Charlie Angus

[Situation in Indigenous Communities, April 12th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague, but I have to say that what I am hearing is a lot of claptrap.

The member stood in this House and said that spending money on indigenous children is what governments should not be doing. Rather, we should give them hope. We should tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We should talk about transparency.

Under her government, every single year $100 million was promised to indigenous schools. Then it was pulled back and spent on tax cuts. The Conservatives promised the money and never gave it. We could not find where the money went. That was the lack of transparency under her government.

The numeracy and literacy rates in the Ontario region of Treaty 9 were down at 21% and 28%. Literacy rates that low cannot be found anywhere else except sub-Saharan Africa.

What did her department do? It decided not to follow up or do any more studies because it could spend the money better elsewhere. We are talking about chronic underfunding of education, whereby children in Kashechewan and Attawapiskat get half of what kids in the public system in Ontario get, and the previous government said that it would not throw any more money at it.

They did not have the money for mental health services. That is why people are killing themselves. It is not because they do not have jobs. We have children killing themselves on reserves where they do have jobs, but they cannot access mental health services. Still, if white kids in suburban Canada need it, they get it.

Let us talk about the role government should be playing here. Let us not talk about giving them hope but not giving them a dime to be able to get an education.

[Situation in Indigenous Communities, April 12th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on my colleague's comments about solutions being at the grassroots level.

We are talking great things tonight, but the worst thing that can come out of this would be a program that would fail.

No offence to the Department of Indigenous Affairs or Health Canada, but they come up with a program and they announce it. Then every single community in the country has to try to fit the criteria. Then they are denied by bureaucrats. That is not useful.

I would like to see a commitment come out of tonight's debate. When ITK and the Inuit have a mental health strategy, if it is a qualified plan, they implement it themselves. In the Nishnawbe Aski Nation territory, if they have a plan for mental health that works for their communities, they implement it. It is no longer the hamster wheel of programs running in these various departments, because they are programs that fail.

In terms of mental health services, I would like to hear my colleagues say that we will take the funds here and put them into the regions so that they can do what needs to be done, culturally and correctly.

[Situation in Indigenous Communities, April 12th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for taking the time to participate in this debate. For people back home, when they hear numbers being thrown around, they do sound very impressive: $200 million in health; $300 million in the present, which has been stabilized funding. However, the issue happening on the ground is a crisis in community after community.

We have some great programs, such as brighter futures, the community health and well-being program, which do some really good work. We have suicide posters in all the communities. However, I go into communities where they have the posters on the wall, and when a child is in need, the wait times to get seen are extraordinarily long. What happens is that indigenous affairs will turn down that child for counselling, and then the child will have to go to Health Canada and it will turn them down. By the time they finish that back and forth, that child has either gone to ground or we have lost him.

I think it is important in the discussion tonight that we get our heads outside of Ottawa. The bureaucrats, the ministers, and politicians will make it all sound great. However, on the ground, those dollars are not helping in the way they need to help. That is what I am asking my colleagues to work toward. Can we find a way to break through that, so that the people who need it are getting the services required to save the children and give them the help?

[Situation in Indigenous Communities, April 12th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for the work she is willing to do with her teams in the communities I am honoured to represent.

The minister talks about dealing with this long term, because we are dealing with historic wrongs. The historic wrongs are built into the operational policies of the government. The task the minister has is to deconstruct those discriminatory and racist policies. Those policies prefer to destroy indigenous families by taking their children away, rather than supporting the families in their home environment.

The Human Rights Tribunal ruling said that the department routinely denied access to drugs that were prescribed by pediatricians, and to medically necessary devices. We heard the story raised at the Human Rights Tribunal of the four-year-old child who suffered severe cardiac arrest and an anoxic brain injury. The federal government would not pay for a lifesaving bed for her to return home. That is a systemic problem.

We need to implement Jordan's principle and stop talking about it, but I do not see the money for it. We need to close the gap so the child welfare shortfall ends once and for all, so children can stop living in the hotels away from their families. However, I do not see the money for that.

I know there is existing money for health care, but we know the shortfalls and the crisis. How will the minister come into line with the Human Rights Tribunal and start to dismantle the system that she has inherited and that she must oversee, so the doors are finally blown open and so “no means no” suddenly becomes “yes” for the children whenever they need it?

[Situation in Indigenous Communities, April 12th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent question. In the rural regions in the north and in all our communities, we see a crisis in health care, in particular a lack of access to mental health services. However, up in the far north, in indigenous country, the disparities grow exponentially. That is why we are two months into a health state of emergency in Treaty 9 territory. We can look at the crisis in rural Canada and then see how magnified it is.

