Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise in the House today to support Motion No. 296. It is unconscionable that we would rank 78th on the United Nations Human Development Index in terms of first nations children.
People call this Jordan's principle. There are some other principles that go along with this. How about principles that say patience not paper? How about some principles about kids first, not bureaucracy first?
When we talk about the treatment of children, in this case first nations children, whatever the agency of first contact is, it provides the service. I do not care which one it is. We can figure out later who pays the bill. It is not fair for a young child to have to lay in a hospital bed waiting for something which adults are bickering about, or they cannot decide on, or they are shuffling papers or they are arguing over jurisdictional issues. There is nothing moral about that.
I want to talk a bit about some experiences I have had in this area. As the minister of health, the minister of education and the minister of children and families in British Columbia, I have heard many heart-rending stories. However, I will go back some time before that.
I am a pediatric nurse and I worked at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. There were young toddlers, two, three, four, five year olds, on the surgical floor. Many aboriginal children came to that hospital. In those days it was almost the only hospital with intensive pediatric experience. Children from northern Ontario and northern Manitoba would come to the hospital and they would be there for extensive lengths of time.
Let me talk about a child I will call Michael, although Michael is really a composite of a number of children that I knew. Michael was from northern Ontario and he came to the hospital have surgery. His surgery was very complicated. He needed rehabilitation after the surgery and then other surgeries later. It involved orthopedics. By the time I met him, he had been there for about 22 months.
It was Christmastime. Anybody who knows Toronto, knows the Santa Claus Parade used to go down University Avenue. The windows of the Hospital for Sick Children face University Avenue. We would gather all the children in front of the window so they could watch as the parade went by. Like many hospitals, people try to take as many people home as possible. By Christmas Eve the ward was fairly empty, except Michael was there as were other aboriginal children.
Where was Christmas for them? They had seen Santa Claus go by, they had heard the other children on their ward getting excited about being home and talking about their stockings and being with their families. Michael and other aboriginal children were in the hospital in beds and cribs.
I remember going to work at midnight and checking to ensure everybody was asleep. There were probably two or three of us tiptoeing around, hanging stockings on the ends of beds and cribs and filling them with toys so in the morning those children would know that somehow Santa had found them.
Michael was there for another year and a half. There was no money for his parents to visit. None of his family could visit him. There was no Ronald McDonald House at that time. One might say that I was nursing a long time ago, and I was, but it is not substantially different now. His family could not come down to visit him and he could not be flying back and forth, with the kind of surgery and rehabilitation he was having.
What do children that age think when they have not seen their parents in a year and a half or two years? They think they have been abandoned. They think it is their fault. They think they have done something wrong. Because they have not seen their family, they think nobody loves them.
Eventually Michael went home, but I am trying to imagine the kinds of family support services and resources that would have had to be there in order to build that family again for a child who had been away for that length of time. Those services were not in place then and many of them are not in place now.
There were other children with Michael who could not go home because no one could decide where they could go. They were “in care”, but no one could make the decision about what foster home it would be, funded by whom, where it would be, and whether it would be in their home community, so they just continued to stay.
These are children at their most formative ages.
For a minute I want to look at this through the eyes of Michael. Michael has seen on television and read books about what home is, but he has never seen one. He has heard the kids on the ward talk about what a home is and what they do at home and where they play at home, but he has never seen one. What does Michael do? He wonders what is wrong with him that he cannot have the same home that the other children do. Why is he different? What is wrong with him that nobody wants him?
First nations agencies should have all the capacity and resources they need to provide all of the services that first nations children require, and I repeat, all of the capacity and resources. In some provinces some of that is starting to work, but my Lord, it has been far too long in coming, and for many aboriginal children it is not anywhere close to being there yet.
If we are truly child centred, then it is about the child. Everyone knows that I am an adopted only child, and sometimes folks suggest they could guess that without my telling them, so I have no extended family. The potential for extended family support for first nations children is huge. It is something that I and my children will never experience.
As a mom, I cannot imagine not having the experience of going in every night to tuck my child in and of tiptoeing in before I go to bed to see if they are asleep. That is what these first nations parents cannot do. That is the joy that comes from parenthood.
How can there be any reason whatsoever that we cannot support this? If we cannot treat a child immediately under all circumstances, then as a country we have failed and as a society we have failed. Jordan cannot have waited or died in vain. Let no child wait again.