Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to address the motion before us today.
I will be sharing my time with my colleague, the member for North Island—Powell River.
If we had been alive 109 years ago, we would have opened what is now the Ottawa Citizen to find a report by a leading public health physician who had just surveyed the health of children in residential schools. His data included one school whose records showed that 76% of its children had died. At that time in 1907, the Department of Indian Affairs gave less money to fight tuberculosis among all first nations people than was allocated to the City of Ottawa. The report proved that the government knew how poorly aboriginal people were being treated but did nothing to remedy the inequality.
It is heartbreaking that 109 years later we are having the same debate in this place. We are here because in January of this year, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal issued a landmark legally binding ruling finding that the Government of Canada racially discriminates against 163,000 first nations children. That discrimination takes the form of unequal child welfare services on reserve, as well as the failure of the government to give aboriginal children equal access to public services without their falling victim to government red tape. The government has said that it will not appeal that decision, and I applaud it for that, but those are just words. What the children of this country desperately need is action.
It is worth remembering how we arrived here. Over the late 1990s government data showed that the number of aboriginal children going into child welfare had risen 71% over a six-year span because the government had failed to invest in prevention services to keep children safely at home. By 2000 a government report found that children on reserve received 78¢ on the dollar for what non-aboriginal children received. Rather than taking real action, the government commissioned another report. The new report showed that aboriginal children were getting even less. By then it was just 70¢ on the dollar.
That same year, 2005, a young boy was sitting in hospital in Manitoba. Just five-years old, Jordan Anderson had been born with serious health problems. After two years in hospital, his health had stabilized and he was ready to go home for the first time. Most children in this situation would be released to their home with the provincial government looking after their health care expenses, but Jordan Anderson was an aboriginal child and so he remained in hospital as Ottawa and the Province of Manitoba argued over who would pay for his care. While the governments argued, Jordan died, never having spent a day at home.
It is in his memory that we are calling on the government today to fully implement Jordan's principle. This principle is one that would be self-evident to every Canadian, that in disputes between governments over a child's care, the child comes first and the red tape comes second. That means that we pay for a child's health care costs first and then let the adults argue over whose budget should cover it. However, as I will address in a moment, Jordan's principle, which is crystal clear to Canadians, is somehow still controversial to the Liberal government. Dealing with this issue was number three of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action, which the Liberal government has pledged to fully implement.
Two years after Jordan Anderson died in hospital, the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada filed a case against the Government of Canada with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. Within 30 days of filing that challenge, the Harper Conservatives cuts the society's core funding. The society had to reduce its staff by half, do its own janitorial work and the like, but it did not give up. It kept going.
On January 29 of this year, its perseverance finally paid off. I would like to read the words of the tribunal's legally binding ruling. It states, “First Nations children and families living on reserve and in the Yukon are discriminated against in the provision of child and family services” by the federal government. The aim, it said, was not to punish the government but to end that discrimination.
Section 53 of the Canadian Human Rights Act allows the tribunal to order a person found to be discriminating on grounds including race to cease discrimination and to take immediate measures to redress the grievance or prevent future discrimination and to make available to the victims, as quickly as possible, “the rights, opportunities or privileges” that were denied by the racial discrimination.
We have an administrative tribunal making a binding order. Unless and until a binding order of a tribunal is overturned on judicial review or appealed successfully to a court, that is the law of the land. We are not here to talk about whether we comply with it any more than we are here to talk about whether we comply with a court order in a criminal matter. That is the law, unless and until it is overturned by a higher court of authority. There was no such ruling.
Under the authority of that order, the tribunal issued this order to the Government of Canada. It states, “(Indigenous Affairs) is ordered to cease its discriminatory practices and reform [its programs]...to reflect the findings of this decision”. Indigenous Affairs was also ordered to cease applying its narrow definition of Jordan's principle and to take measures to “immediately implement the full meaning and scope of Jordan’s Principle”. That is the binding order of a Canadian administrative tribunal.
It is because the government has failed to take the actions that were ordered, despite two failures to comply with other orders in April and September, that we brought this motion today to the Parliament of Canada. After all, it is in this chamber that the elected representatives of Canadians voted in 2007 to fully adopt Jordan's principle. It was crystal clear.
One of those compliance orders issued against the government noted that Parliament applied the principle to all first nations children, not just those living on reserves, and the government's narrower definition “will likely create gaps for First Nations children and is not in line with the Decision.”
I want to read the most recent compliance order to see if members can pick up any ambiguity in its order. It states, “...consistent with the motion unanimously adopted by the House of Commons, the Panel orders INAC to immediately apply Jordan’s Principle to all First Nations children...”.
Cindy Blackstock once said that government, by its actions, was saying that the government was above the law and first nations children were below it. A vote to support the NDP motion today is about to end that now. It is a vote to equalize the gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal children. It is a vote for the principle that, as Canadians, we will set aside our differences and care for our children first. A vote is to stop needlessly fighting families in court, and that clearly has to be addressed immediately.
Refusing to obey the orders of a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal is simply not an option for the government. They are legally binding, they are morally binding, and more delay, more consultations, and more reports will not fix it. We have to do better. We have to do better for the children of Canada, all children, non-aboriginal and aboriginal alike.