Madam Speaker, I am rising on a question that I raised in May to do with the Auditor General's report from 2008 on first nations child and family services. I had asked the minister a question about when the government would live up its responsibility to consult first nations and appropriately fund the child and family services program.
To put it into context, I want to briefly refer to the Auditor General's report in which she indicates the severity of the problem, as shown by the INAC data, in that about 5% of first nations children living on-reserve are in care. This is almost eight times the number of children in care residing off-reserve. She also points out that according to a parallel audit that was done, 51% of children in care in British Columbia are aboriginal. These are pretty shocking numbers.
The Auditor General also indicates in the report that under federal and provincial policies, aboriginal children including first nations children should have equitable access to services comparable in level and quality to those provided to other children.
Subsequently the department came before the public accounts committee and reported on some of its action plan, but part of the heart of this matter is the fact that there is a differential between what the provinces pay for off-reserve children and what on-reserve children are entitled to.
In a letter that came out on August 19, 2009 the department states that
...INAC cannot commit to conducting such a comprehensive review nor can it be done for all jurisdictions by the timelines required by the Committee. INAC would be able to provide a basic comparison of jurisdictions that are currently under the Enhanced Prevention [program] and where INAC has basic information on salary rates...
and it goes on to indicate that it would have some of its preliminary work done by December 31, 2009.
However, in the Auditor General's report, she points out that the funding program that she was talking about in 2008 was designed in 1988 and has not been significantly modified since. The government participated in a couple of different reports. There were the two policy reviews, one of which was a national policy review in 2000 and then there was the Wende report in 2005, in which there was significant work done around identifying the fact that there needed to be this provincial review.
In 2008 the Auditor General identified the fact that there were gaps in service. It is not just the current government's responsibility. This has been going on for a long time. Previous governments were fully aware of the fact that there was this enormous gap in funding.
Yet now we are being told to wait longer. In fact in the public accounts report, under recommendation No. 4, where there is talk about modifying directive 20-1, which concerns the funding that first nations child and family service agencies get, it is indicated that the hope and objective are that all remaining jurisdictions will be ready for transition by 2013.
Therefore there are a couple of issues that come up. Since this is a long-standing piece of information, I wonder why the government does not look at putting in place interim funding to close that 22% gap between federal and provincial services, and put in interim funding until it can get accurate and comparable data from coast to coast to coast.
I would agree that there need to be different models across this country recognizing regional differences. However, we should not simply tell first nations that they have to wait another four, five or six years since if that report comes out in 2013 we actually will not have the new funding.
Why can the government not put in place interim funding?