Status of Women Committee on Dec. 14th, 2010

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Therefore, you believe that the Aboriginal Healing Foundation is not needed, even though their past interventions have proven to be very effective. You feel that the Foundation does not need to continue its work.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Cathy McLeod]

A 30-second response, please.

[Aideen Nabigon]

The work of the foundation has been extremely helpful and very useful. They've done a great job in what they intended to do and will continue to do over the next couple of years with their healing centres.

The Government of Canada will continue to ensure that survivors of residential schools are provided with their health supports under the settlement agreement with the resolution health support program.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Cathy McLeod]

We'll now go to Madame Boucher for seven minutes.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Good morning, ladies and gentleman. I would like to welcome you to the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

We have heard many things. We have read many reports. Naturally, we are here to examine the impact on women.

I have two questions for the representatives of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.

First, I would like to know if you could bring us up to date as to the progress made on the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. Also, under the agreement, what are the Government of Canada's obligations with regard to mental health services in particular, as well as emotional support services.

[Aideen Nabigon]

Thank you for the question. There are five main elements of the settlement agreement, the first one being the common experience payments, which started with a $1.9 billion trust fund to pay to students who apply and are eligible for the experience they had at residential schools.

We initially anticipated that there were 80,000 survivors of residential schools still alive. To date we've paid out on more than 76,000 applications. We feel that it's very much on track and that our original assumptions were right with regard to the number of students alive.

As to the independent assessment process, we underestimated the number of people who would apply and the number of hearings. Originally we anticipated that there would be 12,500 applications. There have been closer to 19,000 applications, a total of $848 million paid in compensation, and 7,500 hearings held to date.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as I mentioned in my opening comments, has had its first national event in Winnipeg and will have its second national event in Inuvik next year. We're working closely with them on the fourth component, which is commemoration. This is a $20 million pot of money to provide funding to communities for memorializing and remembering and commemorating what happened in the residential schools.

The fifth and last component is the healing and health supports, which continue to be provided by Health Canada.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

My other question pertains to mental health and emotional support. Under the settlement agreement, what are Canada's obligations with respect to mental health and emotional support services for individuals who experienced the trauma of residential schools?

[Aideen Nabigon]

The obligation under the settlement agreement is that the Government of Canada must provide supports to former students of residential schools for emotional and mental health supports.

I'll let my colleague speak more about that, if you wish.

[Kathy Langlois]

The section of the settlement agreement that speaks to this says:

Canada agrees that it will continue to provide existing mental health and emotional support services and agrees to make those services available to those who are resolving a claim through the Independent Assessment Process or who are eligible to receive compensation under

—there's probably a typo here—

the [Common Experience Payments]. Canada agrees that it will also make those services available to...those participating in truth and reconciliation or commemorative initiatives.

As a result, we have created the Indian residential schools resolution health support program, which provides three types of services: cultural supports from elders and traditional healers based on the previous iteration of this program, for which we received very positive feedback that it was a very valued element to have as much cultural support as possible; then our resolution health support workers, who also are aboriginal in descent and speak aboriginal languages, which is deemed to be very important as well to support people as they go through this process; and lastly, our professional counselling component for those who would choose those services.

Those are the services we offer in addition to transportation.

[Aideen Nabigon]

May I add one thing, Madam Chair? With regard to future care under the independent assessment process, the government also provides $15,000 for psychiatric care and $10,000 for counselling, if this is requested. To date, the average payments for those have been about $8,400.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Thank you very much.

Do I have any time left, Madam Vice-Chair?

There are two minutes.

[Sylvie Boucher, Conservative, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Okay. I will pass my time to....

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I have just one question. Could you please tell us what the aboriginal foundations will be doing over the next three years? What is your plan?

[Aideen Nabigon]

We will continue to implement the Indian residential schools settlement agreement. The deadline for applying for a common experience payment is September 2011, and for the independent assessment process it is September 2012.

We will be commencing with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the commemoration initiative. As I mentioned, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will be holding six more national events around the country, and the Government of Canada will have a very significant presence, as we did at the first one in Winnipeg. We'll continue to be very much involved with them.

