Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank the Auditor General for this important report.
We're experiencing the consequences of systemic racism. It's clear. Decades of irresponsible consecutive governments have led to the Auditor General's comments this morning. How irresponsible can consecutive governments be to lead to the deaths of individuals because they're first nations? That is ultimately the discussion we're having today.
The consequence of not having houses in northern Alberta and living outside in minus 50-degree weather is death. There are the numbers coming out of Alberta. For instance, in just the city of Edmonton, over 3,000 were houseless, an increase that was larger than and paled in comparison to every year prior.
This continuous lack of care, lack of responsibility and lack of trust continues to plague Canadian society. I'm disturbed by the findings of the Auditor General. I want to thank her team for conducting such a report and for the decades-long work of the Auditor General's office to continuously raise the alarm.
I've been here for just over two years, and we've seen a number of reports with a failure of Indigenous Services Canada to provide the kind of quality homes and quality living that Canadians expect. It's just not there.
There is a huge systemic problem, and the Auditor General, in just a few months from now, will come back to this table to speak about another atrocity that continues with this government's endless ignorance of systemic racism within Indigenous Services Canada. What we'll see is perhaps another decade of policy that results in the deaths of my relatives. It's simply unacceptable. We need accountability. We need change.
I need my colleagues to be serious about this, to understand this. It is the most fundamental issue in our society. If we can't help those who we've come into treaty with, what kind of country is Canada? We are not honourable partners. We're failing, and we've been failing for generations. It's just not acceptable.
For Alberta, if we turn our attention to the report, under “Inequitable funding for the communities with the poorest housing conditions”, paragraph 2.34 says:
According to an analysis by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation in 2023, the impact of not updating its formulas resulted in First Nations in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba being significantly underfunded and therefore not receiving their equitable share of funding. For example, in 2022, the Alberta region received about $19 million in funding.
This is pennies. It goes on:
Had the formula been updated to use recent census data, this region would have received about $35 million. The corporation determined that this region had been underfunded by more than $140 million from 2008–09 to 2022–23.
How can a cabinet minister sit around a table and approve a budget without even asking a question about how the condition of their number one partner is supposed to be? What kind of government do we have? It's a government that doesn't care, is benefiting from the systemic racism they've inherited and is complicit in the deaths of my relatives. It's not acceptable.
I know that as soon as I'm done here today in this discussion, this topic will continue to not be discussed. It will continue to be pushed under the rug. Ministers will continue to say that they did a really good job. The opposition will continue to move on their schedules, and indigenous people will be left without a home at the end of all this.
Who benefits and who loses from these continuous decisions that hurt communities? It's a fact that since 2001, we've been using a 2001 census for the formula for indigenous communities. How unfair is that?
Someone has to be held responsible for this. Someone has to apologize. Someone has to take accountability for such gross neglect.
Neglect has resulted in a major catastrophe. The fact is, we couldn't even update a formula to provide equity for my region in Alberta, and in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. One of the simplest things you can do—just look at the formula and make sure it's updated—wasn't done. What gross neglect this is.
In addition to this, we have a lack of knowledge in smaller communities of these programs. How are they expected to provide co-operation to the government when the government is the one sitting on its hands waiting for someone to put their hand up to say that an issue they told the government about in the 1980s, or even stemming further back, is still going on? The mould, the collapsed houses and the lack of clean water are still happening. Why do they have to continually say that every fiscal year...to get to the same fact? Communities are running out of time, running out of resources and running out of hope.