Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on March 22nd, 2023

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Mr. DeGagné and Ms. Brant, I understand that it is important for these young students to have role models. That is actually what we heard from the previous panel.

Mr. DeGagné, you just raised something very interesting about language. In fact, the committee's previous study, which was proposed by my Bloc Québécois colleague from Manicouagan, dealt with indigenous languages and ways to revitalize them, promote them and ensure their sustainability. Witnesses mentioned the importance of indigenous languages in the context of learning and teaching, but especially in the transmission of knowledge and traditions. We already heard that today from the first panel, as well.

Can you tell us a little more about that in the remaining minute? Would you say it's a factor in academic success and motivation?

Ms. Brant, you even mentioned healing circles.

[Suzanne Brant]

Yes, for sure.

For us, all of our curriculum has indigenous learning outcomes, so they're working toward understanding who we are from an indigenous perspective but also an indigenous world view. There are some really critical points in the language that drive that understanding. Our languages are verb-based, so they create pictures. It's beautiful to understand in the language your positions. You understand what your relationship is with someone you're speaking to or with the rest of creation.

It's important that we see that reflected in everything that we do within our institutes for success. Our students need to see themselves. They need to have their language, and they need to be working toward those goals and things that make sense to them and to us as indigenous people.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you, Madam Larouche.

We'll go to Ms. Idlout for six minutes.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

[Member spoke in Inuktitut, interpreted as follows:]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Let me begin with how, as indigenous people, we value our culture very much. I think the federal government should also value our culture.

The federal government funded residential schools and federal day schools. Some of those who went to residential schools were sent away from their families so that their culture and language would be wiped out. There was a lot of money spent on residential schools, where they hired teachers. There were children shipped out to these residential schools, and that cost a bundle of money.

Now, when reconciliation is being talked about, it seems like all that money that was spent on residential schools has just disappeared or dissipated somewhere. There's hardly any funding for any schools, educators or education now. We hear that schools that are operated by indigenous teachers and indigenous peoples have very little funding.

We have heard that in Nunavut, for 46 years—from 1951 to 1997—there were 13 schools. There were residential schools where residential school students were getting beaten. Their languages, their culture and their identity were beaten out of them.

I want to ask if you are in agreement with me that the federal government should provide more funding to revitalize the culture, the language and the identity of indigenous peoples, so that we can keep our culture and language alive. If the government can spend astronomical amounts of money back then, why can't they give more funding these days?

I would like to hear your answers, if possible. I'm pretty sure time is tight, but I wanted to ask this question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

You have about one minute apiece.

You still have three minutes.

[Melanie Bennett]

I really appreciate that question. I would very much agree.

In Yukon, for what I do on a daily basis with the Yukon First Nation Education Directorate and the chiefs committee on education in our work, I firmly believe that we would be flourishing and our children would be flourishing if we had our own schools. Unfortunately, we are one of the regions that has not had that opportunity.

When first nations control first nations education.... One of my colleagues alluded to when the 1972 Indian control of Indian education policy came. Moving forward with that, and even the current federal government's 10 principles, are things that I think are benchmarks that could help to move exactly that. I think things would be significantly different. We wouldn't see not one, not two, but four really bad Auditor General reports on Yukon education that have clearly stated that things are not moving for indigenous students.

Things have started to move since the chiefs put in place an indigenous organization that could be the conduit to help everyone understand what our way is and how we could implement that in a learning environment. The learning environment may not necessarily be in a building. It may be on the land, but it's really important that we have one that is ours.

I would wholeheartedly support funding being put toward infrastructure especially, so that we could have a first nations school in Yukon.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

There are about 45 seconds left.

[Michael DeGagné]

Previously I worked with an organization called the Aboriginal Healing Foundation for 15 years, starting in 1998. In the early going, we were struggling to sharpen our mandate and to find out what survivors of residential schools really wanted.

We conducted a series of consultations—one-day events—across the country. There were 36 of them across the north and from coast to coast. In those 36 consultations, without exception, the number one loss that was identified and the number one need was the rejuvenation of language. That was number one. Everybody talked about it. We thought that was amazing. We thought it was going to be something health-related or to do with mental health or something like that. Everybody wanted language first.

I think you're right. I think that in some ways cultural rejuvenation is up to us. We define our culture and it's up to us to bring it back, but I think the catalyst for that is the rejuvenation of language. That's where we need support, and I think it has to be very broad-based.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you very much, Ms. Idlout.

We do have time for a condensed second round, so we'll go to Mr. Zimmer for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to ask a question of Melanie Bennett in Yukon.