We have an obligation to make available to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission 100 years' worth of documents with regard to residential schools so that they can prepare their final report and hold their events.

We'll continue to make sure that we're fulfilling all those obligations under the settlement agreement.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Is there some more time left?

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Cathy McLeod]

There are 20 seconds remaining.

We'll go on to Ms. Mathyssen.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for being here. I appreciate this.

I have a number of little pulled-together questions, because it seems that there are bits and pieces that may be missing.

I want to start with the aboriginal healing centres. As you indicated, it took a long time for the travesty of residential schools to unfold. It started in the late 1800s, and the last school closed in 1996. This is a lot of intergenerational despair. It is profound harm to families, generation after generation after generation, and to communities.

I'm wondering what the thought is behind saying that we can fix it all in 12 years, or that 12 years is enough time to work through these problems. It seems to me that after 12 years we're just getting started.

Do you have any light to shed there?

[Aideen Nabigon]

Certainly with regard to reconciliation, I don't believe there's any thinking that it will be done within the 12 years or the five years that we have to implement the settlement agreement. It's laying the groundwork. It was a $4 billion settlement agreement, negotiated, as I mentioned, by the parties. I can't speak on behalf of those parties as to why they negotiated the amount they did for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, but they did agree on an amount of $125 million and agreed that emotional and mental health supports would continue to be provided.

[Kathy Langlois]

May I add to that, please?

We would also want to recognize that in the programs that Health Canada funds in addition to the Indian residential schools resolution health support program, we also fund over $200 million annually for things such as addictions treatment centres and mental health counselling, and those programs will continue. Those are ongoing programs.

In terms of some of the work we do, in the national native alcohol and drug abuse program there are treatment centres and treatment programs that focus specifically on women and that have therapies to support women, and we know that many of the issues that women are appearing in those centres for are due to the intergenerational impact of residential schools. As well, we have our suicide prevention strategy, which supports youth and focuses on building their resilience, again to move past the impact of residential schools. We have some programs for young women as well, on which we are working with the Native Women's Association of Canada.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

So it is $200 million in perpetuity.

One of the things that disturbs me is that 2012 seems to be the end date to a great deal of this, and it doesn't seem possible that there will be substantive help and change if we have a 2012 end date.

[Kathy Langlois]

This $200 million annually is outside of the settlement agreement. These are programs that have been in place previous to the settlement agreement and that continue beyond the settlement agreement.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Okay. It has nothing to do with 2012; it's quite outside.

One of the things we heard in our travels with regard to violence against aboriginal women was, number one, that there didn't seem to be any broad connection between agencies. For example, the judicial system seemed to be at odds with what Health Canada or INAC was trying to do. We asked about how the judicial system played into the reality of life in communities.

I wonder to what degree you interact, because using the judiciary and mandatory minimums and putting people in jail for violence without programming available all seems to undermine the good work that could happen.

Do you discuss with Justice at all the impact of those decisions, made over in that silo, in relation to what INAC and Health Canada are trying to do on the ground?

[Aideen Nabigon]

We do have a working group called the Community Impacts Working Group, which we set up in the early days of negotiating the settlement agreement. It includes colleagues at the ADM and director general levels from Health Canada and Corrections Canada, and the RCMP has been very active in it. There are also people from the provincial governments there, and aboriginal organizations at the national and regional levels.

We did so because we shared those concerns and were worried about the impacts of the settlement agreement and wanted to support people and make sure that information was being shared and that people were working together on strategies to help people through the process, and afterwards as well. That's been very effective.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Madame Langlois.

[Kathy Langlois]

From Health Canada's perspective, I would share two examples of how we work with Justice and the judicial system.

Under the government's national anti-drug strategy, there are numerous forums where directors general and directors from the Departments of Justice and Public Safety and Health Canada get together on a regular basis to talk about how our programs work together. That's been a very useful process under this strategy.

At the ground level, there is an example from our youth solvent abuse treatment centres. There are very strong links between the police and our individual centres who work very closely at the ground level in terms of the youth who are being admitted into those centres.