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Merci, bonjour, kwe. Hello, good afternoon,
nidijinikàz Claudette Dumont-Smith. I'm Algonquin from the Kitigan Zibi community, located just 90 miles across the river, directly north. So you are in Algonquin territory. I guess I don't have to acknowledge my people for being on my land.
I'd first like to apologize for not being able to come on Monday when we were first scheduled to appear, but we are very short-staffed and there are just so many things happening. But I'm here now, so I guess that's the good news.
I'd like to begin by thanking you for inviting the Native Women's Association of Canada to come and speak to this committee on matters that are crucial to Canada's aboriginal women, their children, their families, and their communities.
The Native Women's Association of Canada is a nationally representative political organization comprising 13 provincial and territorial member associations, known as PTMAs, from right across Canada. Each is striving to improve the social, economic, health, and political well-being of first nations and Métis women of Canada.
Forums like this one today help us to discuss the role that aboriginal women and girls can play in economic development, which is a major area to address if conditions of aboriginal women and girls are to change for the better.
At NWAC we recognize that positive action and concrete measures must be implemented by governments to ensure that women, as well as aboriginal people with disabilities and single mothers, are able to access a wide range of educational and employment opportunities so that they too can benefit from the economic security and prosperity that we have here in Canada.
Violence against women and girls is a major concern and a key priority for our organization. We're always trying to reduce violence directed towards aboriginal women and girls. In particular, aboriginal women and girls in remote communities often experience higher rates of violence and unemployment, lower quality of life, and less access to health care, social services, and other supports. Providing economic opportunities can help to alleviate this situation.
NWAC continues to raise attention to these issues with government in order to promote economic and social development, including better living conditions, to directly benefit the aboriginal women who live there.
In a meeting with Minister in February 2011, the president of NWAC, Jeannette Corbiere Lavell, informed him of our organization's activities in the area of economic development. In 2009 NWAC carried out an aboriginal-specific, gender-based analysis of the federal framework for aboriginal development and found that the framework was gender-blind. It had a heavy focus on sectors where male employment and ownership were strong. It overlooked the importance of the creative economy in building sustainable jobs for aboriginal girls and women. There was no recognition that the usual barriers and obstacles to economic development in aboriginal communities are even more pronounced for aboriginal women and girls, and the guiding principles of the framework failed to take into account the different socio-economic conditions affecting aboriginal women. Moreover, it did not recognize the traditional economic roles that aboriginal women had in the past.
In the same year NWAC developed an aboriginal women's comprehensive economic empowerment development plan. And in March 2010, NWAC invited and led a working session with various federal departments to increase aboriginal women's participation through the federal framework for economic development.
Economic security remains a challenge for many of our women. Accordingly, it remains a top priority for NWAC and we will continue to work to advance aboriginal women's economic security and prosperity.
Recently, budget 2012 announced the investments that Canada will continue to make in aboriginal economic development and small and medium sized businesses. Aboriginal women have a strong role to play in building a strong Canadian economy. Economic security and prosperity for aboriginal women and their families is an essential step for improving the lives of aboriginal people and their communities.
The opportunities for economic development and business growth have never been greater than right now. We must support aboriginal women's participation in both the labour market as well as economic development initiatives across the country as an important part of rebuilding our nations within the larger Canadian economy.
With more than 400,000 aboriginal youth projected to enter the labour market by 2020, aboriginal participation in the labour market will continue to be important. More than half of these youth are girls. We must support them in the contributions they can make.
Corporate Canada is working with aboriginal business and communities, and over $315 billion in potential resource development has been identified in or near aboriginal communities. These investments must benefit our women in order to change the future of our communities as a whole. By building on our women's strengths, we can continue to improve the quality of life and the self-sufficiency of our families and communities.
We need to identify concrete measures and targeted investments to support women in order to ensure that aboriginal peoples benefit as a whole. We have also taken other important steps to modernize and improve federal support for aboriginal economic development. We must ensure that the level of education that an aboriginal woman obtains translates into the income she receives. Economic security and prosperity for aboriginal women must be the goal.
It is clear that partnerships continue to grow between Canada's business community and aboriginal peoples. We just need to make sure that these benefit all people. Together we must ensure that no one is left behind. By supporting aboriginal women and youth, this will be the key to Canada's future economic prosperity.
