I would say that among the issues we face at a national level—we have a greater awareness of the issue perhaps in the public eye—is the lack of a federal presence to disrupt some of these known pathways. Just as examples, there are the absence of strong protections for the rights of children, of the concept of the best interest of the child being a very significant issue around keeping them safe, keeping them supported, and keeping indigenous children connected to their families and communities, which they have a right to. They have a basic human right, not only to their individual rights, but the right to be connected to their communities. We don't see enough meaningful implementation of mechanisms to see those rights happen.
For girls who experience abuse in the community, often the presence of the child welfare system has meant they've been removed from their community. They've lost contact with their community, or it's been disrupted, and the community hasn't been empowered to address the issue or to actually protect children.
If we look at the federal Indian Act as an example—I appreciate we do have some treaties and self-government agreements—you can regulate beekeeping, we can regulate dogs on reserves, but we actually don't have the powers to deal with fundamental issues around family policy, and we don't have powers to deal with issues to create the degree of safety needed to address this. So the fairly archaic regime that we have in place to govern the world of on-reserve in Canada is completely inadequate. It is something of a 17th century model that continues in Canada and, as a result, creates these enormous gaps, not only in accountability, but gaps in services.
Many of the provincial systems—I'll point to the B.C. Family Law Act as an example.... It was very comprehensively changed as of last March with a strong provision to make sure that indigenous children have a right to be connected to their culture and their language, that the family law could be important and it could be protected, that children could be well supported by caregivers and important people in their lives. But we still have many challenges around how that can become meaningful on a reserve and for indigenous children. The absence of any really strong federal understanding of how this will work on-reserve or interprovincially continues to be a gap. Taking away, if you like, the power, the policy, the ability to create safety, good regimes for safety on reserve in Canada.... You really see the absence of that.
I thank you for the question, but one of the biggest challenges is the archaic machinery at the federal level and then the inability of provinces, which largely have the responsibility, to know how to fill that.