If we put the resources in, it will save us money. We will not be bringing young people out by medevac, we will not be dealing with suicides, we will not be dealing with the traumas. Let us put the resources in now for front-line services, and then we can start to build the kind of future that we all believe in as parliamentarians.

[Situation in Indigenous Communities, April 12th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, there are concrete steps that parliamentarians can take.

Number one, we have to close the gap on child welfare. As Cindy Blackstock said, kids cannot be left behind. Let us dedicate that money and let us do it now. We need to close the gaps in terms of health care dollars, the lack of services, and the culture that exists deep within the federal government of denying the basic needs of indigenous children.

My colleague mentioned a rock and roll tour. We need to be looking to all the departments of the federal government to play a role in a national youth vision. For example, I remember the days when the Debajehmujig Theatre Company used to go into the isolated communities. Those actors transformed lives. They had young people who felt hopeless who were learning to act and grow, but it costs money to tour. Fifteen or 20 actors cannot go into isolated communities. The government wanted them to do it on the cheap and they could not do it.

Where is the health care? Where is Indian and Northern Affairs? Where is the justice department? Where is arts and culture? If we talk about a national youth vision that we are going to commit to with a road map for it, they all have to be there.

We can start to do this now. Just talking is the beginning, but we can do this.

[Situation in Indigenous Communities, April 12th, 2016]

moved:

That the House do now adjourn.

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River.

I would like to begin by thanking my colleagues for participating in this very important emergency debate.

As parliamentarians, we are responsible for keeping indigenous youth in Canada and all Canadian youth safe. We are also responsible for working together to find a solution to this tragic crisis and working with communities, leaders, youth, and their families. Canada's Parliament must make the necessary resources available to support the communities and help them find long-term solutions.

I want to thank my colleagues for being here. At the beginning I would like to pause and particularly thank Chief Bruce Shisheesh, the council in Attawapiskat, the teachers, the front-line workers, the police, the leadership in the region from Grand Chief Jonathon Solomon, and our Nishnawbe Aski nation.

This is not just about Attawapiskat particularly. This is about who we are as Canadians and our whole nation.

I want to particularly thank the young people. We see the image of these helpless communities and these lost children, but if we travel in these communities and see their faces and see the potential, we see that the greatest tragedy in this nation is that we would waste a generation of children and squander their potential.

I think of Shannen Koostachin, the woman who inspired me more than anybody except my wife, who had to lead a national fight at age 13 just to get a school. I think of Chelsea Edwards, who took her fight to the United Nations when she was living in boarding houses far from her home.

I think of all the young people who leave home at 13 to live in boarding houses in Sioux Lookout and Timmins because they believe there is a better future, and we fail them, and it has to stop.

Tonight might be the beginning of a change in our country. That is what I am asking us all to come together to do.

What do we need in the short term? We have to end the Band-Aids, the emergency flights and the hand-wringing.

This is not new. A 1999 coroner's jury for Selena Sakanee in Neskantaga had 41 jury recommendations. What happened?

In 2008, after the horrific Kashechewan fire and inquest, there were 80 recommendations. What happened to them? They are still sitting on the shelf.

After the 2011 Pikangikum suicide crisis that was so devastating, the coroner's report had 100 recommendations. What happened to them? They are still sitting there.

Now it is up to us. It is no longer possible to say that we did not know or we do not know and we will find out. We know what the problem is. From a parliamentary point of view, we have to end the nickel-and-diming of services. When we say to a young person in crisis that we will medevac them out on a flight, that is an extreme. Most times they are left on their own. However, if we do medevac them out, we send them back two days later because nobody in government will pay for the treatment centre they need.

We have to end the culture of deniability whereby children and young people are denied mental health services on a routine basis, as a matter of course, by the federal government.

Cindy Blackstock points out that in this budget the children are being failed because of child welfare issues. We have to close that gap. That is an issue of political will that we could change tonight.

We have to ask where the health care dollars are, because we know this crisis has been happening, and there are no new augmented funds.

We have to work with our front-line workers. I talked to the incredible police officers at NAPS, the Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service, who suffer from PTSD because they are the ones who go in to deal with the children. We have to augment them and give them support so that we can keep drugs out of the communities and build communities at the grassroots.

What are our long-term solutions? The solutions come from the communities, from their culture, from their incredible relationship to the land, and most Canadians have no concept of how deep that goes. The solutions will not be from outsiders who come in. We need to put the resources there to help, because they know where the solutions are.

We need to get a mobile crisis unit in Mushkegowuk territory so that the communities can start to deal with this themselves.