Over the past several years, NWAC has put forward the following recommendations at the federal, provincial, or territorial levels to improve the economic outcomes of aboriginal women and girls in Canada. I'm presenting them again today. The government should develop microfinancing and business development solutions to support the development of communities and women's and girls' participation in sustainable business. Community and economic development requires long-term strategies—
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Thank you, Madam Chair, and members of the committee.
A recognition of the Algonquin Nation and of all Canadians.... Of all Canadians when they sing “O, Canada, we stand on guard for thee”, they're called back to the central values of our nation, the principles of justice, of fairness, of freedom, and of equality. And they are called there particularly when they go home at night and see the eyes of their own children, knowing that if there ever is a generation that deserves the full enjoyment of those values, it's a country's children.
Economic development theory and practice has told us that a thriving nation can be measured if there's a thriving generation of children, that as a government, the most important economic stimulus that you can provide is investing a dollar in a child. As the World Health Organization has said time and time again, for every dollar invested in a child, a government can expect to save $7 down the line. This $7 can be available for things such as building roads, for health care, for an aging generation, for pensions, for all caring Canadians and citizens to ensure mental health practices. All of those things can be in place. Fail to spend the dollar on the child, look at the child as a way to save money, and you'll still spend those remaining dollars but you'll spend it on prisons, mental health care, and welfare payments.
Just a number of weeks ago, I was reading a report and there's a phrase in there that says:
Let someone hazard a guess as to what year or what century real progress will be made in the equality of [First nations] children.
It was written in 1967. I was three years old.
Successive governments have known about the inequalities of first nations children on reserve in education, child welfare, and other services. Some investments have been made but they fall far short of equality. As the Auditor General found in 2004, and again in 2011, in education, the investments are short. Your own first nations panel on elementary and secondary education found that investments are immediately required to bring first nations students up to the same standard that all other Canadian children enjoy. The Auditor General in 2008, and again in 2011, and the Parliamentary Budget Officer in 2009 found that these same inequalities echo across child welfare.
So how does this inequality happen? Well, as you know, parliamentarians, provincial and territorial laws, child welfare, education, and health all apply on reserves but the federal government is to fund them. As the Auditor General has repeatedly found, the federal government does so to a lesser level than all other Canadians enjoy. This happens across multiple experiences in childhood, and it weighs on the hopes and dreams and potential of a whole generation of first nations children.
The good news is that there's something we can do about it; we need not leave things the way they are. You have the power amongst you to make a strong departure from the parliamentarians who have preceded you and decide that racial discrimination against children is not a legitimate fiscal restraint measure; to decide that there's no room within the Canadian consciousness for a child to be left on the sidelines because of their race; to know that every child should grow up in this country having the same opportunity to start the race on the same values; to know that the Government of Canada as represented by all parties is prepared to truly put children first.
Some people might wonder why these inequalities have gone on for so long. I think it's because in a busy legislative office it's sometimes easy to forget whom it impacts. I'd like to share with you a story of Shannen Koostachin. Shannen Koostachin was born in the year of 2000 in the Attawapiskat First Nation. She was an excited little girl, like any other kindergarten kid, and wanted to go to school. But the only school in her community was closed because it sat on top of 30,000 gallons of diesel fuel. Over three ministers of Indian Affairs across two political parties promised Shannen and her friends a school and didn't deliver. Instead they went to portable trailers set beside the toxic waste dump, separated from it by only a chain link fence. The trailers deteriorated so much that there often wasn't heat in the portables, and mice would eat their sandwiches. There's no money for a library, no money for computers, no money for proper teachers, and no funding for a science lab.
When grade eight came, she believed in the goodness of each and every one of you. She thought the reason you didn't provide her and other first nations children with a proper school and equitable funding for education wasn't that you were bad people. It must be, she thought, because you didn't know how bad it was, that when you heard the statistics about the underfunding of first nations education, you would think it's almost beyond belief in a wealthy country like ours.
So, she organized non-aboriginal and first nations children to send you letters to say this is what it's like: “We're worried about not growing up and getting a proper education, because we want to get jobs, we want to make a contribution to our families and our communities. We know if we don't get that education, we're really going to suffer.” Some of those letters from Canada's children to parliamentarians are in the Our Dreams Matter Too report that's before you.
Shannen was true to her word. She did everything she could to fight for proper education for first nations children, including meeting with the Minister of Indian Affairs and asking for a new school. As many of you know, that request was declined on the basis of there apparently not being enough funding in the Government of Canada to provide a school at that time.
