Thank you for those two very important questions.
As you know, Jordan's principle applies to all government services. The Prime Minister or the government and all of parliamentarians today could say that we re-embrace the original intent of Jordan's principle that we voted for in the House of Commons; that we as a federal government will take leadership and insist that it be fully implemented; that we will pick up the tab on services, whether we think they're the provinces' or not, and we're going to keep records, because we want to be accountable to taxpayers; but that those conversations are going to be secondary to the concerns of children.
I can tell you that I know of 33 children right now who are at risk of going into foster care simply because there's a dispute between Manitoba and Canada about who should fund their in-home supports. You could stop those 33 kids from going unnecessarily into child welfare care by fully embracing and implementing Jordan's principle.
It's not an irresponsible use of taxpayers' dollars to step up to the plate on equality. In fact, when I share Jordan's story, I haven't run into one Canadian yet who thinks you should have sorted out an agreement with the province before they implemented it for Jordan. All Canadians agree: children must come first.
That is one thing that I think needs to happen. What's happening in practice is that there's a narrowing of the definition to children with multiple service providers and multiple disabilities, and it's only being implemented by the Government of Canada in what they call willing provinces. They're effectively putting agreements with the province ahead of meeting the needs of children, which is not Jordan's principle; Jordan's principle is asking for leadership from parliamentarians to meet the needs of the child and then figure out the jurisdictional stuff as a secondary concern.
The other thing is about where we go from here. It's an important question.
I'm not all about problems. It's not helpful to just say that this is where we are and that we're stuck here. We know enough about the enhanced funding formula to be able to correct those problems that were well identified by the Auditor General of Canada, and you and your committee could call the department's attention back to the 2008 report and call on the department to remedy those problems that you've heard about here, which are in the Auditor General's report and were just spoken about at the aboriginal affairs committee. That would be a fundamental positive step.
The other thing that could be done is to look at the missing elements in the enhanced formula. What we've found gives a lot of trouble is that there are not adjustments for children with special needs or with high populations. Members, I need not tell you that some of the children in child welfare have extraordinary needs. It can cost up to $60,000 a month to house some of these very special needs children. If you are an aid agency and you have one of those and there's no adjustment for that situation, that's important.
The third thing about where you go from here is—you've probably heard of the McIvor decision and those deliberations—that there has been no thought whatsoever given to the department, at least publicly, about how they're going to adjust the funding for child and family services up, so that we're not losing investments in children as we're making more use of an already very desperately limited pool.
With those things in mind, we could make a substantial gain for children and could think about whether we would like to do processes such as the Touchstones of Hope, which we have going on in northern B.C., and whether it is something we would want to make more publicly available. It's a very low-cost model. In fact, the British Columbia government, prior to our implementing this model, spent $43 million trying to renovate its approach on aboriginal child welfare, and it failed.
This approach has spent 0.0007% of that, and it is completely now run not by the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, but by community members. That's because we have designed it to be sustainable at a grassroots level and to cost hardly anything to run these sessions, because we don't want the money going into the pockets of consultants; we want the investments to go to children themselves. That's another opportunity.