Status of Women Committee on June 4th, 2010

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

I'm Nicole Demers. I'm the member of Parliament for Laval, Quebec. I never knew anything about the aboriginal people except what they told us in school about cowboys and Indians—I'm from an urban setting—until I met Ellen Gabriel. I've been working very closely for the last six years with Ellen, ever since I met her, and she taught me and I am awed by all the work that you do. I am awed by all the generosity that you share. I am awed by everything you are able to do with so little, and I am very humble coming here today to meet. We are here to learn. We don't want to do things for you, but we want you to tell us what we can do with you.

To me it is very important that we change the way things have been done for so long and that we stop being paternalistic toward aboriginal people and start seeing this as sharing together. We're sharing territory. We're sharing the riches of those territories as well, which we should do. We should share in everything.

I am very pleased to be here and very happy to meet you.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Nicole.

Some of you have introduced yourselves only knowing that we wanted to look at the root causes, knowing that we wanted to look at the depth and the extent of the situation and we wanted to look at ways in which you believe we can do things to help or whereby we can try to find ways to alleviate the problem in whatever ways we can, as the federal government.

I'd like to do is ask you, starting with Natalie, what you think about the issues, the problem, and how you think we can help you to resolve it.

[Natalie McBride]

Okay. I haven't made any notes, but I do have five key issues. Sarah may step in and help me if I bungle this.

The first thing I would like to see is affordable housing. The current situation for a woman coming to Transition House, especially when they have to leave their community and come to an urban area--most of the women live in rural communities--is that they have to go back to their same situation, to their same community, because there's no affordable housing for them. The only aboriginal housing unit we have here in Fredericton is Skigin-Elnoog, where there is never enough space.

That leads into why we need second-stage housing here in the area. We are putting our women who want to get out of the situation they're in, who want help, back into a unit where there's no one who's able to work with them and continue to work with them. We find that when we put our women in with non-native second-stage, it doesn't work. They are not fitting in, because people don't understand the life of a first nation woman living on-reserve. We definitely need to look into affordable housing and a second-stage unit for New Brunswick.

This leads me to having our own outreach worker. I'm not sure if you're aware, but the Province of New Brunswick, in the past year and a half, out of their blueprint, has hired outreach workers who are all non-native. They do not work with aboriginal women. I think if we could have a partnership with both the federal and provincial governments and the chiefs and council on where changes need to be made, maybe there could be a cost-share for our own aboriginal outreach worker in each of the 15 first nations here in New Brunswick. They should not rely on Transition House staff to be the ones who are instrumental in helping women cope. I think if we had our own outreach worker who understood aboriginal issues, perhaps part of the health and wellness centre on first nations, or child and family--just someone who was trained and able to help us do the family violence prevention work--that might help us with the teen dating violence that's happening, with the aboriginal women who are going missing. Right now they do not have anybody working, and they rely on us to do it. I think New Brunswick is too rural to have one person in charge of that.

This brings me to partnerships. I think our biggest problem here in New Brunswick is the jurisdiction issue. Everybody always says that's the feds, or that's the province, or that's your chief and council. I think it's time--we're in 2010--to sit down at the table and work at these issues. We shouldn't lay blame on which government officials are responsible. I think we should have partnerships that are woman-centred, because that's where we need the help; we're ultimately helping the woman in aboriginal family violence situations. It shouldn't be the responsibility of the feds or the province or the chiefs and council: it should be woman-centred, it should be focused on her, and we should all sit down and work together, not in silos.

That is why it's important that you look at our Strategic Framework to End Violence against Wabanaki Women in New Brunswick document. Some of the people sitting in this room sit at that committee, which I co-chair with the province. It's the first step in a process to address violence against Wabanaki women in New Brunswick. There are 49 recommendations spanning various areas to address violence against Wabanaki women.

The Advisory Committee on Violence Against Aboriginal Women identified three areas for action--capacity building, prevention and education, and service delivery. Right now at the table we do have the province; we do have community members sitting there from across New Brunswick; we do have chiefs who are for this, who are going to stand behind us; but we're missing the federal government. I think it's time we come together as a unit to help our women, because it is time. There should not be jurisdictional issues. We have to think about the women, because that's why we're all here. And that's why our statistics are so high--because we're all working against one another instead of with one another.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

That was very well done, without a piece of paper in your hand. You obviously have a very logical mind.

Thanks, Natalie.

Sarah.

[Sarah Rose]

Could I just add one thing to what Natalie was saying?

In reference to the second-stage housing, Gignoo did get three units this year for the first time. So we do have three second-stage units, but they are new. There were federal-provincial dollars to build these units, but there was no money attached to the maintenance of these units and to operational funds. So we were not able to do that alone. We had to partner with Skigin-Elnoog Housing Corporation, an off-reserve aboriginal housing organization. They built the units and were given the funds to build the units. They manage the units on the operational side, but we fill the units with our tenants.

Now we're having issues because we don't specialize in that tenant-landlord relationship. We're trying to get the women into the second-stage housing and are preparing them for the next steps, but we don't have workers for that. So we're having some issues on that side.

In relation to affordable housing, we're relying on Skigin-Elnoog Housing, but they have no new units and don't have money for new units. The majority of their units were purchased in the seventies, so they're aging. Instead of repairing them, they're removing them from the program—but no new units are going in.

The affordable housing is limited. We can ask for it, but we're sent here. We're a priority for the Skigin-Elnoog Housing, but we're not priority for the provincial affordable housing.

