SCYR Committee Meeting

SUB-COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND YOUTH AT RISK OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT AND THE STATUS OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES

SOUS-COMITÉ DES ENFANTS ET JEUNES À RISQUE DU COMITÉ PERMANENT DU DÉVELOPPEMENT DES RESSOURCES HUMAINES ET DE LA CONDITION DES PERSONNES HANDICAPÉES

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, November 21, 2001

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[English]

The Chair (Mr. John Godfrey (Don Valley West, Lib.)): Let me begin, because I expect that colleagues will drift in from the vote, as is their wont. They first of all have to remember where the room is, and this is always challenging for us.

I will bring this session to order.

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I'd like to welcome our witnesses today and to remind them of the context of what we're up to. What we are undertaking is a study of aboriginal kids, principally on reserve in the first instance. We're largely focusing on the zero-to-12 population.

Our approach is to try to understand what each department is doing about this particular population. We are starting to hear from individual departments, and we're delighted to welcome people from the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development today. Our long-term strategy is to try to put all this together and see how it works. If you have any ideas about that, you can let us know.

I'd like to welcome two representatives of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development: Dan Beavon.... Have I pronounced your name right?

Mr. Dan Beavon (Acting Director, Research and Analysis Directorate, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development): It's Beavon, as in “heaven”.

The Chair: Beavon as in “heaven” and as in Welsh. And Kathleen Campbell—I think I have that one right.

I don't know which order you have decided to go in, but we'll be delighted to hear from both of you. How do you want to arrange your time?

Ms. Kathleen Campbell (Director General, Social Policy and Programs, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development): I think our guidance had it that Dan would go first, so he will.

Mr. Dan Beavon: I was asked to speak for five minutes. I'd just like to thank you first for the opportunity to come here and speak.

I brought with me three different research studies we've recently completed. Two of them we haven't even put up on the Internet. They just came back from translation.

The first one, which I think you'll find the most interesting, is one we contracted out to Jeremy Hull. It's on aboriginal single mothers in Canada. It contains a lot of detailed information on both the on-reserve and off-reserve situations and on all aboriginal groups, and it has comparisons to the general Canadian population as well. I'll just give you some highlights of that in a couple of minutes.

The other two studies are ones we've done internally. One is on the mobility and migration of registered Indians. I provided that one because I saw the notes from your meeting last week, when Doug Norris from Stats Canada spoke. This study has a lot of pertinent information with respect to mobility of first nations people, including of course their children.

The third study is one on ethnic mobility and the demographic growth of Canada's aboriginal population that one of my staff published in a journal. If I could, I'll just speak for a minute on that one first. That study has a lot of relevance because it's important to understand how one defines aboriginal populations. If one looks at the growth of the aboriginal population from 1971 to 1996, the aboriginal population grew by about 252%, whereas the non-aboriginal population in Canada grew by only 32%.

Now, that tremendous growth is not as a result of just fertility alone. A lot of that growth has to do with ethnic mobility. By ethnic mobility, what I mean is how people change their ethnic affiliation. This is an example of where basically, from one census period to another census period, people who in the first census period did not identify themselves as aboriginal have changed their identity in the next census period. This is why we see tremendous growth, particularly in the Métis population.

The relevance it has with respect to anything you're doing when you're looking at aboriginal children and youth is that you'll see astronomical growth rates for these populations. But it's not just a question of fertility.

In the same way, with respect to the migration study I've provided you, there's often a myth that there's a huge growth in the urban population as a result of aboriginal people leaving reserves and going to urban centres. The reality is that for the last 30 years there's been a continuous net population movement back to reserves. There's an incredible amount of churning back and forth in terms of people going back and forth between reserves and urban centres.

The migration study also shows you some of the indicators of potential problems with respect to the urban population itself, which probably has the highest mobility rates anywhere in Canada as a segment of the population, whereas the reserve populations are quite stable. The movement from reserves is lower than the mobility of the average Canadian. Basically, aboriginal people have an attachment to their home communities and are content to live there for a variety of family reasons. I just provided you with the migration study to dispel some of those myths.

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If I could just go back to ethnic mobility for one minute, one of the reasons it is important to understand this concept is that it means it's very difficult to make any comparisons among aboriginal groups over time because you're not comparing the same group from time A to time B to time C. It's not the same cohort. The cohort changes because it's a different group of people who have identified themselves as such, which is one of the reasons you don't see any of this stuff in the literature.

