:
I want to thank the chair and the committee for inviting Statistics Canada here today.
I'm going to try to do this in 10 minutes, but we always have so much data and so many interesting trends to present that it is always a little challenging.
I am here with my colleague, Cathy Connors, who is the assistant director of the aboriginal statistics program at Statistics Canada. We'll be pleased to answer your questions after the presentation.
I think you have copies of the presentation in front of you. I'm going to be presenting some data, so I'll just tell you where I am on various slides.
I am now on slide 2. We were asked to present some selected results from the 2006 census. We have recently released information from two aboriginal surveys, the 2006 aboriginal children’s survey and the aboriginal peoples survey, and you asked me to speak a little bit about our relationship with the First Nations Statistical Institute.
There is certainly too much information from these data sources to present to you in this short period of time, but I'll present to you some very key trends today.
Turning to slide 3, before presenting the trends, I'd like to first talk about concepts. Statistics Canada has four concepts for identifying the aboriginal population, and we ask about them on the census and generally in our aboriginal surveys. They are aboriginal ancestry, aboriginal identity, whether a person is a registered Indian or a treaty Indian according to the Indian Act, and whether a person is a member of an Indian band or a first nation.
Users can use these concepts in different ways according to their own program or information needs. In this presentation we're going to focus primarily on the aboriginal identity population, and that is people who self-identify as an aboriginal person and/or are registered and/or are a member of an Indian band or first nation.
Just beginning with the data trend for the census on slide 4, in 2006 1.2 million people reported having an aboriginal identity—that is the short pink line on the graph in front of you—compared with 1.7 million who reported aboriginal identity, the long blue line. As you can see, there has been a steady increase of people reporting either aboriginal ancestry or aboriginal identity in the census. These increases in recent years can be attributed to demographic factors such as higher birth rates, as well as to non-demographic factors—for example, increased numbers deciding to self-identify as an aboriginal person in the census.
On slide 5, of the three aboriginal groups, the largest increase in population between 2001 and 2006 was observed for the Métis, with a growth rate of 33%. Most of this increase was due to increased numbers self-identifying as Métis in the census. The second-highest growth rate was with the first nations or North American population who did not report as registered Indian. This group grew by 28%. In comparison, the non-aboriginal population grew at a much slower rate during this five-year period. In terms of actual population size, the first nations people were the largest group, followed by Métis, then the Inuit.
On slide 6 and the next couple of slides I'll just show you where the aboriginal population lived. Slide 6 shows that most first nations people live in Ontario and the west. They make up 3% or less, though, of the population of Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. In terms of the Métis, on slide 7, like the first nations population, most of the people who were identified as Métis live in the west and Ontario, and as you can see from this graph, the largest Métis population was in Alberta, then Ontario, and Manitoba.
On slide 8, in terms of the Inuit population, three-quarters or 78% lived in one of the four regions within Inuit Nunaat. This is an Inuktitut expression for Indian homeland and stretches from Labrador to the Northwest Territories.
Now I'll turn to the 2006 aboriginal children’s survey, and I'll just present you some initial findings from this survey. On slide 10 you'll see information about this survey, but I'll just say that it was conducted following the 2006 census. Up until now there had been little data available about the health and development of aboriginal children under the age of six, and the survey was designed to address this gap. Although the survey was primarily conducted off reserve and in the north, children living in some first nations communities in Quebec and the territories were included. You can see more information about how we conducted that survey on that slide.
On slide 11, first of all, from the census we learned that young first nations children living off reserve, and Métis and Inuit young children, that is, those under the age of six, are growing up in families that are unique in many ways, compared to the families of non-aboriginal children. Young aboriginal children are more likely than non-aboriginal children to have young parents, be part of a large family, be living in a lone-parent family, and be living with grandparents. You see some of the data supporting these statements on this slide.
On slide 12, parents were asked in this survey how the child spends time with various people in their lives, so you see that young first nations children living off reserve regularly spent time with not only their immediate family, such as their parents or siblings, but also with extended family and community members such as elders. Of note is that many young first nations children living off reserve, 68%, are spending time with their grandparents on a weekly basis. Similar trends were observed for Métis young children.
