Thank you very much, Madam Chair and committee members.
It's an honour to be here on Algonquin Nation lands and also to talk about such an important topic. As parliamentarians and as citizens, we have so many challenges before us in this wonderful country, and some of them feel like they can never be solved. They seem to pass from one generation to another, and despite our goodwill across all the political spectrum they seem to remain undone.
I am here to talk about a challenge that we not only can solve, but we must solve, and that we're morally compelled to solve as Canadians.
You've heard the stories by others much more expert than I and closer to the matter about the perils many indigenous women face in this country, but some of those challenges in many of those cases could have been prevented had the women received the right service at the right time when they were children themselves.
I'm going to go through a little bit of the evidence to tell you how compelling it is that the very best investment any government can make is in its children, not only in terms of setting up for a robust society we can all be proud of, but economically, too. Then I'm going to turn to how that relates to violence against indigenous women. Finally, I will put forward to you some solutions that you can take to the table and get done.
Children only have one childhood, as you know, members. We can't spend three or four budget cycles trying to figure it out because we miss the opportunity to do the right thing by them.
We know the statistics. First nations children are more likely to be in child welfare care. They're placed there at 12 times the rate of non-aboriginal children, driven primarily by neglect that's fuelled by poverty, poor housing, and substance abuse, all things we can do something about, members. Those are not unsolvable problems.
Graduation rates are at around 35%, not because children don't want to be educated, not because they're not intelligent, but because they don't have the same opportunity that other Canadian children have. There are health statistics that none of us around this table would feel proud of.
What does this mean for them not only as children but as adults? I'd really recommend that you read, and I've provided the reference to the committee clerk, “Adverse Childhood Experiences Study”, an experience study in the United States. This is a sample of 20,000 Americans. They asked how much does what you experience as a child affect you down the road as you grow up.
One of the things they found is that the more adverse experiences you have—and when I talk about adverse experiences, I'm talking about child maltreatment, family violence in the home, suicide, poverty. The more of those that you have, the higher the likelihood is that as an adult you yourself are going to suffer from mental illness, have challenges with addictions, that you are going to grow up and live your life in poverty. Not only that but it actually predisposes you to very serious diseases like cancer, diabetes, lung disease. All these things could be really prevented and, of course, once they develop, they are expensive for taxpayers to intervene.
The cost of child maltreatment in Canada is expensive. There is a great study by McKenna and Bowlus. What they say is the cost of doing nothing, because somehow we feel that doing something, investing more money costs us, but sometimes we don't sit back and reflect on the cost of doing nothing.... The cost of child maltreatment in Canada in terms of loss of taxation revenue, more social assistance programs and those types of things, as of 2003 when they did the study, was close to $16 billion.
I'm sure if I announced to all of you today that you had $16 billion to invest in other things that Canadians care about, you would all have a number of things come to mind. We can get there by investing early with children. The key things are that we go after those drivers that cut across those disadvantages for first nations kids: poverty, poor housing, and substance misuse. How do we do that?
I'd like to bring to your attention one of the innovative programs coming out of the United States. For far too long, people have said, “Well, poverty, that's too big for us to tackle. That's outside of my department, outside of my ministry, outside of child welfare.” That's naive thinking, quite frankly, because poverty is at the centre of so much disadvantage in Canadian society.
What the American government did—and I think you'll agree with me that $15 million from the American government is a very modest investment—was to decide that they would provide $15 million to child welfare workers, because they noticed in their own data that 30% of American children who go into child welfare care are going there primarily for housing-related issues. That's not dissimilar in Canada, and of course, is even more the case for first nations children.
They said that they were going to give those people housing vouchers so that child welfare workers could work in tandem with housing professionals to pay the first and last months' rent, to pay for heat, or to pay for renovation of a bathroom for a child with a disability.
What ended up happening with that $15-million investment is that they saved 7,500 kids from going into foster care, and they saved the taxpayer $131 million, because placing a child in foster care costs far more than keeping kids safely in their homes. I think you could all agree with me that the best place for kids is in their family homes.
There are investments out there that we can make.
We know that the federal government is directly involved with first nations children. Although we can make the argument that for other children, education and child welfare are a provincial jurisdiction, for first nations children the federal government has a direct role in the provision of child welfare for 163,000 children.
You are custodians. You have the opportunity to influence the well-being of those kids directly.
One of the ways you can do that is, of course, by remedying the long-standing inequalities that exist in child welfare, education, and health. There's no sense denying it. Every report that's done independently and even by government itself confirms those inequalities.
What people have been too slow about is addressing it in a bound.... What do I mean by that? There's been this process in Canada where we've become really comfortable, I guess, with the notion of incremental equality for first nations children. I remember reading a report back in my office that asked if anyone could “hazard a guess as to what year or what century” real progress will be made towards the equality of first nations children in education. When that was written in 1967, I was three years old. The same is true in child welfare.
What do we do about this? We have an opportunity to avail ourselves of the solutions that are before us. These are not problems that have not been costed out. There are evidence-informed solutions that we could be undertaking and funding so that we know the money is actually going to where it needs to go. However, we must have a government and a cross-party commitment that we are not going to save money on...that racial discrimination will not be a fiscal restraint measure.
We are before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal at the moment trying to get equality in first nations child welfare funding. I tell people that the most shocking thing about that case is that it's even necessary at all in a wealthy country such as ours.
I want to draw back a little bit on Jordan's principle. Many of you were there on that day in December 2007 when that passed in the House of Commons unanimously. What Jordan's principle says, simply, is that where government services are available to all other children, first nations children should be able to access them on the same terms. It's the fairness principle that all Canadians, regardless of party, believe in. That's why it got a unanimous vote.
However, it has not been implemented properly. In fact, the Federal Court recently ruled in a case against the federal government about its implementation. It's the case of Beadle and Pictou Landing versus the Attorney General of Canada. It comes out of Nova Scotia. It's the case of a single mother who is caring for a son with high special needs, with cerebral palsy, etc. She did so for 15 years with very little public support, but then she had a double stroke so severe that she cannot care for him physically. All she wants is the level of care respite while she recovers from her stroke and is then able to resume her responsibilities.
There's a Supreme Court of Nova Scotia decision that says children in cases like Jeremy's should receive whatever level of care according to his needs and not some arbitrary value. It's called the Boudreau decision. The aboriginal affairs department decided that no, they weren't going to pay attention to the decision. They were going to provide a fixed value for Jeremy's care, which was assessed by health professionals to be insufficient.
They said to the mother, “Well, you could place the child in child welfare care and we will pay for that, or we can place him in an institution and we'll pay for that.” As you can imagine, as parents yourselves, or grandparents or aunts or uncles, that's not an acceptable option when you love your kid. She filed an action against the federal government suggesting that the failure to implement Jordan's principle was a violation of the charter. The Federal Court agreed that the federal government had erred in its decision-making in denying the service and ordered the federal government to pay for it.
The Department of Aboriginal Affairs, through the Department of Justice, is now appealing that decision at the Federal Court of Appeal. Most difficult of all is they're actually asking Ms. Beadle to pay for the court fees. It's difficult for me to understand how this is in the interest of public policy at all.
In terms of some solutions, we have them before us. Implement Jordan's principle fully. At a minimum with the implementation of Jordan's principle, please reflect on the question of whether recovering legal costs from a single mother, who is caring for a high special needs child and recovering from a stroke, is in the best interest of Canadians, or whether investing those funds and keeping him at home is in the best interest.