Shannen Koostachin went on to speak to anyone who would listen. She was one of 45 children in the world to be nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize given out by the Nobel laureates. She should be one of our true Canadian heroes. But sadly, it wasn't too long after her 15th birthday, living hundreds of miles away from her family so she could get the quality of education all of you received, that she died in a car accident, never having been treated equally by the Government of Canada. She would have graduated this year.
I will be giving an address at the University of Northern British Columbia, where I'll be receiving an honorary doctorate in law degree. I will dedicate it to Shannen Koostachin for the graduation she was never able to attend. Shannen had wanted to grow up to be a lawyer.
What about child welfare? There are more first nations kids in child welfare today than there were at the height of residential schools. They are driven there by poverty, poor housing, and substance misuse, all factors that we could do something about. As the Auditor General has found, there is underfunding of child welfare services on reserve. Has the federal government made some investments? Yes, but they're at a standard we read about in the Sims report. If investments continue at this very slow pace, it's not unreasonable to think that it will be another 45 years before we will be re-reading this report and wondering why equality didn't happen in child welfare.
Instead, in 2007, along with the Assembly of First Nations, we filed an action in the Federal Court against the Government of Canada alleging that the Government of Canada was racially discriminating against children by underfunding child services on reserve. I tell many people that the day I filed that complaint against the Government of Canada was one of the saddest of my life. I could not believe that in a country that I loved so much this was even necessary.
Over the next five years, the Government of Canada tried to derail a hearing on the merits—not on the facts, not on the substantive question of whether racial discrimination was happening. I think you can agree with me that if confronted with that allegation, if the Canadian government as a whole were innocent, then it should put its cards face-up on the table and let's have the debate. Instead it is pursuing a bunch of legal loopholes. One is that you can't compare, it says, federal services to provincial services. I'm very grateful to say that just a couple of weeks ago, the Federal Court rejected that argument and ordered a full hearing on the facts at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.
Ladies and gentlemen, I don't even think that a hearing is necessary. It would not be necessary if all parliamentarians across all parties decided that today was the day that first nations children would get a chance, that today was the day that first nations children would no longer stand at the sidelines of the country getting less because of who they are, that today was the day we recognized the 700% return of investing a dollar in a child and receiving seven dollars down the line.
There are other questions about best practices and research. The good news is that we know what many of these are, but without the financial dollars to put them in place, they're nothing but spirits in the wind.
As we know from Shannen's experience, there are thousands of Shannens out there right now. Do any of us around this table want to see another graduation day go by where a child who should really be there is somewhere in the spirit world looking down and hoping that we'll do the right thing?
Thank you very much.
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Well, there are 160,000 first nations children, and approximately half of them are on reserves.
The reports I would commend to you, member, are the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report on first nations schools, authored in 2009. He did a rather thorough inventory of the needs of first nations schools in terms of bringing them up to the same standards as offered in the provinces and territories. Of course there's the recent report by the first nations panel on elementary and secondary education, and of course your colleagues in the Senate also just did a report on first nations education. They demarcate, really, where are those areas where investments could be made that would make the most significant impacts for children. In terms of child welfare, there's the Auditor General's report of 2008 and her refresh report in 2011.
As well, a joint report was done between first nations and the government in 2005. The Wen:de report involved over 20 leading experts, including five economists. We wanted to make sure that we were being very fiscally prudent, that we could link every penny we were recommending to be spent with actually good evidence on what happens on the ground in child welfare for children.
Member, I know that you yourself are very familiar with foster care with the work that you were doing in terms of the development of foster care programs, etc., and your own family's commitment.
If you'd like a copy of those reports, we'd be happy to send them to your office.
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I'll just give you a little bit of history, because I was the first health director of the Native Women's Association of Canada back in 2005. We applied for and received funding from the first nations and Inuit health branch of Health Canada to delve into different health topics, such as maternal and child health, aboriginal health human resources, FASD, early childhood development, and diabetes. The issues that were of great concern to aboriginal women were our concern as well.
We applied for project funding. Every year we got the funding and we would develop whatever we could develop. We would raise the awareness of these issues to our constituents and try to address the issues. We have done very well. As a matter of fact, one of our products on suicide prevention was identified—this was for young girls, as a matter of fact—as a best practice last year.
So as I said, we really thought that we would continue this work. We were very proud of our health unit, and consequently we were very surprised when they cut us at 100%. What will that do to the national office? Well, it's one-fifth of our budget. Six of our staff had to be let go. They had to be laid off. That seems to be the end of our health unit.