We need healing centres and treatment centres. We actually have lots of them across the country, and they are just sitting empty, because governments built them but never put a dime in to fund the resources so that they could actually staff them. Among the ones that we have sitting empty, there is one in Attawapiskat. Where are the resources, the mental health dollars, to have those local healing and treatment centres for the young people when they need them?

We also have to talk to the youth. Maybe this is a moment to think outside the box. When the body of little Alan Kurdi was found on the shores, it shocked the world and it shamed Canadians. Canadians stood up and said that they would do whatever. All of civil society came together. Well, this is our moment.

I am thinking tonight of young Sarah Hookimaw who has left home to go to school in Timmins. She wrote me a message. She said, “I wish I could be there with the young back home, my cousins and my peers. I can't right now, but I am seeing the leaders standing up and I'm proud to be who I am, even though it is not easy. I want us to build a relationship with the government.”

This is the voice of the youth speaking.

Abagail Mattinas of Constance Lake First Nation wrote me a message tonight. She said, “I want to be part of the teams that will bring light in the dark time. Let me know how I can help so we can plan an assessment to end the suicides in our communities.”

Where is the will to take from the youth and start regional and national teams and empower youth to come to this Parliament and tell us what change should look like? The days of Indian Affairs and Health Canada dictating to them how their resources are going to be spent is a failed model, and it has to end.

I want to thank my colleagues in the House for their goodwill on this, because this is not a partisan issue. As parents, as adults, this is our primary responsibility. It is the fundamental responsibility, and we cannot use this in any cheap partisan manner.

There have been mistakes. There has been a 150-year system of systemic discrimination and racist denial, but by coming together, we can change that, and that is what I am asking for tonight. I want to see political will, because what I am hearing in the communities is that they do not want another declaration of emergency. We have lost count of the declarations of emergency that were lip service or were ignored or were denied. They are tired of that.

They want a nation-to-nation relationship, and it begins when we get past the talk. It begins when we get past the rhetoric and say that we will commit and put that money into the health services that have been regularly denied. We will stop fighting children when they need access to proper mental health services. We will deal with the crisis in education that still makes the children in my communities like Kashechewan go to school in rotten, broken-down portables.

We have to end that, because the greatest resource we have in this country is not the gold and it is not the oil; it is the children. The day we recognize that is the day that we will be the nation we were meant to be.

We will have this journey together for as long as the rivers run, as long as the grass grows, and as long as the sun shines. That is our commitment to each other, and I am asking everyone tonight to follow through and make it true.

[Indigenous Affairs, April 12th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, the youth suicide crisis has shocked the world and people are asking how a country as rich as Canada can leave so many children and young people behind.

What the people in Attawapiskat are facing is the same systemic negligence that is robbing the hopes of young people in communities like La Loche, Cross Lake and Neskantaga. Yet there were no new mental health dollars in the budget to help indigenous children.

Enough with the band-aids and the emergency flights. Will the minister commit to a total overhaul to ensure that every child in our country has the mental health supports he or she needs to have hope and a positive future?

[The Budget, April 12th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, what really shocked me in the budget was the lack of mention of the importance of health care, particularly the issue of palliative care. The current Prime Minister stood in the House and voted for a national palliative care strategy, and then did not deliver.

We are on the eve of the Liberal government bringing in right-to-die legislation so that people will be able to terminate their lives in any jurisdiction in the country, but they will not have access to quality palliative care. That is an oversight and a lack of willingness to ensure that the most vulnerable in society are given the support they need.

I want to ask my colleague why the government has not followed through on the call from Parliament to work with the provinces and territories to establish a proper palliative care strategy and to ensure that people who require health care in the federal system, such as veterans, the military, prisoners, and particularly indigenous people, have access to quality palliative care. There are zero dollars for that. How can the Liberals justify overlooking that important issue for Canadians?

[The Budget, April 12th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to my hon. colleague. Living in northern Ontario, we are resource-dependent. Many of us have small businesses, but our small businesses are dependent on the fact that if we do not have the resource economy, we do not have the small business.

I am looking at the FedNor portfolio. I know the member is not from the north, but FedNor is where money is reinvested so we can create economic development opportunities. All the resource shares go to Queen's Park in Ontario, and we get very little back from the Wynne government. There is no augmenting in the FedNor budget.

Second, there is no action on the Ring of Fire. For the last 10 years, the Wynne government has sat on the sidelines. This project will bring generational economic change to all the regions and the indigenous communities of the north. However, we see no action on it.

The previous government did not move on it. The present government has not moved on it. Does my hon. colleague not agree that if we are to build this economy, we have to maintain that balance and we have to ensure that small businesses in our resource-dependent regions actually have the economic development dollars they need to diversify the economy?