Madam Speaker, I rise tonight to protest the Conservative government's decision to end funding for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation suddenly and with little warning, effective tomorrow, March 31.
This funding began with $350 million in 1998 by a Liberal government and it was meant to allow aboriginal indigenous communities to take charge of the healing, which they needed very sorely to recover from acts of colonialism that have created generations upon generations of aboriginal people with a legacy of pain, a lack of self-worth, a sense of shame and deculturalization. It left them with a legacy of physical, mental and sexual abuse and with family breakdowns, addiction, despair, suicide.
Many governments have subsequently tried to “heal” aboriginal peoples. Many governments have since tried programs and initiatives to ensure that these effects were no longer evident, and they all failed. They failed because they did not have the right vehicle.
The Aboriginal Healing Fund was meant to:
—promote reconciliation and encourage and support Aboriginal people and their communities in building and reinforcing sustainable healing processes that address the legacy of physical, sexual, mental, cultural, and spiritual abuses in the residential school system, including intergenerational impacts.
There are two words that I want to focus on: intergenerational impact. That means that it would not be fixed in one generation, that it did not just span one generation, that it would take a long time for the results and for the healing to occur. Sustainable means that it must go on until whatever time it takes for healing to occur.
I am a physician. Healing does not occur because I will it to. Healing does not occur because I say I will do this for six months. Healing occurs in its own time. With all of the centuries of pain that aboriginal people have suffered, it will take a great deal of time for that healing to occur.
I would like the minister to note the words he said in his defence “that the healing fund had done good work but it was never meant to be a permanent policy or permanent service delivery”. That alone tells us the hon. minister does not understand the process of healing for indigenous peoples.
Even if he does not understand it, let us look at what his own department had to say a year ago with regard to the outcomes and the effectiveness of this fund:
Although evidence points to increasing momentum in individual and community healing, it also shows that in relation to the existing and growing need, the healing “has just begun”. For Inuit projects in particular, the healing process has been delayed due to the later start of AHF projects for Inuit.
That was said by the minister's department in its evaluation of the Aboriginal Healing Fund. It noted that the majority of projects were not sustainable without AHF funding.
The department said as well that the evaluation “results strongly support the case for continued need for these programs due to the complex needs and long-term nature of the healing process” and that “this support is needed at least until the settlement agreement compensation processes and commemorative initiatives are completed and ideally beyond until indicators of community healing are much more firmly established and aboriginal people in communities either no longer need such supports or are able to achieve healing from other effects and through other means”. This is very clear. The minister does not have to listen to me. He just has to listen to his own department.
Yet the minister further argues that the government has transferred a lot of this healing fund to Health Canada for delivery. It will deliver $199 million over two years, $130 million of that over two years is going to go to claims settlement. Only $66 million over two years, which is $33 million a year, will actually go to the delivery of emotional support. Last year that emotional support fund spent $39 million, so in effect to give $33 million a year means the government has cut that fund as well.
What is really important is that people have to understand the nature of aboriginal healing. This is a people whose healing is based in communities. It is a holistic healing. It is culturally appropriate and delivered by their own people. When aboriginal people deliver their own healing in ways that are culturally appropriate, what they are also saying to each other is that they can do these things, they are worthwhile, they know how to do these things. They have knowledge, capability and are able. They do not need someone else to come and fix them. That is exactly why the healing fund is important.
The need for this fund is so great that not only has INAC, the department itself, studied this, and I quoted INAC, but the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission also said that this was an extremely important fund.
We heard from the territorial government of Nunavut that this was very important. We heard from the Women's Shelter of Montreal that it was important. However, I want to give hon. members a quote from the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The chair, Justice Murray Sinclair, said that to hold back during the duration of the mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the healing fund, “We felt the aboriginal healing foundation's funding should be continued at least for the term of our commission”.
In Nunavut, when members of the legislative assembly unanimously voted on Thursday to press the federal government to continue the AHF, Mr. Ningeongan said these words, and they speak for themselves:
Mr. Speaker, to terminate the Aboriginal Healing Funding now would defeat the whole purpose of the apology that our Prime Minister made on behalf of Government of Canada. The federal government must recognize that healing takes time, recovery does not happen overnight.
In B.C. I know very fully that the B.C. Indian chiefs have also said the same thing. About 134 communities that depend on this fund that will have nothing as of tomorrow.
The irony of this, though, is that the Liberal government issued a statement of regret in 1998 and followed it up with $350 million. The Conservative Prime Minister in June felt regret was not enough, so he made a long statement of apology and then he removed money from the table instead.
I want to read what the Prime Minister had to say and let members hear the irony of it all. I quote the Prime Minister in June 2008, when he said:
The government now recognizes that the consequences of the Indian Residential Schools policy were profoundly negative and that this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact on Aboriginal culture, heritage and language...by tragic accounts of the emotional, physical and sexual abuse and neglect of helpless children, and their separation from powerless families and communities.
The legacy of Indian Residential Schools has contributed to social problems that continue to exist in many communities today.
That was two years ago. I do not believe that those problems suddenly disappeared in two years. The Prime Minister promised:
You have been working on recovering from this experience for a long time and in a very real sense, we are now joining you on this journey.
We do not join people by taking away the tools that they need to help themselves.
I do not believe the Prime Minister did not mean those words when he said them, but in order for words to have credibility. They have to be followed with concrete action. It is cruel to give hope with fine words and then pull that hope away by removing the means for realization of that hope. I may be cynical, but it seems to be to be typical of the government, that it says and does what looks good, that the optics are important, but it does nothing to achieve the objective.
We have come full circle. I have listened to the minister say that everyone wants the best for aboriginal people. The aboriginal people want what is best for them. We are no longer handing them something. This colonialization has got to stop, and inherent in those words is that full circle of “We know what is best for you”. Comparing the aboriginal healing fund to other programs that are non-aboriginal in nature also does not show he understands. The very ability of aboriginal people to heal means that they must be empowered, they must be given the right to heal themselves. They must let us know we can no longer think that we can tell them what is best for them and let them take charge of their own healing.
In order to bring back pride, culture and empowerment to aboriginal people, this is an absolute necessity, to bring back the aboriginal healing fund.