Status of Women Committee on June 4th, 2010

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

Sorry, I had to leave quickly there for a second.

I sit on the aboriginal affairs committee, and we had Sharon McIvor come in and testify before us, so I'm quite familiar with the issues there with the McIvor decision. I understand that for B.C. it was 45,000 additional people added to the registry. Then all of a sudden with the amendments and all that, they went outside the scope of the study. We're hoping to get that back on track and study it further at the aboriginal affairs committee.

One thing I do have is in the friendship centres I don't think they get enough credit. I'm going right back to you, Tamara. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but just in visiting the friendship centres in my riding in northern Saskatchewan, I heard one common complaint regarding funding, at the end of the year. Some of the friendship centres that do have money left over have to give that money back to Canadian Heritage or back to the government. Am I wrong? Is that correct?

[Tamara Polchies]

I don't know of any centre that has money left at the end of the year to give back for anything.

With the new amendments to our contract with Heritage Canada and the National Association of Friendship Centres, the way we get our money has changed. There are centres with different agreements that aren't receiving their money all at once. We now have to report back before we're able to get money. If your staff isn't properly trained or you don't have a director who can put that stuff together and report it, you're going to be lacking in that area.

The way the new situation is now, you receive 50% of your funding in April, or whenever the agreements were signed—which this year was two or three weeks ago—and then you receive 45% before Christmas or in the fall, and then with the end report, you receive 5%. There are new requirements for the stats that are due in September, so they can negotiate more funding from the federal government and our friendship centres can have more money.

So it varies, but I don't know of any centre that sends money back, because every penny is used and stretched for anything, and we work on air basically. We do need more money.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Do you have anything else to ask here quickly?

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

No, but in north Saskatchewan there were a couple of friendship centres that had some funds left at the end of the year.

[Tamara Polchies]

Yes, there are some centres in difficulty.

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

They are rare.

[Tamara Polchies]

In Saskatchewan, actually, there are centres that are considered in difficulty, which means either that they're shut down or they didn't provide an audit or meet certain financial requirements in reporting. It's very rare that happens.

Right now there are 125 friendship centres across Canada. Saskatchewan has, I think, two that had to shut down. It's up to the provincial association to decide where the allocations of those centres can be split. If they did have to send money back, it would be up to the Saskatchewan association to decide which centre deserves a part of that money. But it won't go back up to the feds; it won't go back that way.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Rob.

I have a couple of questions. As friendship centres, do you not get multi-year funding any more?

[Tamara Polchies]

No, it's negotiated every year.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

That's hard to deal with.

[Tamara Polchies]

It is.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You can't plan, right?

Multi-year funding makes a lot of sense.

[Tamara Polchies]

To a national association, it does.

[Natalie McBride]

It affects transition houses, too.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

They've been year by year?

[Natalie McBride]

Yes, year by year. We've been fighting with the Department of Indian Affairs to try to get things changed, because the same thing happens. If we have money left at year-end, which sometimes we do—because we don't know when we're getting it, so we have to have enough to pay for that—we have to send it back. So you have to be creative, right?

So the funding portion is our problem too. We never get increases. We never even get the 2% or 2.5% cost of living increase. We never get it. There's no negotiation with Indian Affairs for transition house funding.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

I understand that you only have three units in the second stage in the whole of New Brunswick.

[Natalie McBride]

That's the problem we're having right now. Who controls it? Right now the lease agreements are signed by the client with Skigin Elnoog Housing. So technically, they are not even second stage units, because if a tenant has to be kicked out for some reason, I have no control over that. My second stage units should be for two years for the next steps in healthy living. Right now we're on pins and needles, because there's a complaint against one client for noise. He says there will be no more warnings, that she is going to be kicked out the next time. I have no control over it. She's supposed to be in a second stage unit. So we're working with the province and him to try to settle it, so that Gignoo Transition House will sign the lease with him. Then we will work with the province to put our women into those units. But it's not working. That's all I can say without being political. We only started in January, so we're new.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Do you have any shelters? How many?

[Natalie McBride]

We have one aboriginal transition house, and we have a women's centre for the non-aboriginal homeless, which is open. We also have a men's shelter, and that's it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Either of you can jump in here, but can you tell me what the difference is between the urban, off-reserve aboriginal women who come to live in the cities, and...? I want to know if you have the same phenomenon we have in the west, where enormous numbers of aboriginal people—almost 50%—live in the cities with absolutely nobody claiming jurisdiction for them at all. But the City of Vancouver has to deal with the impact of it all. So there was this in-between situation where people were lost. Then, of course, there are the on-reserve women.

Do you have a difference like that here? Do you have large numbers of urban aboriginal women in New Brunswick? If so, who takes care of them and provides services for them, if anybody?

[Natalie McBride]

As you say, they're kind of lost in the middle. If they come to the transition house because of an abuse issue, we ultimately have to set them up with the province for housing. We try to find housing for them, because there isn't priority. We try to set them up with social income. That is sometimes also hard, because then we have to go back to their first nation. They need to have a letter saying they have not received help from their first nation. Sometimes women can't get that because it's hard and they don't know who to contact, and stuff. So it's kind of like they're in limbo. They don't know where to go. They may go to the friendship centre. They end up being homeless.

[Tamara Polchies]

I deal more on the front lines with emergencies and more drastic situations, where they have nowhere to go and haven't eaten for two days. We're the sort of last stop before sleeping outside, eating at the soup kitchen, or trying to feel comfortable taking a shower. We offer those kinds of things--to make yourself a bowl of soup or lunch or something, or provide clean clothes for your children.

In Fredericton we see people from all the reserves throughout the province or all different rural areas, whether they're from Moncton, Big Cove, Woodstock, or wherever. But again--it's the complaint of our national group--the province doesn't really acknowledge what we do and how we help people, whether they go back to their communities or not. So we help the homeless, those at risk of being homeless, and the youth. We're seeing a lot more transient men now, so we have a big men's program happening.

But we're working on air and trying to provide.... I do 20 different programs and have a limited number of staff. We're burning the candle at both ends. We don't know where to turn now. We need more money. We have a lot of homeless people, and there is no acknowledgement what the friendship centre does for people living in Fredericton. We don't have that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Tanna, do you want to add something to that?

[Tanna Pirie-Wilson]

I come from a rural first nation community. Our nearest transition house is a non-native transition house in Woodstock, which is an hour away from my community. The next one is in Edmundston, which is two hours north. They basically deliver to the francophone community in northern New Brunswick. So there is a big issue with access to a transition house, even for our rural sisters.

Gignoo does awesome work, but we have to travel two hours outside of our community to access the wonderful work they do with those women. I came here to give a rural perspective, because we have less than adequate access to these services. We even have less than adequate knowledge of services available in our communities. Gail does wonderful work in our communities, but a lot of people don't know about the work being done there. So there is an awareness issue, and we as communities are working on it with our people.

But there's a lack of resources and funding. Just by sitting here today we're garnering the support we need to move forward. As Natalie said, we want to walk hand-in-hand. We want to be treated as equals now. A lot of times, when governments hand out money, it's almost like, “Do we have to choose between rural or urban?” We're still given a very little amount to address the issue, but then we still have to pick and choose who we can help because of the limited resources. Tamara does a great job working with air.

Some of those best practices need to be shared. I hope that when the study you're doing comes back we'll be able to share on a national level, if not international, the issues of our rural communities--pitting them against our urban aboriginal sisters.