The other thing too is that often you see statistics showing substantial progress in different areas for aboriginal groups. That could be quite misleading in that often the progress is not so much due to improvements in program or policy, the improvements are often a function of a different cohort.

Take differences like higher education. If you follow a cohort, say, from the 1991 census in the 25-to-30 age group and follow that same group in the next census five years later, you're now looking at the 30-to-35 age group. Theoretically, if you follow a cohort, the number should be smaller in terms of total population because some will have died. But the reality on the aboriginal side is often that you'll see those cohorts grow by tremendous amounts, by 100% or 150%. What it means is that you're not comparing the same group from time A to time B. What that means is that new people have come into those groups, bringing different social and economic characteristics with them, and often these people who've been coming in have different levels of fertility and education, which compound the complexity.

Now, if I could just move on quickly to the more pertinent study for your committee here, the one aboriginal single mothers, the executive summary will give you all the stats. There are a lot of detailed numbers in the report, so I'll just give you a few of the highlights.

Twenty-six percent of aboriginal families were single mother families, whereas on the non-aboriginal side it's about 16%. It's even higher off-reserve. In the urban centres it's up to 34%. There are two types of families. You can look at families who have children and families who don't have children. If you look at, say, mothers with children, one-third of all aboriginal children are in single mother families, whereas on the non-aboriginal side it's one in six.

If you look at registered Indian children, there are over 50,000 registered Indian children who are in single mother families. That's 25% of all the aboriginal children—this is the zero-to-15 population—whereas only about 14% of non-aboriginal children in Canadian society are in single mother families. Again, it's much higher in urban centres, where about 40% of registered Indian children in urban centres are in single mother families.

There are some very interesting dynamics as to why there are so many single mothers in the urban centres, and we're in the process of doing other research, looking at the reasons for this phenomenon right now. We suspect some of them might have to do with the lack of division of property. There are no division-of-property laws in the Indian Act, so often when families break up in the first nations communities, the home is in the name of the male through a certificate of possession. When a family breaks up, often the women and children are forced to leave the reserve because there's not enough housing on the reserve. Perhaps this is the reason, but we're pursuing research in this area right now.

I know I'm running out of time here, but I just have a couple of other little facts here to throw out. Just in terms of income, aboriginal single mothers had an average income—this is from the 1996 census, and this is for the year 1995—of around $17,700, whereas for non-aboriginal single mothers it was around $21,300. If you look at a typical Canadian family, a husband-and-wife combination, their combined income was around $61,200, so that's a tremendous difference.

These numbers are even bigger when you factor in the size of the families. You have to remember that the aboriginal fertility rate is much higher. On-reserve the fertility rate for aboriginal women is about 3.1 children per woman, whereas for a non-aboriginal woman in Canadian society it's about 1.6. So it's basically double. So when you look at income figures like this you also have to factor in that they have more children as well.

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I'll stop there, because all the basic numbers and statistics are in the report itself. If you have additional questions I'd be happy to answer.

I'll turn it over to Kathleen.

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: I'm speaking to the actual programming that takes place.

First of all, the focus of programming for children insofar as the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development is concerned is on first nations children on reserve. There are other programs by the federal government that you are no doubt aware of, and you will no doubt be hearing about them from HRDC and from Health Canada, and their programs are off reserve. Insofar as we are concerned, all our programming focus is on reserve.

The main programs we have are child and family services and the national child benefit reinvestment. And in that sense, for both these programs, one of the purposes of the program is really to provide the comparable provincial-type services. So we're acting in almost a provincial way on reserve in terms of children's programming.

In addition, DIAND or INAC funds child care programming in Ontario and Alberta and the aboriginal head start initiative in New Brunswick. These programs are, in a sense, a little of an anomaly. We got into them through federal-provincial agreements. And in general, they're augmented by similar types of programs in HRDC and Health Canada. I can speak in more detail to that a little later, if you like, but we're not the major players in either of those areas; nor are we the driving forces.

We also provide funds for elementary education as well as some pre-school education programs.

I'll speak about the two main programs, which are child and family services and the national child benefit reinvestment.

First of all, the goal of the child and family services program is to support first nation communities in providing culturally sensitive child welfare services, comparable to those available to other provincial residents in similar circumstances. Some of the key words there are “culturally sensitive” and “comparable to those available to other provincial residents”.

