Public Accounts Committee on Oct. 19th, 2011

[Ronnie Campbell]

Yes, Mr. Chairman. If I can go back to my analogy about how long is a piece of string, the piece of string is getting longer, and that's a good thing. But how long it should be is the question.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Fair enough.

There are incremental government resources that have been provided to this since the 2008 findings, but your review still has conducted sort of a difficulty, perhaps, in understanding how your.... My notes here say you haven't really defined the comparability or conducted a review to ensure that services available on reserve are reasonably comparable to off the reserve. A child is a child is a child, is my point. So thank you for allowing me to verify my understanding.

My question is to Mr. Wernick. First of all, we've heard about the partnership piece. Who are your partners? How are you going forward on this? The key piece I'm trying to understand is how you are addressing this gap for the children who happen to reside on reserves, the ones that are provincially funded.

[Michael Wernick]

Thank you for the question. I know this has been of great interest to this committee and others, and I certainly welcome the engagement.

The real measure I think we're all struggling to get is, are we protecting vulnerable children from risk and harm? It's not really easy to find a satisfactory measure of that. Chasing how much we're spending isn't necessarily a good indicator. If you're actually spending more on child protection, that means things are getting worse. And we doubled the spending on the child and family services program over a period of time.

What I think we identified, with the help of the work from the Auditor General, was that we had the incentives all wrong. You actually got more money as an agency if you took kids out of care. And we didn't really have a funding formula that provided a lot of resources for prevention. In many cases, early intervention and prevention with the families in the communities means that the kids can be protected from harm and risk without having to be taken out of the home and put into care. So children in care is sort of a flawed measure as well for what we're trying to get at.

We have fixed the funding formula. We make sure resources are available for prevention services. And we've put in place these kinds of tripartite agreements, because these are creatures of the provincial child protection statutes. In six of the provinces, I think it is, we have $100 million or more in funding over several budgets. They go at the pace at which we can conclude agreements with the provinces--I can certainly provide the list--but we're now covering about 68% of first nations kids with this prevention approach.

We've had a bit of back and forth with the Auditor General about culturally appropriate services, which we discussed earlier. For me, the most important policy part of this is, are we investing in prevention? The more we can invest in prevention, the less you have to invest in remediation.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Can I have a follow-up?

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

Be really quick.

[Joyce Bateman, Conservative, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

My colleague, Earl Dreeshen, raised the question on education that, to me, is linked to success in this area. His point is well taken, that you could risk creating bureaucracy instead of supporting teachers in the classroom. How are you addressing that issue?

[Michael Wernick]

Because we flow money out through hundreds and hundreds of funding agreements to individual first nations, it's difficult to impose a systematic solution across the board. We work with each community or each school, or sometimes with tribal councils in geographic districts.

Two main things have happened over the last little while. One is investments in a school success program, which follows the recipe most provinces have followed of really working hard on student assessment, teacher assessment, performance of the schools, giving those kinds of tools to first nations educators. And the other is the partnerships program, which allows us to fund very practical local solutions, if a local school board is willing to help with teacher training, that sort of thing. Those have been the investments that the government has made over the last little while, as well as some investment in school construction so that people have clean, safe facilities to go to.

The missing piece, at this point--and I'll wait to see what the panel reports--is going to be having it all pulled together in some kind of legislative and governance structure so that we can move forward into the future.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

Thanks very much.

Mr. Byrne, you have the floor.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

We started this discussion talking about the frustration over the lack of progress, and the lack of positive progress, in terms of the indicators—the criterion of the standard of living index—to show that life for first nations on reserve is getting better.

Mr. Wernick, as a key principle originally in the Kelowna accord—I can't help but ask you, as someone who knows this issue from the draft of the Kelowna accord and who has participated very directly and very positively in trying to find solutions to this day—if the Kelowna accord were in place today.... You were on both sides of this case, and I'm not trying to put you in a difficult situation, but people want to know. We've had instances where premiers, where first ministers as early as just a year ago, were still suggesting the Kelowna accord would provide a positive road map for this circumstance. The Assembly of First Nations and others continually suggest that if the road map were provided by the Kelowna accord, we would be better off.

I'm not going to put you in too difficult a spot, but I have to ask you, is much of the progress made today in tripartite agreements and other things...? Has a kernel of that come from some of the successes of a tripartite agreement signed in 2005, called the Kelowna accord, which at least can provide us with a good example of a road map on other things and other progress?

[Michael Wernick]

I think there are other pieces of the progress made that are outside the architecture of the Kelowna accord we've been discussing, sort of provincial-like services on reserve. One, I would say, would be the promotion of economies in aboriginal communities and economic participation, and the other would be the settling of land claims and outstanding grievances from the past. Kelowna really didn't have anything to say about those. It wasn't designed to.

So I think in many cases, the conclusion of litigation and the settlement of land claims clears the baggage of history. It often provides resources to first nations communities, and it makes investment in natural resource projects, transportation projects and so on more possible, because who has rights to what and what is going to be done with the section 35 rights in the area have been dealt with.

I think one of the real accomplishments of the last little while has been the negotiation and settlement of litigation and claim settlements. We hope to have even more progress over the next little while. That's not something I can commit easily to, because it depends on a give and take at a bargaining table with particular communities.

The real recipe, I think, for a lot of further progress ultimately is going to be economic activity. You cannot get past a certain point improving social conditions in communities where there's no economy. There have to be jobs, there has to be opportunity. So I think work on education and child protection provides a basis for healthy teenagers to come out of the communities, but we have to work on the other tools to get them into the labour market and give them the chance to get jobs and employment.