Slide 13 provides the same results for those who are spending time with young Inuit children. It is clear that Inuit children are spending time with a network of extended family and community members. About seven in ten are also receiving focused attention from grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins at least once a week. We've outlined that in the bars in the graph. These were higher proportions than those observed for young Métis and young off-reserve first nations children.
On slide 14, parents of off-reserve young first nations children were also asked to rate their feelings about their community as a place to raise children, in a number of areas, as listed on the slide. From this chart, we see that off-reserve first nations children, generally speaking, have parents who are satisfied with many aspects of the community as a place to raise children, but they were less satisfied with access to activities that promote traditional aboriginal culture and values. Similar trends were also observed for young Métis children.
Finally, regarding ratings of community as a place to raise children for Inuit, on slide 15 we see higher ratings of community facilities given by those living outside Inuit Nunaat. The only characteristic that did not receive higher ratings was aboriginal cultural activities, which were rated more highly by those living in Inuit Nunaat.
Now we'll look at the aboriginal peoples survey. On slide 17 there is information about this survey. The aboriginal peoples survey, which we refer to as the APS, was conducted between October 2006 and March 2007. It provides extensive data on Inuit, Métis, and off-reserve first nations children aged 6 to 14 and adults aged 15 and over living in urban, rural, and northern locations across Canada.
Three analytical articles were released just recently, providing initial findings from the survey. I will give you a brief overview of the school experiences of off-reserve first nations children aged 6 to 14, which was one of the analytical articles released.
On slide 19, parents of off-reserve first nations children were asked in the APS how well their child was doing based on their knowledge of their child's school work, such as report cards. In 2006, seven in ten off-reserve first nations children aged 6 to 14 were reported by their parents to be doing very well or well in school, based on their knowledge of their child's school work. These findings were similar to those for children aged 6 to 14 in the general Canadian population.
On slide 20, the study also looked at factors: factors associated with perceived achievement at school among off-reserve first nations children after holding constant other factors such as gender and age. The study found that factors associated with relatively high perceived achievement at school included--the slide lists these, but I will just give you a few--getting along well with teachers or classmates, having parents who were strongly satisfied with school practices, and reading books every day. Factors found to be associated with lower perceived achievement were: having missed school for two or more weeks in a row during the school year, having been diagnosed with a learning disability or attention deficit, or having parents who had attended residential schools.
We also released two articles, one on Métis health and one on Inuit health. I will just give you some very brief highlights from those and then conclude the presentation.
On slide 22, respondents were asked to rate their health in a five-point scale ranging from excellent to poor. This is a standard question that we ask in many of our health surveys. In 2006, nearly six in ten, 58%, Métis aged 15 and over reported that their health was excellent or very good, the same proportion as in 2001. This compared to 62% of the population of Canada who rated their health as excellent or very good.
Turning to slide 23, in 2006, just over half, 54%, of all Métis aged 15 and over reported that they had been diagnosed with a chronic condition, about the same proportion as was reported in 2001. The most commonly reported chronic conditions among Métis adults were arthritis, rheumatism, high blood pressure, and asthma. In all three cases, rates among Métis were higher than they were in the general population after standardizing for age differences.
Finally, in terms of health care utilization--slide 24--Métis aged 15 and over were slightly less likely to have seen a family doctor in the 12 months prior to the survey, compared with the total population of Canada.
I'll just give you a couple of similar highlights on Inuit health and chronic conditions.
Slide 26 shows the percentage of Inuit and of the total population aged 15 and over who self-rate their health as excellent or very good. For all age groups, a lower proportion of Inuit rated their health to be excellent or very good than was the case for the total population.
The most frequently reported chronic conditions among Inuit, on slide 27, were arthritis and high blood pressure. The rates were about the same as those for the total Canadian population, after differences by age group were controlled for.
In terms of health care utilization, on slide 28, Inuit were less likely than others to have contact with a doctor. This was true for Inuit in all age groups. Few Inuit communities have a resident doctor. The point of first contact with the medical system is with a nurse. Inuit requiring the services of a doctor are usually flown out of their community for treatment in a larger centre.