I appreciate all the witnesses appearing today and congrats to our new chair as well.

Melanie, you referred to this earlier. I'm just going to quote a Yukon News article titled “Long-standing gaps in student outcomes persist as Yukon government works to close them”. It starts off like this:

The territorial government is taking steps that it hopes will lead to better student outcomes nearly three years after an auditor general's report slammed the Department of Education for falling short of understanding and addressing long-standing gaps.

It goes on to say:

According to the March 9 news release, the department created a performance and analytics unit in 2018 to better manage and analyze student performance data, and a joint data working group was created in 2020 with the chiefs committee on education to improve data-sharing with Yukon First Nations about student outcomes.

Lastly, it says:

As for the breakdown by self-identification status, the graduation rate among Yukon First Nation students was 66 per cent or 65 out of 98 potential graduates.

The graduation rate was even lower for “other Indigenous” students, at 63 per cent or 22 out of 35 graduates.

I bring that up because I appreciate why you are doing what you're doing in your organization. I really appreciate it, as a former teacher myself. I really have a heart for students and kids and want to see them get through high school to achieve greater success in life.

I wanted to give you the opportunity. In your earlier testimony, you said you'd like to elaborate. I want you to elaborate on what's next.

We know why you're here. You're here to help things get better in Yukon. Please elaborate.

[Melanie Bennett]

First I'll elaborate on that data, because people hear 66% and they say, that's not bad—you're better than 50%. It's not 66% as a graduation rate. It's 66% of the 30% of students who made it to grade 12. The data working group that's been put in place, for three years, has been working very hard to try to have that accountability to the Yukon Education. It is very difficult to get any data, so YFNED being in place is now working very hard to develop our own data. We could have the relationship of saying, let's just ATIP it and figure it all out from there, but that's not being done—as our elders teach us—in a good way.

Ultimately, our goal is student success. It's determining how that will be. I really appreciated some other folks who spoke of.... It seems to be there's this benchmark of getting them to university, but that isn't necessarily always the path for all of our indigenous students. We've developed a model that will provide them success on their chosen path, because for us, a chosen path is to come home and be a community member. That could be a language speaker. That could be a doctor. That could also be a ditch digger. They are helping in their community. That's what we want: our people who are going to come back to the communities.

I bet you every one of us, in the last storm, really appreciated the person who was able to drive the snowplow. Those are the things we have to build in our children, the strength to do that, and that's what we're trying to do.

I appreciate that you brought up data because that is an important thing. It will give us the benchmarks and the ideas, and will find the gaps, because one of those things that we are seeing is that there are some successes. We implemented programming this year, and for the first time we have an improvement in math because of the indigenous-led math camps that we've been operating with targeted interventions to the students.

Now, if I could get Yukon Education to implement that same thing, instead of me and the organization doing a one-off of that, I think we would see greater achievement outcomes for our students. That's what we mean by indigenous-led. We need to listen to and hear from our people what the gaps are in the things we need for our children and how we can fit them in a ministry-operated system, in a first nations school board, or in a first nations school that's operated by an individual first nation.

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

My time is up, Melanie, but I just applaud your efforts and wish you all the best of success. We look forward to hearing that positive data in a few years, when you have it. Thank you.

[Melanie Bennett]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you very much, Mr. Zimmer.

We'll now proceed to Mr. Badawey for five minutes.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'll preface my comments by echoing Mr. Zimmer's comments with respect to applauding the efforts of all of you. Great work.

I want to concentrate and focus in on the strengthening of capacity. As many of you know, from our meetings in the past and when I visited many communities throughout the past year, ISC in particular, the department that I represent, is moving forward with, for example, water legislation and the replacement of the Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act. We're looking at indigenous health. We're looking at capacity with respect to long-term investments to support closing the infrastructure gap. The list goes on. There's the business navigator program that will assist indigenous businesses in finding supports across the federal family, with all departments, not just ISC but Infrastructure, Health, and the list goes on.

I do want to concentrate on Ms. Brant because I guess I have a bit of a bias because we've done some work together in the past. If I have time, I will also be going to Mr. DeGagné and others.

Ms. Brant, can you speak about some of the things you're looking at right now with respect to the people you represent, in particular, as it relates to, first, your partnership with both colleges and universities, but also, getting a bit more granular, how you are strengthening the capacity to allow it to be very personal in terms of the next generation of those who are going to be working in our indigenous communities? Can you speak about how that would then allow more culture-based programming and culture-based responses to the needs with respect to what I already mentioned and, lastly, to ensure that sustainability exists for many generations in the future, especially as it relates to managing infrastructure, asset management and the list goes on?

