Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to raise an issue in the House following a question I asked in April of this year regarding a tragic situation in an aboriginal community in Manitoba.
The question I asked originated with the very tragic death of Chace Barkman, one of twin babies from the remote Garden Hill First Nation in Manitoba. The twin babies were medevaced to Winnipeg to undergo emergency treatment for meningitis that went undetected at their local nursing station. One of those twins, Chace, died. As a result, our eyes and ears and minds are focused on what Parliament and the Government of Canada need to do to ensure that a death like this never happens again.
Unfortunately, the statistics coming out of first nations communities are so overwhelmingly negative that we do not have much hope that this situation can be turned around anytime soon. The government has failed in fact to take concrete steps to deal with the tragic circumstances facing children and all residents in first nations and Inuit communities across this land.
We have had our own studies. One done in March of this year, which should have alerted the government to the problems at hand, was entitled “Indigenous Children’s Health Report: Health Assessment in Action”. It showed, as many other studies have done, that children on reserve were far more likely to suffer chronic diseases, 14% of on-reserve children had asthma, and the list goes on. We have our studies, yet they do not seem to make a difference.
We turned to international bodies for their glimpse of what is happening in our country. The results are staggering. Let me just refer to the UNICEF report, a very recent report from 2009, that states the following:
The fact is, the numbers just don’t add up. In almost any measure of health and wellbeing, Aboriginal children – including First Nations, Inuit and Métis – are at least two or three times worse off than other Canadian children. As children, they are less likely to see a doctor. As teens, they are more likely to become pregnant. And in many communities, they are more likely to commit suicide. The result is a generation of children whose health and well-being is unjustly compromised.
Let us also remember that UNESCO has done a similar report suggesting that aboriginal children are among the most marginalized in Canadian society and despite some advances in almost every measure of health and well-being, aboriginal children, including first nations, Inuit and Métis, are at least two or three times worse off than any other Canadian children.
Is that not enough for action? Today, we have seen nothing from the government. In fact the whole landscape around the pandemic of H1N1 has only put further attention on the failure of the government to take action and do what is necessary in terms of an area where it has jurisdiction, where the federal government is ultimately responsible.
At the time of the tragic death of Chace Barkman—