Finally, we were asked just to speak briefly of our relationship with the First Nations Statistical Institute, the FNSI. I know you're going to have a presentation today from the chair of FNSI. I'll just talk very briefly on this. In terms of the relationship, the relationship is outlined to some extent in the legislation, the First Nations Fiscal and Statistical Management Act. That states that FNSI will work in cooperation with Statistics Canada to ensure that the national statistical system better meets the needs of first nations and the government. As well, the chief statistician is an ex officio member of the FNSI board of directors. FNSI will play an important role in the national statistical system. Both FNSI and Statistics Canada will work together, building on their respective strengths to improve statistics for first nations.
That concludes my presentation. On the very last page, there are links to other information on our website where you can find more detail on some of the analysis I presented today. Thank you.
:
First, thank you very much, Mr. Chair and committee, for the invitation to come and present this morning. It is wonderful to be here, but I have to extend the apologies of our vice-chair, Judy White, who was intending to be here. Unfortunately, she was coming in from the east coast and was stuck yet again at another airport. I think this was the third trip when she has tried to get out to somewhere other than the east coast and couldn't make it, so I am passing along her apologies to the committee.
I'll introduce Carla Di Giusto, who is one of our staff members for the First Nations Statistical Institute. She is here to assist.
I don't have a written presentation for the committee. I thought I would give a verbal update as to where we are as an organization.
The First Nations Statistical Institute, or FNSI, the acronym most people refer to us by, is a brand-new organization. Last year at this time we did not yet have a full board. We've only had a full board and been legally constituted as an organization for one year. I thought I would take a few minutes of your time to give you an update as to where we are, where we have come from, and our relationship with Statistics Canada.
As I mentioned, last year at this time we had yet to have our full board appointed. I was appointed in the spring of 2007, and I'm a part-time chair. A year later the board was fully constituted, and we have met four times in the last year to get the business of the organization up and operating; that is, to become legally constituted as an organization, to pass our bylaws, to appoint our officers with the requirements in the legislation, to get our audit committee up and operating, and essentially to get us to the position where we could develop and then pass our first corporate plan, which we did. We put that into the Treasury Board submission process. Our corporate plan and Treasury Board submission went in front of Treasury Board in November of last year and we received our funding this year. We are now in the process of developing and passing our second corporate plan and putting that into the Treasury Board submission process as well.
Up until this point in the development of FNSI, we have received interim funding from Statistics Canada and the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, where they were expending moneys on behalf of FNSI. We have secured our own budget only recently and are operating with that.
From the perspective of accomplishments of the board to date, the board has been very active to get us up and operating. Again, it's unique to be a crown corporation and not to have been an organization before. There wasn't an organization in place where we just changed the name to FNSI. We are essentially starting from the ground up. There was no infrastructure, no organization, and the staff we have been working with--and we have three or four staff at this point--have been on loan from other organizations through various measures within the government.
Essentially we've accomplished everything we have with a very limited budget, a small number of staff, and no outside consultants. We are a very active and a very small organization, but one that, at this point, is just starting to build the organization with its own budget and to look into our future development.
Looking to the future, our next big task is to hire our chief statistician. Under the legislation, the First Nations Fiscal and Statistical Management Act, the chief statistician first has to be hired in order for us to then hire our staff. Until then, we're still essentially an interim organization with interim staffing arrangements. Once our chief statistician is hired, and that will be a thorough and transparent national competition, we can then start hiring our staff and become operational as an organization.
In the meantime, the board and the staffing that we do have on an interim basis are very active in building the organization, building the crown corporation, in order to ensure that when we get to the point of hiring our chief statistician, the organization will be in place and everything that we require will be there for us, as an organization, to meet the challenges that we find in front of us.
It has been a very active year for the board, in summary. We have, I think, accomplished a lot with a minimal amount of funding, with a very small number of staff and with little outside assistance from consultants. We've had our full slate of four board meetings in one year to pass the corporate plan and get it accepted into the Treasury Board submission process.
We do have in front of us, as a board, a number of very important challenges in building the organization. Our next board meeting is to take a breath somewhat and go back and look at some of the things that we had to rush through as a matter of necessity to get to this point, such as what the organization will look like and the details of how we will work with our partners such as Statistics Canada, Indian and Northern Affairs, the Assembly of First Nations, and other organizations that we will be developing strong partnerships with.
