have been denied for far too long—well before the pandemic. We are endeavouring to do what is needed to keep COVID-19 out of communities.

[Sylvie Bérubé, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

There is something else you can do to stimulate the economies of indigenous communities, and it really wouldn't cost the government a penny more. All you have to do is ensure indigenous communities and businesses receive their fair share of government contracts.

What are you doing to ensure communities have access to government contracts?