Can you speak a bit more about, first, what you're doing, as you mentioned earlier—you can get a bit more into the weeds on that—and, second, what some of those recommendations are that you may have to enhance and strengthen those needs?

[Suzanne Brant]

That's exactly what we're doing: building capacity. The Indigenous Institutes Act passed in Ontario now gives us the right to graduate from certificates all the way to graduate degrees. That's in our own knowledge, while also meeting the requirements of regulatory bodies and things.

For example, the indigenous bachelor's of social work program builds indigenous social workers who can then go back into the communities and address issues in ways that are very culturally appropriate. At FNTI, we have our own capacity to develop programs and support students and graduate students. As I mentioned, the average age of our students is 36 years old this year. They've already tried the mainstream system, or they didn't succeed in high school. We have all the systems in place to bring them in, train them and develop that capacity.

We're also a research institute. We're developing the capacity to bring our needs back to the communities and then figure out solutions to those issues.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. DeGagné, do you want to comment on that?

[Michael DeGagné]

On strengthening our capacity, I'd have to speak from the perspective of Indspire. One thing I've noticed is that.... As I said before, we get funding from the federal and provincial governments, but we have Canadian donors and corporations that step up and match those funds. That's what provides us with a pool to fund indigenous students. Strengthening Indspire's capacity with that sort of fund-matching from the federal government would....

We have a long list of donors interested in that sort of thing, from people who give us $100 at a time to those who give us $1 million at a time. I'm absolutely astonished at how many Canadians are interested in providing support to indigenous people, and to indigenous students specifically. They do so not because they see indigenous people as having some sort of deficit that has to be fixed but to support the excellence of our students—the ones who want to go on to graduate or professional studies. That group among our students needs to be acknowledged for their excellence.

I think that's where the real capacity strengthening will occur.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you, Mr. Badawey. That concludes your time.

Ms. Larouche, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I see that this is a committee where we have fun among colleagues. That's what I feel, and that's good, because we need to work in a non-partisan way.

I want to thank the three witnesses again for their participation in this study.

Mr. DeGagné, you unfortunately did not have an opportunity to respond to my earlier question about language, on the topic of which Ms. Brant made a fine case. You managed to touch on it briefly in response to a question from one of my colleagues about language and its importance in keeping indigenous students motivated and encouraging their perseverance. You noted that the importance of language was prioritized in your consultations.

Do you have anything to add on that topic?

[Michael DeGagné]

This is an excellent question because I don't think we considered language as the doorway to support for education. We see it as something that's maybe more tied to culture, but language seems to be a critical piece of all of this.

Six years ago, in 2016-17, I was sitting on a departmental audit committee for Indian and Northern Affairs. We got a copy of the department's annual results report. In there was a sentence that I was just astounded by. It said that, in spite of 30 years of sustained funding to indigenous communities across the country, we have not been able to improve the community well-being index of the Government of Canada vis-à-vis the difference between indigenous people and non-indigenous people.

The community well-being index gap between indigenous people and non-indigenous people had not closed one bit after 30 years of funding from Indian and Northern Affairs. That's billions of dollars of investment. I thought it was a very honest admission that, in spite of all of our efforts, a lot of things have not improved—health, education, etc.

I would suggest we do something different. I think using language as a portal to educational improvement might be that difference. It might be something interesting that this committee can entertain in its report. It may be that you have to be very bold and leave some space for something that you haven't thought of before, or that's been thought of but hasn't been tried before.

If the report results in simply identifying weaknesses but doesn't propose anything that's new or different that's never been tried before, I think we'll have lost a tremendous opportunity.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

Thank you, Ms. Larouche.

We'll go to Ms. Idlout for two and a half minutes.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

[Member spoke in Inuktitut, interpreted as follows:]

I want to ask Suzanne Brant.

I posed a question to you earlier. I would like to hear your answer because you are doing very important work and you are always lacking funding too. I think we should have more investments.

I wanted to ask if the funding you get from the federal government is adequate to invest in the programs that are crucial to our cultures and languages.

[Suzanne Brant]

We get very little funding from the federal government. Most of our support is coming from the provincial government at this time.

It would be really beneficial for the federal government to invest in the programs. We have programs we were already developing in midwifery, which is really important from an indigenous—

[The Chair, Liberal, Jenica Atwin]

I'm sorry to interrupt, Ms. Brant.

Ms. Bennett, could you mute your microphone?

Thank you.