That is a very brief update of a newly formed crown corporation that has a very active board and has accomplished a great deal in the last year to get us to the point that we are at right now.
Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members.
The question has three parts. I'll respond to the first part. I wasn't involved in the lead-up to the creation of FNSI, so I have to rely on the record as much as anybody else. In the creation of FNSI and outside of that, I think there were a number of discussions about the nature of the information that first nations had access to or that they could use.
We as a board took that background, and when we looked at that question of what is the purpose of FNSI, what is our mandate, it was in more of a positive manner and we said, “Well, whatever has gone on in the past, we are here to be a mechanism to build better and stronger relationships with first nations. We will do that by improving the communications that occur between first nations and the other partners that we work with as an institution.”
As we know, the world works on information, works on data, and we said, if we could, in our role as FNSI, improve the communications between those who are generating the data, whoever that might be, and those who are receiving the data or using the data, either first nations or organizations on their behalf, we would do so, and then we took that as being our mandate in the very positive way of saying that our role here is to build better and stronger relationships with first nations.
The second part of the question concerns the specific mandate we have. That's the philosophical approach that we bring as an organization. Our specific mandate has two components under the legislation. The first component is to support, essentially, economic development on first nations territories, on reserves across Canada. The First Nations Fiscal and Statistical Management Act has within its purpose the ability for first nations to tax real property interests and to then take that and pool those reserves in order to issue a bond on the public market to fund the infrastructure. We are there to support those first nations and those three other institutions under the legislation to ensure that there is up-to-date information for that bond issue.
Under the legislation, we also have another component to our mandate, which is a much broader one, to look at all other issues surrounding first nations data and information, not just with respect to those first nations going forward under the legislation, for that bond issue.
The third part to the question is that when we look forward we know we'll be revising our vision in going forward with that. As I said, we do have very good relationships with all our partners. For example, as Jane was mentioning, the Chief Statistician of Canada is on our board as an ex officio member, and we do meet on a regular basis to ensure that we have strong communications and that our efforts as we go forward will be meshing one with the other.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Welcome to our committee, to all our witnesses. I'm going to take the first part of the seven minutes for some questions for Statistics Canada, particularly around some of the health data that are contained in your presentation. Then I'll move to some questions for FNSI.
I should make the pre-emptive statement that I'm relieved that this government seems to be on the right track when we look at our accomplishments so far and what we propose in the economic plan. Our job, of course, is to shape policy around a qualitative analysis of the quantitative data that's here. Our priorities in the areas of education, training, housing, infrastructure, and maternal child health seem to be on the right track, but I want to make some sense of a few of these pages.
Some of it builds on Mr. Russell's line of thinking. If we go to page 14, we have what I would consider a fair degree of satisfaction, even if it is perception, with health facilities. Perhaps, Cathy, you could comment on where that satisfaction might come from. Does that include services? What does the word “facilities” mean, because 77% of the people surveyed there had a good or excellent or very good perception of the services in their community?
Before you answer that, I'm going to pull in pages 26, 27, and 28, because they round out our analysis with respect to a couple of interesting points in terms of health services for Inuit people and their degree of satisfaction. I think the statement could be made that the fact that we've identified increases in certain disease processes, particularly high blood pressure, which is more often a symptom of another disease process, means that access to services has to necessarily be improved in the communities because we're identifying more of those. Whether it's diagnostic or access to some kind of primary health care, there may in fact be an improvement and more comprehensive care. Do you have any data on the satisfaction about that care to the extent that it might be different on page 14 as the question is asked?
I ask these questions for some very specific reasons, obviously. I spent eight years working as a nurse in isolated communities across the Arctic and several provinces. I can say that the access to services, particularly around prenatal services, work-ups for diabetics or for even looking at diabetes, and the advancements we've made in a number of communities to getting things like telopthamology services, portable services in communities like Pikangikum, Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, and Muskrat Dam, and KO Telemedicine has in fact improved the access to services in those communities. Quite frankly, as a nurse practising the extended role and for nurse practitioners, which I know is a growing profession in those communities, there is increased access to services, and these support it, although it may not be obvious.
I'm sorry for that rather lengthy question. It may only require a short response. Could you comment on that?