We have funded services for children, but they have been provided by the provinces. It wasn't until 1991 that we started putting in First Nations Child and Family Services, mainly because first nations felt that the services needed to be more culturally relevant. They were getting very concerned about children who were leaving their cultural environment through adoption or other particular ways, such as the foster home. So they were lobbying for services that were more culturally appropriate.

The way the program operates now is that an agency, the First Nations Child and Family Services agency, will be created on reserve for either a single reserve—although we discourage that, because there usually isn't quite the economy of scale required—or for a number of reserves or bands together. And this agency is licensed by the province so that it provides the same level and types of services that the provinces do, but it is funded by DIAND and it's funded through a particular funding formula that allows for various operational and maintenance expenditures.

The agencies are mandated to provide the full range of protection and prevention services for children on reserve, plus adoption services in most regions. The extent of the support for prevention services for children or families on reserve is really dependent upon the availability of funds. Since the beginning of the program the number of agencies has increased from 34 to 105, so we're gradually getting full coverage of all reserves with First Nations Child and Family Services.

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We recently undertook a national policy review of the child and family service agencies. It was a fairly extensive review. It took us about 18 months. We did it jointly with the Assembly of First Nations and with representatives of the First Nations Child and Family Services agencies. We looked into a number of areas. There are several recommendations for improvements in the current programming that came out.

There are two complex issues that are receiving a great deal of our focus right now. One is how do you balance the services between being comparable with those that are of the province and being relevant to the first nation community that's being served? I think this is a challenge that faces us in all of our social services. Under one rubric we're really trying to provide comparable services and comparable levels of services, but really for the services to be most effective they also have to be tailored and relevant to the population it serves. That's a continuing challenge for us.

The other issue is aside from maintaining that balance, how do we actually follow what the provinces are doing? In various provinces it's a bit of a pendulum effect. Every so often provinces put a focus on protection of the child because they're terribly concerned that any child might have some injury and perhaps even die because of a lack of intense supervision or supervised care under child and family services...to the other side, whereby you are trying to focus your attention on the whole family. So rather than taking a child into care to physically make sure they're not harmed, you're trying to take care of the child within the family environment itself, and therefore ensure that the child is protected within the family environment.

There is a lot of external assistance given in terms of whether there's a need for programs related to abuse of drugs or alcohol or programs related to anger management, or even extra parenting services required. So the provinces themselves move back and forth along this scale.

We in DIAND try to follow on one side of our mandate, where you're trying to follow that particular pendulum in each region, which means the regions can vary in the kinds of services they deliver.

On the other side, we would also want to listen to what first nations themselves have to say on this. Certainly the feedback we get from first nations at this particular point is they're very much more concerned about ensuring that they have care for the child within the family environment. And they want care for the whole family, not just for the child itself.

So this, among several other recommendations, came out of the national policy review. That issue is the largest one as far as we're concerned. We have an advisory committee, again, composed of DIAND and AFN and first nation representatives. We're going further into the recommendation and assessing the pros and cons of how we manage the system in order to respond to those particular needs. That is it for the child and family services program.

The other major program is the national child benefit reinvestment. I'm not sure exactly how aware everybody is of the national child benefit itself. The benefit is a tax credit coming from the federal government that goes to low-income individuals. Then the entity—be it the province, the first nation, or DIAND—that is managing the social assistance program does not give out to the parent that portion of SA that they are receiving from the national child benefit. So the parent still is receiving the same amount of money, but instead of receiving it all from the same source, which used to be either DIAND or a province, they now get part of it from the national child benefit and part of it from the source that gives their social assistance.

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The part that is not given out by that particular agency—be it the province, the first nation, or DIAND—is retained and used for proactive programming for children under certain guidelines that come under the national child benefit. Mainly, the broad guidelines are to alleviate poverty and to encourage attachment to the workforce.

When it comes to first nations, although those are still the same guidelines, we work with first nations communities to look at attachment to the workforce in the longer term. Indeed, things like providing places for school work to be done so that the education is achieved, so that people can attach themselves to the workforce, for example, would come within those guidelines. Learning work-related skills through volunteer work within the community so that you attain a certain amount of those kinds of skills would also come within the guidelines.

So most of the first nations communities, one way or another, now have a sum of money that is related to the national child benefit. And we are working very closely with first nations communities to have them develop the particular guidelines they would like to see for this amount of money.

