Finance committee  I'll take the first portion around how serious it is. For me, the longer the conversation only happens around distinctions-based approaches, the less Inuit I feel. I don't know how to explain it in any more serious a way than that. I sometimes feel the erosion of my identity in

Finance committee  Thank you. Atheihai, Christopher Sheppard, uvanga. Good afternoon, committee. My name is Christopher Sheppard. I'm the president of the National Association of Friendship Centres. I want to recognize that I am joining you today from Saskatoon, which is Treaty 6 and the homela

Justice committee  It's— [Technical difficulty—Editor]

Justice committee  Thank you. Atelihai, Christopher Sheppard, uvanga. Good afternoon, committee. I'm Christopher Sheppard, president of the National Association of Friendship Centres. I want to recognize that I'm joining you today from Treaty No. 6 territory and the homeland of the Métis. I'm th

Finance committee  Thank you. I'll start by saying that when I started coming to these committees, friendship centres had a permanent program. We had a youth program. We had employment and training programs. That was before I was even 30 years old. Now we have none of those things. I think we nee

Finance committee  I think my final comment, which I keep making at every committee, is that the Government of Canada needs to find ways to recognize that the majority of indigenous people live in urban communities. The proportion of funding that goes to those communities is minuscule when you look

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, committee. I'm Christopher Sheppard, president of the National Association of Friendship Centres. I want to recognize that I'm joining you today from Treaty 6 in Saskatoon, the homeland of the Métis. I'm thankful for the welcome that I've re

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In Saskatchewan I can speak to specific examples, because they did surveys with their members at the beginning of the pandemic and in the middle of the pandemic, and the surveys are ongoing throughout just to accurately tell the story of what it's been like. I remember one of the

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It has gone by many names. Originally it was the urban multi-purpose aboriginal youth centres program. It was part of a program under Canadian Heritage. Then it was CCAY, and then went into non-existence.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We have said that COVID is just one more piece of a puzzle that has been what we've dealt with for the last 70 years. It's just another challenge for us. We've had young people within our movement across the country create mental health programs for submission to Canada that wer

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think recognizing that Canada and friendship centres have a 70-year history, a once-permanent program history that has been developed to.... It's a self-determined structure created by our own people to move ourselves forward. We have been a welcoming place to collaborate, to d

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We have such a long history of working together, but oftentimes, we aren't there in the on-boarding, the development, the creation or the design, which can be extremely problematic when you're trying to measure impact or even to have impact. If you read the statements I've made t

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I guess I'll quickly go. Thank you, Mr. Battiste. I think, number one, especially when we're talking about indigenous young people, let's recognize that Canada doesn't have any specific one-stop program that supports the development of indigenous young people at all. For the fas

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think we were in front of committee right around when that was happening in the first round. Being someone who works in the region and works with individual centres every day, I was extremely frustrated that while people were getting direct investment without delay, we were hav

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Vidal. If you've seen Jocelyn and me present at any federal committee, the lack of urban indigenous health data and other sources of disaggregated urban indigenous data in Canada is, I guess at minimum, shocking, because what you don't know, you don't know. What w