Thank you, Madam.
I am sorry but I must speak English.
I want to quickly note that fetal alcohol syndrome is a disability. It's a rightful disability that we need not criminalize. I just want to say that.
You know that the reality with child welfare, as everybody knows, is that the vast majority of the children being apprehended are our children. The criterion now for apprehending children seems to be poverty, right? So we have women operating within really abject poverty being told, “You're not a good mother, so we will apprehend your children.” Going back to what Kim was saying, that's after the fact. Again, we're blaming the mother and blaming the parents, because they live within a context of poverty that is a historical context as well.
We need to invest and to engage with government in communities. We need to invest in families. When you look at some of the social assistance dollars that people live on.... I know that on one reserve in Manitoba, a family gets $174 per month for social assistance. You can almost see that their children are going to be apprehended in some capacity at some point, because they don't have the means to provide for them, yet this family is also dealing with all of these intergenerational traumas that we heard today and that we all operate within.
We have to invest those dollars not only in social assistance but also in education. We know there are communities in Canada that don't even have schools for kids to go to, so what will happen? We know that invariably a lot of children will get into trouble, their families will get into trouble, and they'll get apprehended. It's just a vicious cycle.
A lot of communities across the country say that the current social service and child welfare system is just a continuation of the residential school. We have to be courageous and invest those dollars in education and health and nutrition and all of those pieces.