Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate on Bill C-420, An Act to establish the Office of the Commissioner for Children and Young Persons in Canada.
This bill was introduced by the member for Westmount—Ville-Marie in May 2012. I reviewed Bill C-420, and after a thorough review, I believe that an office for a federal commissioner for children would be redundant.
Before going into detail regarding the bill, I would like to stress the fact that the Government of Canada is determined to meet the needs of Canadian children and their families in order to build a strong society.
I commend the hon. member for Westmount—Ville-Marie for his interest in improving the lives of Canadian children and youth through his introduction of Bill C-420. The bill proposes to create the office of the federal children's commissioner with a broad mandate to report on Canada's compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
However, our government is of the view that Bill C-420 is not the most effective means of achieving this laudable goal. We oppose the bill for four main reasons: One, it would be costly to establish and maintain; two, it would duplicate existing international reporting processes; three, it would replicate current domestic implementation mechanisms; and four, it could indirectly impact upon provincial and territorial areas of responsibility.
As to the costs associated with this initiative, our first concern with the bill is related to the potential costs. It would be difficult to justify creating another layer of bureaucracy for reporting and monitoring purposes in this current climate of fiscal restraint. The costs could be somewhere in the vicinity of $7 million annually, which is the net cost of comparable independent commissioner offices.
It is our view that federal funding would be better spent on actual programs and services for Canadian children and youth rather than on creating an office that would produce more reports. I will speak to this issue in more detail in a few minutes.
The second concern we have with the bill is that Canada already reports to the UN on its implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We do this every five years. Canada also covers children's issues in its reporting on a multitude of other international human rights treaties including, but not limited to, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Our third concern is that many of the functions of the proposed federal children's commissioner are already being performed through existing domestic mechanisms. For instance, the government promotes public awareness of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, reviews proposed legislation and regulations for consistency with human rights protections, and promotes the ongoing implementation of the convention through the provision of legal advice and training. Moreover, parliamentary bodies have and continue to conduct special studies on children's issues.
Effective domestic coordination is already in place through various interdepartmental and intergovernmental mechanisms. For example, in 2007, an interdepartmental working Group on children's rights was created to enhance federal coordination with respect to children's rights.
It is also important to note that federal, provincial and territorial governments continue to consult on issues relating to children through various forums, such as the Continuing Committee of Officials on Human Rights, the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Working Group on Family Violence Prevention and the Directors of Child Welfare Committee.
Our fourth concern relates to the fact that the important government role in supporting families and children is shared between the federal, provincial and territorial governments. Most of the programs and services relating to children fall within provincial and territorial jurisdiction. Almost all the provinces and territories have established independent children's commissioners, advocates or ombudspersons. The work of those bodies and other ongoing partnerships ensure that Canada promotes and protects the rights of children.
Bill C-420 would require that the proposed federal children's commissioner submits an annual report to Parliament on the government's implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, jurisdictional limitations would make it difficult to provide a complete portrait of children's well-being without potentially infringing upon matters of provincial and territorial jurisdiction.
I would like to point out that many other comparable federal western democracies, such as the United States, Germany and Switzerland, do not, like Canada, have independent federal or national children's commissioners.
As we can see, processes are already in place to ensure that all orders of government coordinate their efforts in an effective way so Canada meets its obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The government remains very committed to improving the lives of Canadian children and youth. I will provide members with a few examples.
The government is committed to helping parents balance work and family life through transfers to the provinces and territories of over $15.2 billion in 2011-12 in support of early childhood development and child care. This is the largest investment in early childhood development and child care in the history of Canada.
Through the universal child care benefit, the government annually provides over $2.6 billion directly to families, helping over two million young children. This is in addition to other supports, including the child tax credit and the Canada child tax benefit, which includes the national child benefit supplement.
Through the supporting families fund, the government offers $60 million per year for family justice services and information resources aimed at promoting compliance with financial support and custody access obligations in order to reduce the stress of separation and divorce on children and assisting parents to focus on the best interests of the child when deciding on parenting arrangements.
The government also provides $4.5 million per year through the youth justice fund for the development, implementation and evaluation of pilot projects that provide programming and services for youth in conflict with the law, such as children involved in or vulnerable to gun, gang and drug activities, and for youth with illicit substance abuse issues.
Through the victims fund, this government has doubled the amount of money available for child advocacy centres across Canada, to a total of $2.05 million per year. Child advocacy centres adopt a seamless, coordinated and collaborative approach to helping child and youth victims of crime to minimize system-induced trauma by providing services to young victims and their families in child-friendly settings and by reducing the number of interviews and questions directed at children during the investigation or court preparation process. This has been a very successful initiative. I have visited some of these centres.
The community action program for children funds community based organizations to develop and deliver comprehensive, culturally appropriate, early intervention and prevention programs that promote the health and social development of vulnerable children zero to six years of age and their families. This program distributes $53.4 million annually to projects across Canada.
The government also recognizes that additional efforts are required to improve the well-being of aboriginal children. Funding for first nations child and family services has also more than doubled over the past 14 years, from $238 million in 1998-99 to approximately $600 million in 2011-12.
Under the six current tripartite frameworks, more than $100 million per year in additional ongoing funding are now dedicated to implementing the new enhanced prevention focused approach to funding first nations child and family service providers for on reserve first nation children and families.
The 2010 federal budget announced additional funding of $50 million over five years, 2010 to 2015, for the aboriginal headstart on reserve and aboriginal headstart in urban and northern communities programs.
The 2010 federal budget provided $75 million from 2010 to 2015 to renew the national aboriginal youth suicide prevention strategy and to continue to support first nations and Inuit communities in addressing aboriginal youth suicide.
In 2010-11, the government invested $1.9 billion in education to support first nations and Inuit students across Canada.
Then, in the 2012 federal budget, the Government of Canada committed to invest $100 million over three years to provide early literacy programming and supports and services to first nations schools and students, and to invest an additional $175 million over three years to build and renovate schools on reserve to provide the youth with better learning environments.
Those are concrete examples of the government's investments in children and youth, investments that promote and protect the rights of children, as set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In conclusion, the establishment of a federal children's commissioner as proposed in Bill C-420 would be a costly and unnecessary duplication of existing international and domestic reporting and implementation mechanisms.
The government considers that federal funding would be better spent on concrete programs and services for Canadian children and youth, rather than on creating another layer of bureaucracy.
For all the reasons that I have just explained, I call on my colleagues on both sides of the House to oppose this bill.