It doesn't always come to a very large sum in the community, because that sum is dependent upon how many people are on social assistance and the rate they've been getting. So some communities have very small amounts, but they've still been remarkably innovative in the kinds of programs they've developed. Some of them have used the funds to augment other programs, such as child care or the aboriginal head start initiative. Some of them have used the funds to augment various nutrition programs or cultural attachment programs. To our initial view, they have been quite successful.

Why do I say they're quite successful? Everybody wants to know that. There are two things that lead to my saying that. We have done an interim evaluation. We are required under the program to follow all of the same requirements of the national child benefit program that are in place for the provinces, also. So we have undertaken an interim evaluation that is just in its draft form now, but we have some early results. Within the next couple of years we will undertake what is now called a “summit of evaluation”, too. This gives even more definitive answers to whether this is of benefit or not.

So in the interim evaluation we undertook the evaluation and we undertook a literature review. There were several site visits to first nations communities and case studies.

In conclusion, what they found is that the flexibility of the national child benefit reinvestment plans do respond to regional and local needs, and this is a valuable feature of the initiative. They are citing the fact that there are variations in the programs across the country. This is evidence to the fact that there are varying kinds of needs across the country.

They did note the importance of linking national child benefit investment initiatives to other programs with similar objectives, and I think that's become a very strong theme in all children's programming.

When you hear about, if you haven't already, the child care programs from HRDC, the aboriginal head start initiative from Health Canada—these two that I'm speaking of here—you begin to recognize there are four or five different kinds of programs going into first nations reserves or communities to a very similar, targeted clientele. So obviously there is something that can be done in the future about helping those particular programs to be more coherent and to work a little more together.

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In terms of improving the operations of the program, the evaluation certainly recommended better communications between ourselves in DIAND and first nations on clarifying the respective roles and responsibilities for the reinvestment initiative. I think that just speaks to the need for better communication and more clarity in what some of the programs have been, and will probably lead into more clarity in the longer run of the guidelines themselves. The initial phase has been a little more innovative, in that we were listening more to what first nations thought they may need rather than dictating what we thought they might need.

Obviously there are several programs that are very similar in nature, and I think we can begin to put them together and develop guidelines to better help first nations in further reinvestments that they would like to do.

I want to speak to one other aspect that isn't in the written document I provided to you. It is that aside from the formal evaluations that we're doing with our audit and evaluation people, this interim evaluation and then the summative evaluation, we are involved with first nations in helping them do self-evaluations. This is because the national child benefit reinvestment fund was really some of the first moneys that first nations had over which they had a wider degree of policy and program discretion. They made up their minds as to where their priorities were within the community and how the money should be spent. The next step, of course, is to be able to assess how effectively that is being spent. So we're investing with first nations in a program of self-evaluation.

I guess we started last year, or the year before last, with 19 first nations and had them go through a self-evaluation process where they looked at their program and learned the skills of evaluation in order to determine if they were meeting their own goals. There were 18 the first year, then last year there were 50 first nations that engaged in this, and we're anticipating doing it again with approximately the same number. This year we're beginning to also put in place a train-the-trainers type of activity so that those who have learned this self-evaluation process can pass it on to their colleagues.

If you like, I'll stop there for the moment. I would be happy to answer any questions you may have in this regard.

The Chair: Thank you very much. I think what I particularly like about the presentation is the ying and the yang, if I may put it that way, between the research part and the program part. I think we'll be able to get quite creative with that.

Ms. Skelton.

Ms. Carol Skelton (Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, Canadian Alliance): First of all, thank you very much for coming.

In my riding of Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, I have a large first nations population.

I want to ask you a question. The ECDI states: “Governments will work with aboriginal peoples of Canada to find practical solutions to address the developmental needs of aboriginal children”. What does that mean?

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: This is an HRDC and Health Canada initiative, in the sense that it's led by those two ministers, early childhood development. My understanding of the statement is that there are two aspects to it, two ways we work with them. One is for aboriginal children off reserve. Because it is a federal-provincial agreement, they are agreeing that they should be taking a closer look at what is appropriate for aboriginal people off reserve and the federal government and the provincial government will work jointly to do that.

It means slightly different things when it comes to us in DIAND, because of our focus primarily on reserve. The way we're interpreting it is to make sure we're working with first nations to ensure that they have access to programs that are comparable with those being provided off reserve, but also with the added complication of making sure that it is harmonized with the provincial program. I am using the word “harmonized” because again one wants to make sure the program is unique enough to the first nations community that it is meaningful to them, but there are certain parameters that you don't want to go beyond because you do want to make sure it is similar to that in the province also. So it will vary from province to province.