We've been lucky in Canada—there has been a lot of growth in the resource sectors in all parts of the country, which I know you know very well. That gives me some ground for optimism: if we're going to have several hundred billion dollars of resource, transportation, and infrastructure projects over the next 10 years, we have a pool of young aboriginal people living in those areas. If we put those two together, we're going to see some interesting results over the next little while.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Well, I hope for the aboriginal leaders across the country hearing your words and your position...that you're bringing them more hope, not less, in their desire that the Kelowna accord be resurrected.

I want to go to Mr. Campbell. You have a preoccupation—and I think it's a positive preoccupation—with a legislative framework. What benefits would a legislative framework provide first nations? Would it actually create a capacity that if the Government of Canada were not fulfilling its fiduciary responsibilities, first nations would have a capacity now to sue for provision of those services within the statutory framework? Is that a positive thing or a negative thing, if that indeed is the case?

[Ronnie Campbell]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

No, I wouldn't characterize it as a preoccupation with the legislative base. I think my office feels very strongly that the suite of issues that we've talked about—all four of them—are fundamentally important, need to be addressed, and need to work together. So within that context, the legislative base would provide a degree of clarity to the people who are receiving the services. They would also provide a degree of guidance to the bureaucrats who are designing the programs, and it would clarify their roles and responsibilities.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Does it afford additional protections in terms of a legal mechanism to challenge if there are services not being provided or if it's felt that services are not being provided? Does it provide a legal mechanism to impose that responsibility, that act of duty, on the federal government, which is non-existent now?

[Ronnie Campbell]

Mr. Chairman, not being a lawyer I would hesitate to go too far down that road, but it certainly would provide clarity to citizens as to what the government is committed to providing to them, and if they felt they weren't getting that, they could avail themselves of whatever tools they felt were appropriate.

[Gerry Byrne, Liberal, Humber—St. Barbe—Baie Verte, NL]

Thank you very much. I think that's well over time.

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

We'll move on.

Mr. Hayes, you have the floor, sir.

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

One of the first things I did as a new member of Parliament was to meet with Chief Sayers and his council at Garden River First Nation, outside of Sault Ste. Marie. I spent a couple of hours listening to their concerns in terms of education, economic diversification, development and infrastructure, fishing rights, treaty rights, housing, comprehensive land agreements. I said to myself at that time, my goodness gracious, what can I do as an individual to correct any of that? I'm getting a sense that there actually is a lot I can do collectively. I think that's what this discussion is about today, what we can do collectively. I'm pleased to see that there is much being done, but much more to go.

One of the things we talked about was land agreements. I'm wondering, Mr. Wernick, if you can give me some sense of what is being done to improve the coordination of comprehensive land claims implementation.

[Michael Wernick]

Thank you for the question.

It's a very interesting question because I think we were rightly criticized as a government and as the public service for not paying enough attention to implementation once the ceremony announcing the treaty had finished and the lights were off and the TV cameras were gone. All you've done, then, is you've created a new government-to-government relationship with a new first nations entity and their ongoing relationships with that part of the world. The crown is still the crown, and it's not like we'll turn out the lights at INAC, as some people used to say, because somebody has to be the Government of Canada in that new relationship.

We've taken that advice and some advice from a Senate committee fairly seriously, so we have an implementation group. We have clearly developed a framework around implementation. We have guidelines and training tools for people who work in other federal departments, because it could touch on people who work in airports or training programs and other parts of the federal department. It's where our department has to herd the cats within the federal system and make sure they're aware of their obligations.

It's a large part of what my department does. It's a small part of what Transport Canada does, and so on. So we have to keep chasing, and I accept that responsibility. I've written to colleagues many times. I've pointed out specific issues. We've trained their officials. We've caught up on the reporting to Parliament, which was lagging until a few years ago. We worked closely with each of the governments or institutions that were created by the land claims agreements, the self-government agreements. We have an informatic system to keep track of all of the obligations.

One of the things that we were not very good at was this. You move on to the next treaty, the next treaty, and the next treaty, and you forget what you committed to in the previous one. We have a systematic database of that. I know it all sounds very bureaucratic, but it's actually very helpful, because even as people come and go and change jobs, they can plug in the software and they can see what the obligations are or the status. Some things are done, some things are under progress, and so on. It helps provide that accountability, which I think is the theme of a lot of our discussion today.

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Is this something new that occurred after the 2010 report, or was this in place prior to that?

[Michael Wernick]

We had started to give this a lot more attention I think based on some specific reports that the office had done around the Inuvialuit agreement, but also based on some advice we got from the Senate committee on Aboriginal peoples and certainly on representations we had from the Land Claims Agreements Coalition. It was a work in progress, but I will certainly concede that the audits always give you a bit of a reminder that that's another thing you should be paying attention to.

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

You mentioned some of the methodologies you have in place to ensure that departments understand and fulfill their obligations under these agreements. Can you elaborate on that a bit more in terms of an internal audit function? I want to make sure that all departments really do understand this, because I think it's very, very significant.

[Michael Wernick]

An example might be a commitment to a land transfer and the land was held by one of the other federal departments. That's one we talked about in the Inuvialuit context. We sometimes have to chase the other department to finish the transaction and get the land into the hands of the group. In this case it would have been Inuvialuit.

In other cases there's an ongoing commitment. Most of them have a commitment involving government procurement and purchasing. If there's going to be government purchasing in the area, businesses in the land claim area should get a shot at contracting opportunities.

That tended to be sort of hit and miss. It was overlooked in some processes. I think much more systematically, the people who work in procurement shops and departments are reminded that before they push the button on a request for proposals, they had better check what their land claims obligations are. I'm not going to claim we're perfect, but I do think that everything is now moving in the right direction, and the clarification that it's my job to chase the other departments has been quite helpful.

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

How is my time, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, NDP, David Christopherson]

You're well over. It was good questioning.

Mr. Caron, you're up again, sir.

[Guy Caron, NDP, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you very much.