So there's that point in relation to our housing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

I will stop there and ask if anyone wants to interact with questions and suggestions, before we go to Gail and Tamara and Tanna.

Is there anything that was said that anyone wants to clarify or follow up on?

Rob.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Tamara, you were mentioning the national friendship centres. I'm curious from a regional standpoint about the working relationship that might transpire between the regional and the federal friendship centres, and how the funding mechanism works.

I've always heard about it, but I just don't quite understand it. I think a couple of months ago there was a funding problem from the national friendship centres to the regional ones. I'm curious how that affected you. Did your organization or friendship centre have to go through a layoff process?

[Tamara Polchies]

The National Association of Friendship Centres is funded through Heritage Canada's aboriginal friendship centre program. That trickles down to the national association. The national association has provincial and territorial associations across Canada.

New Brunswick does not have a provincial or a territorial association. The Fredericton Native Friendship Centre is the only one in the province. So when you go east, you go to Halifax, but in St. John's and Happy Valley, they also don't have provincial or territorial associations. So that has blocked us even longer from receiving our funding.

When they were in negotiations to try to get more funding and we wanted to upgrade our funding allocations—which have not been upgraded since 1996, meaning that I've had the same funding at my centre for that long—we had to cut back and tie up any strings we could and change anything we could within the centre to get our operating costs lower when we were waiting for that funding. We did not have to lay off anybody, but we did have to cut back on what we were offering for about three months. This was because there were negotiations, and agreements were not signed and amendments were going back and forth. So it just tied us up really, really badly.

We're very grateful and lucky to have a positive working relationship with our bank, so they were able to extend us a bit to help us to at least leave our doors open.

[Rob Clarke, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Okay, thanks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

Nicole, you wanted time.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Natalie, you were talking about a healing toolkit. Would it be possible for you to forward one to us so that we could learn about it and see what it is?

[Natalie McBride]

Sure. I have it in both official languages, too. Actually, I could probably get someone to bring it down, because my office is just up on Hanwell Road. So I'll bring some down.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Gail, you were talking about the child welfare act. I know in Quebec we've had problems lately. They are taking the children outside of the community, and sometimes it's very far from the community, so the mother cannot keep contact with the child. Are there any such problems here?

[Gail Nicholas]

Yes, definitely. There are the same problems here also. I think community members who are in those child welfare positions try as much as they can to have the families on reserve. But there don't seem to be any programs that invite native people to become foster parents. I'd like to see that as a measure, to try to do some training in that area.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Since that's provincial jurisdiction, it must be very difficult to do something about it. As you said, there's always this fight between federal and provincial jurisdictions.

[Gail Nicholas]

It's frustrating for me to see that. In the United States, it's a federal law that you have to follow the Indian Child Welfare Act in the placements. We don't have that in Canada.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Would it be something that should be looked at?

[Gail Nicholas]

Yes. As I said, we did pass the resolution, which I have a copy of, with NWAC, the national Native Women's Association, to put forth that resolution. We did that last September, and they are working on the study on that. One of the things that came out of that study was that right now there are more native American children in foster care than there ever were with residential school survivors. So they are still out of our communities. Our children are still out of our communities.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Thank you so much.

Being an elder, and being a teacher of traditional culture as well, it must be very difficult to see that. What can empower a child is knowing about his culture, his ancestors. You can't do it if you're outside of the community. You can't give them that.

Tamara, you said something that really hurt. You said we're wasting time, money, and spirit by doing all those reunions. I think you're right, but we have to do it.

What do you propose to do? What works best, and what do you need to do it?

[Tamara Polchies]

Money, programs. Especially in New Brunswick, we have an issue with funding for off reserve, on reserve...trying to access workers. Now these programs are trying to work with a union...or with me, for our organization to work with the communities. Our organization gets the people who leave the reserves, who come to the city to work, and then all of a sudden we're not acknowledged for helping the off-reserve people. That's why we're trying to find more dollars, to have more people to help the women and children who need help right now.

I know it is hurtful to say we are hurting spirits. That's exactly what we're doing. We're allowing abusers to keep abusing.

Of course we need research. The way everything goes, we have enough information now to know what needs to be done. We're reinventing the wheel every time there's another paper, more research, or another book done. We have shelves filled with the definitions of what violence is and what needs to be done. Now we need to move forward to take those recommendations, those studies, and to actually put government money toward the people who are going to make a difference.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

To implement those recommendations?

[Tamara Polchies]

Yes. I think we've worked almost six years on getting our framework finished for our province. With the work we've put into that and the women we brought into our committee...the government changes when there are new elections and we have to start all over again to go through our training with new people. Then we have more standing committees. Then we have more lobbying.

There's only so much we can do before we end up getting so frustrated. We keep going in circles again. Then we're allowing the circle of violence to keep going. We're not stopping to put money toward programs and toward workers to help the children.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Have you done any work on how much money would be needed to do what has to be done?

[Tamara Polchies]

I think Natalie can help you more with that question. We haven't said we need $8 million to complete our framework. We are trying to figure out what needs to be done. I say $8 million, and it would be nice if they gave us $8 million. It probably won't happen. We are looking forward. We don't have an exact amount.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

It's an issue, and not knowing what something costs is very frustrating. Having a framework of knowing what is expected I think is good. It is easier to defend money when you know where it's going. If we don't know, someone will know best.