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Ms. Carol Skelton: In the 2001-2001 main estimates one of the key results planned for this year is to support first nations children and families through enhancement of the NCB reinvestment initiative. What do you mean by that?

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: We've had relative success with the national child benefit reinvestment, but each year there has been more money put into it, because as there is more money invested in the tax credit there are more returns to reinvest. We are working very closely with first nations to ensure that those additional moneys are effectively invested in the community. So we're enhancing them in terms of their own skills in getting feedback from their self-evaluation.

We are trying to bring a little more coherence across the country with the program too. As I was saying, in the first few years it was really in response to what first nations needed, and it was a learning exercise for both sides, but now we want to bring a little more coherence in so that we have more channelled programming and we know what we're doing.

The more recent issue is also trying to ensure that it is working in closer cohesion with the other children's program. I'm hesitating over my words because “integrated” is the word we're using, but I think that what we're working at is that it be integrated at the community level insofar as it is possible. So those would be the enhancements.

Ms. Carol Skelton: You talked about the evaluation of programs. It's been going on for two years, and you're looking at another two years?

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: Yes.

Ms. Carol Skelton: How long is the whole evaluation period?

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: Of the two evaluations, in terms of the self-evaluations, we're hoping it will be an ongoing program.

Ms. Carol Skelton: But the department....

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: And that's why we're doing the train-the-trainers bit, so that the first nations can continue indefinitely doing this.

In terms of the evaluation, it's a similar schedule to that for the overall program, and there are two phases. We're doing the interim evaluation now, and I believe in two years we do the summit of evaluation. And then I assume there will also be the requirement to do further evaluations after we see the results of both evaluations. We would have a continuing program of evaluations as things move on.

Ms. Carol Skelton: You were talking about the fluidity of the people moving from the reserve to city and back and forth, and you're stating that everyone believes that our populations in the city are growing in large numbers. Do you have any numbers for the cities? Have they stayed pretty well the same then?

Mr. Dan Beavon: We have numbers actually in the migration report itself where we highlight the ten top cities in Canada. What we do is we show the inflows, the outflows, and we subtract to get the net flows. For instance, for the 1996 census, if you take cities, almost all the major cities in Canada lost registered Indians, I think, except for Saskatoon, Thunder Bay, and Ottawa. Ottawa-Hull had a slight net gain, but almost all the others lost population.

That's actually true for the general population as well. It's what they call a “census metropolitan turnaround”, that cities in general decrease in population. We've been tracking this now since about 1966 in terms of the net flows. We also broke it down for the other aboriginal groups as well.

Ms. Carol Skelton: Thank you. That's enough for now.

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[Translation]

The Chair: Ms. Guay.

Ms. Monique Guay (Laurentides, BQ): I would like to ask two brief questions.

First of all, welcome to the Committee. I would like to know if you have any problem in administering some programs because of overlaps with various departments. How do you implement the programs in order to be effective? I know that Health Canada has some programs, you have some and other departments have some. How do you make sure that you all work effectively together?

I was quite surprised, at our last meeting, when StatsCan, which by the way did not have any recent statistics to provide, appeared before us. Their most recent statistics dated back to 1996. And their people kept telling us that it was very difficult to collect data because of the various programs of various departments. Could you perhaps elaborate on this and tell us how this really works?

[English]

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: Yes. One of the reasons the stovepipes were created and became as rigid as they were is that it is actually easier for a department to have a stovepipe. So in a way, if I can break your question down a little bit, for a single department, the stovepipe isn't the issue; it's a natural way to absolutely control where your money is going and how effective that money is. We actually do have statistics within the department that tell us that. It's when you step back and you find out that there are two or three departments doing this that you realize that from the community point of view it's not very effective, nor from the federal government point of view writ large.

I don't want to almost split hairs, but from the departmental point of view, it's not a problem. But obviously from a larger perspective it is a problem, and it should be addressed. The reason it's so complex to address is that it's not in the natural best interest of a single department to suddenly confuse itself by working with all of the other departments too and getting that muddled up.

So it does take a special effort, a special federal effort, and it speaks to the need for horizontality within the government in order to find a way for all of the departments to work together that way. I think it is a very real issue, but there are natural bureaucratic barriers to overcome in order to do that.

