moved:
That this House do now adjourn.
Mr. Speaker, first I would like to thank the Speaker for agreeing to my request earlier today to have this emergency debate tonight. I think it is very important that we have members here tonight and that we focus on this most urgent issue, not only in my community in east Vancouver and specifically in the downtown eastside but I hope that it will illuminate and draw attention and visibility to the plight of aboriginal people across the country, those who are infected by HIV-AIDS, those who are living in poverty, those who are living in the cities but also those aboriginal people who are still on reserve.
This is a deeply concerning issue. It is something that I face and deal with in my community every single day. When I see the devastation of people and the housing that they live in or people who are homeless on the street, when I see the soaring rates of infection for HIV-AIDS, I have to ask myself, why in a country as wealthy as Canada, why in a country that has all of the human capacity, all of the resources at its disposal, do we have an infection rate that is parallel and in some places exceeds what we see in the developing world?
Why do we have such terrible poverty among aboriginal people? Why do we see people who face the grind of daily poverty, who face a lack of access to health care?
Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan.
I hope this emergency debate tonight will cause us to reflect and think, but most important, to propel the government to take action to resolve this crisis not only in my community but across the country.
There was new research done by Evan Wood, who is a research scientist at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. He produced some alarming results based on a four year study. It shows that the HIV infection rate for aboriginal people in the downtown eastside is twice as high as that for non-aboriginal people. I would point out that already in this community that is so under stress, the HIV infection rate is much higher than in the general population.
The research is very disturbing, but it is not new. This particular report is new but there has been lots of research that has taken place. For example, the Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network tells us in a release put out today that HIV-AIDS continues to be a serious health concern for all aboriginal communities, but the rise of HIV rates among aboriginal people is most apparent in Canada's inner cities where an increasing proportion of aboriginal people now live. We know from the recent statistics from Statistics Canada that there is a much greater emphasis now of aboriginal people in the urban environment.
Ken Clement, who is the president of CAAN, points out, “Many of our people do not have access to trauma care and treatment. We consider colonization, loss of land and territory, loss of language and the residential school system all social determinants of health impacting the epidemic amongst our people”. That is something that I see every day.
The City of Vancouver website points out that the life expectancy for aboriginal people in our city is 9 to 13 years less than the average population. Daily, the Vancouver Native Health Clinic on East Hastings Street, a wonderful place, deals with a tidal wave of people who need support and help and it barely has the resources to keep going.
Dr. David Tu, the clinic coordinator, says, “once infected, aboriginal people are only half as likely as non-aboriginal people to start HIV treatment and are twice as likely to die of HIV compared to non-aboriginal HIV positive people in this same neighbourhood”. Remember that this is a community where already the HIV rate is practically off the books. He says, “This speaks to the failure of the medical system to effectively engage urban aboriginal peoples in the system of care and prevention”.
He goes on to say that the history of racism, the history of discrimination toward aboriginal people in the health care system is something that we have to overcome and we have to do that in mainstream society. Again, the West Coast Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society, WAHRS, which is a great grassroots organization of people who are injection drug users and who are living with HIV-AIDS and hepatitis C, tells us that its street outreach HIV prevention program had its federal funding cut a year ago.
The same group also had the funding cut for hospital visits that helped people when they were finally in treatment and they were actually getting some help. This program was making sure that people were completing that treatment and yet that funding, peanuts, was cut for that program. The funding is so low that the group may not be able to continue after this year. That is another group that has been struggling to survive and it is coping with a very large demand.
I cannot talk about this issue without also relating it to the underlying issues. Those are issues of racism and colonization, but it is also about the growing gap between wealth and poverty in our society. It is about the issue of aboriginal people who are being left to die, aboriginal people who are being left without the support and care that they need.
For example, we know that according to a recent Pivot report, of all the people who self-identified as being homeless in their affidavits, 28% were aboriginal, even though aboriginal people only represent 1.8% of the general population in greater Vancouver.
The same report found that aboriginal people make up 30% of the total homeless population in Vancouver. It also found that of the 70% in the report who identified as aboriginal in the GVRD, they identified as street homeless. That means they had no physical shelter, that they sleep on the street or in doorways, parkades, underpasses and parks, compared to 57% of the non-aboriginal homeless population.
In Vancouver just in the last year, we have seen the loss of 560 low income housing units. Not all of them were in the downtown east side, but the vast majority of them were.
In the years between 2003 and 2005 we saw the loss of another 400 units. We know that a single employable person gets to live on $600 a month, yet by the federal government's own market basket measure, it costs about $1,300 a month to live in our expensive city. We can see the incredible disparity between people who are being left behind and people who have no resources and are very vulnerable and at great risk. We now have about 2,000 people in Vancouver who are homeless.
Even the United Nations has drawn attention to this great issue. In his report, the UN rapporteur calls on the federal government to bring in a comprehensive national housing strategy that focuses its attention on aboriginal people in particular.
The same rapporteur in his October 2007 report called on the federal government to commit funding and resources for a targeted national aboriginal housing strategy. Where is it? Where is the housing for the people who need it in my community and in other communities? The government cannot even get the statistics right. The same UN rapporteur said that the government should work with other organizations to develop proper statistics and indicators for homelessness and housing insecurity. What an outrage that we do not even know what the full picture is.
I have to say that despite this alarming health crisis and despite the seriousness of the situation and the lives that have been lost and injection drug users who are now infected and living in poverty, still there is a great sense of community spirit.
For three years I have been trying to get support for the native youth centre in my riding. The federal government has not yet committed to the project.
Today I demand of the government that it get its priorities right and that it pay attention to the people who are most at risk in my community and other communities. We have billions of dollars in the federal surplus. Why is it not going to help these people?