So yes, it doesn't only impact us at the national level. It's going to impact our constituents as well. When we had our annual general assembly or special meetings throughout the year, we would talk about whatever issue there was and whatever project we were developing. We would bring that information to them and get their input. We would also go to the tables at the national level, where they would talk about diabetes prevention, for example, or maternal and child health. We would have somebody from our health unit there to give their expert advice and to develop better programs and better policies.
There will be a tremendous backlash, I think, on the health of our women and girls.
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Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to thank the witnesses for being with us this afternoon.
I have to say that prior to becoming a member of Parliament, I was a teacher in a public school for 33 years. Following that, I taught for four years on a reserve after I retired. I felt that retirement wasn't for me, that I needed to go and make myself useful. So I went to a reserve and taught there.
Now in my constituency I have three reserves and I am very proud to say that all those three schools have the highest commendations and the highest technology, which I know because I have visited them since becoming a member of Parliament. The school that I taught at had been requesting a new school because they needed some repairs made to it and they were looking for that while I was there those four years, but it wasn't disastrous. There were things that needed to be repaired, like the electrical system and things like that. So I'm proud to say that as soon as I did get here, our government listened to me, and we have a brand new school there that I'm about to open in a few weeks.
These things provide a lot to our children back home on the reserve, and I'm happy and proud to see these kids enjoying such accommodations. It's good not just for the girls and the boys but also for the teachers. It gives them great ambition to go ahead and provide these kids with lots of different programs, which I have seen first hand.
Now of course this new school that we're about to open has breakfast in the morning and lunch at the cafeteria and everything. These are things that students on reserves need to have at their fingertips. They get a three course dinner at this new school for a dollar each. That is a very, very good program being provided by our government. There are some success stories out there, no doubt, with that.
But my question is, why do you see such a big difference from one area to another? I can visit any one of those three schools and be proud about what is going on there, and be proud about the accommodations and the work by teachers and volunteers in the community. Why is there such a big difference from one area to another? Being a teacher, I'm going to be the first to say that I don't like to see boys or girls lose out on a good opportunity for education. But why is it that some areas are doing so well and another has nothing? Is it financial mismanagement? Is there something that our government should be looking at to make things better for all?
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Thank you, member. It's a very important question.
It's one that the Parliamentary Budget Officer asked when he did his review of first nations schools. So we'll make it a particular concern of ours following on your colleague's mention. We'll send you a copy of that report.
What they found is that there was no clear process inside the aboriginal affairs department for deciding which communities receive schools and which do not. That was one of his central recommendations, that there need to be some kind of clear criteria set out.
He found that 50 communities needed schools. As you may know, in Thunder Bay, for example, many first nations children, including some as young as 13, are having to fly down from their communities to go to school . I have an 18-year-old at home and I think many of us have kids. We don't even want to see them going away at 18, let alone at 13. They're getting into at-risk behaviours.
Twenty nine others need substantial repairs, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Even in communities where there are good quality schools, the estimate is that there is underfunding in the basic formula for education—for teachers, libraries, and those types of things—by $2,000 to $3,000 per student per year.
Despite that, in some areas both the teachers and schools are able to do good work. But I think you can agree with me that good public policy is when success is the rule and not the exception. So we need to bring everybody up to that basic standard of equity and I think that it would be worth it for the government to look into how these schools are actually allocated. What are the criteria? How do we ensure that they're going to those most in need?
I think that's a very important question.
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Well, what you say is right: there is more violence in the communities. Overcrowding is an issue, and we know that overcrowding causes violence and mental health issues as well. That's probably why a lot of the young women leave home when they're not ready to leave.
When I say they're not ready, it's that they don't know enough about the outside world, so to speak. But they do take that risk. They leave and we know where they end up. I think you're well aware of the 580 some aboriginal women, many very young, who ended up on Vancouver's east side and they're either dead or missing. I think all of that is interrelated. I think that housing has to be improved.
As for shelters, there are shelters on the reserve, but it's a situation where everybody knows everybody. Usually the communities are small and everybody knows everybody. Are the young women accessing services there? I'm doubtful about that.
I think that where there are no services in the communities for young females.... But as I mentioned earlier, I want to stress that there are friendship centres that are good places, which young women who are leaving their communities should be made aware of and where they can go for services.
I know that the friendship centres as well are very underfunded. I think the government has a prime opportunity to work with the friendship centres and to offer these services to the young women, because the end results are very sad.