I have to say a few words about statistics. I'm fond of them. In terms of the programs themselves, we do tend to keep administrative data on how each program is doing. Most of them require some sort of reporting on how a project is doing or how a recipient is getting money and what they're doing with the money. So we do have a bank of administrative data that tell us that part of things.

The real difficulty in the longer term is to either assess out of that kind of data or get other data that tell us what the overall impact on the community is and the longer-term results. That is a problem. Statistics Canada only covers the population on reserves every census year for the census, and it's only done one special survey on the aboriginal peoples once. I think this is being repeated this year.

So in terms of the future, particularly when first nations are taking a more active role in running the programs themselves, there really is a need for that statistical feedback for them as well as ourselves to see how well these programs are doing and what their combined impact is. So I think, yes, I'd say you've put your finger on a very real issue.

[Translation]

Ms. Monique Guay: It seems that everything is more complex when dealing with First Nations, even getting statistics, when you have to deal with issues like on-reserve and off-reserve children. Anything seems to be so difficult. It is difficult to collect data and accurate information. So, it is also difficult for you to develop programs that will be effective everywhere, or to follow the implementation of your programs. This is a concern.

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Here is my final question. You referred a while ago to the work of the various provinces, and to their own priorities. In Quebec, we will generally prefer getting the child out of his or her environment for immediate protection and then deal with the family to see if any solutions are available that will allow the child to go back to the family.

There are some places where, as you said, the family is the priority. That is what we do, when it is possible, but it is not always easy. In our province, as soon as we feel that the child is in danger, we take him out of the family environment to protect his health and his safety.

So it is not very easy to harmonize everything. Could you give us some examples of programs which are really very effective in some provinces and which could be implemented elsewhere? I'm not talking about general implementation across the country, since that would not be possible, but it would be interesting to have some idea about that.

[English]

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: Most of the time we've found that the most effective programming is one in which the people have a sense of ownership of the program and they have a sense of the relevance of the program. And I think that's certainly the idea behind the establishment of first nation child and family services agencies that are run by first nations people, by boards of directors that are first nations people and related to their community.

At the same time, how we effect the harmonization to ensure that they are held to a certain professional standard is that they are licensed by the province. So whatever the province holds to be the professional standard for that particular area, the first nations agency would have to adhere to that also. But at the same time, they do provide a sense of cultural relevancy. They would understand a lot of the issues behind it, and they might be able to assess the individual situations a little more thoroughly as to the safety of the child.

[Translation]

The Chair: Is that all for now, Ms. Guay? You know that, in principle, Ms. Guay was to sing at the opera tonight, but the production was cancelled.

[English]

Mr. Tirabassi, it's your turn to sing.

Mr. Tony Tirabassi (Niagara Centre, Lib.): I have no questions.

The Chair: Yet you have a great voice.

Let me then weigh in, if I may. First of all, I'm delighted that you're both here, because it suggests some very interesting juxtapositions. I haven't had the chance to read the paper on ethnic mobility, but it's a fascinating concept, this notion of self-assigning categories, which I suppose is what it's about.

I'm sure it's in the document, but can you tell us, Mr. Beavon, what's the difference in weighting between the assigning factor, if you like, versus the fertility factor? What order of magnitude are we dealing with here?

Mr. Dan Beavon: That's a pretty interesting question. It's actually in the paper by Eric Guimond, who is one of my staff. He's completing his PhD in demography at the University of Montreal, and that's the whole substance of his dissertation.

The difficulty is you cannot measure ethnic mobility; you can only infer that it's there. It's a very controversial subject, even among demographers. A lot of demographers won't acknowledge it because they can't measure it, because basically you only have a few factors related to growth. You have natural increases, which is births minus deaths, and you have migration, and usually you're talking about international migration.

We have a closed population with respect to the aboriginal population here in Canada, so what Eric does—this is Eric's work—is he estimates the components related to births, the components related to deaths, and he also factors in under coverage for the census in terms of error within the data itself. And then he compares one census period to the next census period. He does this for the different aboriginal groups. And what happens is that, lo and behold, the growth is way beyond what one could expect in terms of these other factors. And what he does is he calculates a dimension he calls a theoretical maximum growth. He takes the highest fertility rates ever recorded on the planet in history, and he subtracts the lowest mortality. That gives you your theoretical maximum in terms of increase, which is around 8%.

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So you have a theoretical growth of 8% per year. If you look at some groups like Métis, I can't remember the exact numbers, but they're up in some provinces in the 20% or 30% range. Basically, that's how he infers that you have this ethnic mobility; it's by what you can explain.

