Madam Chair, thanks very much.
I want to thank my colleague Mr. Desjarlais for bringing this up. I think it is very important. I know we've heard constantly from the government side that this is not the account to hold departments accountable. I disagree greatly with that comment.
I'm going to follow up a bit. I spoke about this previously, about when we discuss the follow-up reports, and there's one I'd like to wrap in. If we cannot wrap it in at this time, I think this amendment is too important to amend, but we do need the minister here on that issue. I will be talking about the other issue, which is the 2018 report entitled “Socio-economic Gaps on First Nation Reserves—Indigenous Services Canada”. This was part of Auditor General Ferguson's “incomprehensible failures” report. People think it was about Phoenix, but it was also about gaps in first nations services.
I'm going to read a couple of items from that report. First, “Indigenous Services Canada overstated First Nations’ secondary school graduation or completion rates by up to 29 percentage points.” That's percentage points. That's not per cent: It was 91%. When I spoke to Mr. Ferguson at committee, he said that for at least a decade, Indigenous Services, which of course was Northern Affairs before, was purposely doctoring graduation rates for indigenous. It was 91%. The report also states that they “found that education results for First Nations students [had] not improved relative to those of other Canadians”. This was “despite commitments the Department made 18 years ago”.
Now, this was 2018, so this goes back to the year 2000 as the year he was referring to. It has been 23 years now. We're now in our eighth Parliament since this report came out. I do not want to be sitting here in another Parliament and I don't want other MPs sitting here looking back at our failure to act on this, just like I don't want another group looking at our failure to act on the clean drinking water issue.
I'll continue with what he stated in the report. Indigenous Services “did not collect relevant data, or adequately use data to improve education programs” and “did not assess the relevant data it collected, for accuracy”. He said that the department “was still unable to report how federal funding for on-reserve education compared with the funding levels for...education systems across Canada”. He said that the department “did not assess relevant data it did collect”, and “it did not know to what extent First Nations students were graduating from high school with diplomas recognized by post-secondary institutions, or with completion certificates”.
Apparently, what Indigenous Services is doing is that if you're indigenous and you drop out on the very last day of grade 11, they're not counting it as a dropout. It's only if you drop out in grade 12.
Again, this is 23 years. I looked it up. We had one progress report in five years. We had 30 pages of recommendations and one progress report that addressed three of these items.
I think it's desperately important that if we are going to be doing our jobs as MPs, or as humans, or even working toward reconciliation, we need to have the minister in, and the department and the deputy ministers, to actually update us and explain that this is fixed once and for all and that the water issue is fixed once and for all.
I wholeheartedly and 100% support Mr. Desjarlais' motion. I hope the rest of the committee will as well so that we don't have MPs one Parliament or two Parliaments from now thinking, “What the hell did they do in public accounts that they didn't actually hold government responsible? What did they do to actually improve people's lives?”
We have the stuff right in front of us about what has to be done. It's not good enough just to do a report, look at it and then wait for some department to maybe do one update over five years. It's 23 years now. It's not acceptable. I think we owe it to Canadians and to the indigenous that we actually get answers, and not from a partisan point. I will pledge right now that when the minister's here, I will not make it at all a partisan issue, because it's both parties. We just want answers on what is done to fix this and what needs to be done to fix this.
Again, we'll be supporting Mr. Desjarlais's motion. I sincerely thank him for bringing it forward.