Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Obviously an increase of 74% is significant. I guess the question is whether it's enough. We come back to whether the services being provided are comparable to those that would be provided off reserve, and whether the funding is sufficient for that. I think there are still issue

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Let me answer you first. Services for children are first of all a provincial mandate. The federal government funds services for children living on reserve. In my opinion, it should take into account the standards established by each province and make sure that the services offer

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Well, one would certainly hope, with a broader range of services and more funding for those services, that we will be able to see that they are having a positive impact. Again, I think that's something we will be looking at. The program is actually only fully implemented this ye

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Chair. I'll ask Mr. Berthelette to give you more precise information, but I can say that it is ad hoc; it is when these communities face expenditures that they have to make and they have to take the money out of other programs because they don't have it within the bu

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  No, we haven't, Chair. I did of course see the testimony that the department gave before the committee saying that they were going to a policy approach, but we haven't received any specific information. That's something that we would be looking at in our follow-up audit.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Well, I'm a little surprised that the department doesn't have at least some information on this, because not all of the services are provided by first nations agencies. Many of the services are provided through provincial agencies and are billed to the federal government. So—

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The provinces are billing the federal government, and the federal government is paying provinces for services, so they should be able to know what kinds of services are being given and how much it is costing.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Well, absolutely. As I mentioned earlier, I think this is one of the main issues in this whole program: the department has not analyzed and compared the child welfare services on reserve with those off reserve. And so you have to question, how can they establish funding levels if

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In fact, the 2008 follow-up is a part of the report.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In my opinion, the most important issue in this entire file is the definition of "comparable services". No one has ever defined what a comparable service is. More money could very well be given, but we do not know whether the services offered to these children and their families

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Oh, oh!

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Chair. As I noted in my opening remarks, one of the issues we found with the old funding formula was that it assumed that a certain percentage of children would need care, and that was applied across all first nations. With the new funding formula, that is still the s

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's right. I could perhaps ask Mr. Campbell to respond, Chair.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  If I could give a partial response—and it may be something the committee would want to explore further—one of the things we noted in our audit was that under the old funding formula very few of the preventative services were being funded. So in fact in order to deal with the situ

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. We thank you for this opportunity to discuss chapter 4 of our May 2008 report on the first nations child and family services program. I should note that the audit work for this chapter was substantially completed in November 2007. Joining me at the table