The Chair: As a follow-up question, would I assume that the greatest ethnic mobility in terms of self-assignment—if I could put it that way—is in the Métis category because you have a much more rigid definition for what a status Indian is?

Mr. Dan Beavon: That's correct.

The Chair: What's the weighting between those two categories, sir?

Mr. Dan Beavon: What happens, and you can look at it.... We're just mortality...looking at population projections. This is an area that's quite controversial, because population projections that have been done for aboriginal groups have never factored in ethnic mobility. We have a chapter in the book we're just doing right now—it will be through ABC Press—that deals with this issue.

For the registered Indian population the growth is very simple to project, because we have an Indian registry, which is basically a birth and death record database. That's the only real database we have other than the census. This allows us incredible precision with respect to doing population projections for the registered Indian population. You factor in fertility and death, and you can model out-marriage, which is important in terms of status Indian inheritance rules, so we can do very precise estimates on the registered Indian population. You also have to factor in Bill C-31 reinstatements, which we can do as well.

For these other groups, it's really a story of out-marriage. That's the whole story of the aboriginal population here in Canada. We've gone through hundreds of years of intermarriage. When you talk about, for instance, aboriginal families, 44% of aboriginal families, in terms of couples, have a non-aboriginal spouse. The question is, how do the kids in the next generation define themselves?

When you look at projections that were done for the RCAP, for instance, they had identity projections that were done for the first time using the 1991 census data. Their Métis growth estimates were out by a factor of—I can't remember—around 350%, while for the non-status population they projected growth but actually had a negative component, so a lot of non-status were switching over and identifying themselves as Métis. Part of what we have to understand about that process is that when you have programs, rights, or privileges associated with belonging to an ethnic group, people will change their identity in order to get those benefits.

This is not a new concept. We see the same thing historically. After World War II, the German population in Canada did not identify themselves as such in the census because it was not chic to be German. We've been doing international research, and you see the same phenomenon in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States with respect to this phenomenon of ethnic mobility.

When you look at the growth rates for the indigenous populations of this country, it almost looks exponential. At some point it will have to peak, because eventually you'll run out of people who have some aboriginal ancestry.

The Chair: I gather your mandate and Ms. Campbell's mandate are a little different. My impression is that your research mandate is to cover the entire aboriginal population, however defined....

Mr. Dan Beavon: Not quite. When I started with Indian Affairs four and a half years ago, the primary focus was on the on-reserve population. That's where a lot of our research was done. Since we're very limited in terms of the data that's available, we have to rely a lot on the census.

It only makes sense when we do our analysis to have comparative groups, so when you look at the migration paper we've done or when you look at the aboriginal single mothers study, it doesn't cost us any more to break out comparison groups. We can then compare on and off reserve, we can compare by different geographical regions, rural, urban, and reserve. We can compare for the different aboriginal groups, Métis, status, non-status, and Inuit, and we can compare them to non-aboriginal people as well. It doesn't cost us any more to do that comparison, and it provides you with a much more in-depth analysis when you have those comparisons built in.

• 1620

The Chair: Wouldn't it also give you a more dynamic systems approach—that is, dealing with mobility not in the ethnic self-definitional sense but in the backwards and forwards sense, between the reserve and an urban area? I can believe there may be a stable base population, but I could also believe there are seasonal migration patterns. Are you in a position to capture that?

Mr. Dan Beavon: Yes, and again we rely a lot on the census for that, selecting the census-type question of where did you live five years ago, or where did you live one year ago?

What we can do is construct a matrix of every community in Canada of five years ago and every community now to see how many people have moved from here to there or from there to there. We've done all sorts of different case studies of individual cities as well, such as Thunder Bay, Regina, Saskatoon and Edmonton, and you can see the different flows in and out of those cities by different groups. It helps a lot when we're doing that research.

It just shows again how heterogenous the population is. Often people have this view that the aboriginal population is very homogeneous, yet in different cities like Winnipeg it may be composed of 44 different first nations. We can tell you what concentration there is from which communities.

There are patterns to that migration, too. Sometimes you see anomalies that may be related to health reasons. We saw one anomaly in Winnipeg where there was one community way up north that had a high concentration of people in Winnipeg. On the CBC news we saw a documentary and found out that in that community there's a high degree of diabetes and they didn't have fresh water in that community to run the dialysis machines. So Health Canada is flying all these people for dialysis treatment to Winnipeg at great expense each year. You can see that reflected in the statistics.

That's the difficulty in interpreting the statistics. Every community and every city has its own story in terms of those flows.

The Chair: Does your research branch deal with the evaluation of programs as well, or is that different?

Mr. Dan Beavon: That's different. Our unit is basically trying to do forward-looking policy research, strategic research. I'm not involved in the evaluation or in basic operational research.

The Chair: Do you talk to each other?

Mr. Dan Beavon: All the time, though not as much as one would like because we're both basic people.

We're trying to lay the ground work for empirically, directly driven policy decisions.

The Chair: One of the programs Ms. Campbell talked about is the national child benefit, and it would seem that there are some statistical challenges in even understanding the on reserve. Ms. Campbell knows these arguments, as we've had them in a different context. It's challenging even with respect to the on-reserve population, which in some ways is more stable in terms of the number of families that are eligible, since the chief definition of eligibility is whether you file an income tax return. Since many first nations people don't file income tax returns, how do we know what percentage of people deserve it, as it were, according to their income? What percentage is getting it? Is that one of your problems, or is that an analysis problem?

Mr. Dan Beavon: It's a challenge for both of us. A lot of people who earn income on reserve and who don't have to pay income tax still file, I understand, in order to get tax benefits.

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: In that particular instance it's not a statistical problem so much as an operational issue, because the recouping of the national child benefit only occurs when people apply for social assistance. In that case they only get that amount less the amount of the national child benefit. At that operational point the administrator asks them if they are getting any other income, and if they say no, then they are asked, are you not getting the national child benefit allowance? If they say no, then they are told, here's your piece of paper, go apply for the benefit; you're not applying for the tax; it's not a tax. If they still refuse, then it is another issue. We anticipated when we were implementing the program that there would be a number of people who would refuse, but we haven't heard of any particular individuals who have.

The Chair: You're saying you don't have to file a tax form even saying zero in order to get the national child benefit if you're on reserve?

• 1625

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: You're allowed to say zero in the sense that you are just filing for the benefit.

The Chair: But you actually have to send in a tax form, even if it says zero, just to qualify for the benefit?

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: I'd have to consult a technical reference to say whether you can apply just for the benefit versus whether you are technically filing a tax return. I don't know. Do you remember, Art?

The Chair: He's looking it up.

Do you want to come forward and talk, Art, and identify yourself? That would be helpful.

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: This is Art Dedam, who's director of income security reform. I might in fact be asking him because of his previous knowledge of the tax system rather than because of his current responsibilities.

I apologize if I've put you on the spot.

The Chair: Welcome, Mr. Dedam.

Mr. Art Dedam (Acting Director, Income Security Reform, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development): It's not the first time Kathleen has put me on the spot, by the way.

Generally speaking, we've seen an uptake in filing for tax benefits in first nations communities going back to introduction of the GST rebates. We've done some anecdotal work in terms of trying to determine the level of uptake in first nations communities, and what we've determined is that it is in fact very high, probably in the high nineties, 90%. So yes, the technically correct approach is to fill out a tax form, write zero, and fill out the attached form to receive the benefit and the supplement.

Mr. Dan Beavon: Let's just provide a research perspective on this. This is an area we've wanted to explore for a couple of years with respect to using Revenue Canada data in analysing income tax returns. The difficulty, of course, is that we don't have an identifier that identifies someone as aboriginal on the form. However, there are other ways of doing it, and one of the ways would be with postal codes.

The Chair: Postal codes?

Mr. Dan Beavon: Yes. For instance, Stats Canada does all sorts of analysis at Revenue Canada, getting data on the basis of postal codes. They aggregate postal codes. The difficulty is that first nations communities don't have unique postal codes. Some do, but most of them share it with an outer-lying town or area. Yet I've spoken to people at Canada Post, and they have almost an unlimited number of postal codes they can assign. They give postal codes to individual businesses, yet they don't feel behoved to grant unique postal codes to first nations.

The Chair: That would seem a simple enough thing, and it wouldn't seem to be violating privacy or anything else, as far as one could judge. Is there some downside to doing that?

Mr. Dan Beavon: I see a downside.

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: It's not necessarily a downside, but I think it would be interesting, in the context of a study like that, to define exactly what a community is. Traditionally, from the Statistics Canada point of view, communities get defined through the census on a certain day every five years according to a certain geographical boundary.

If you were to look at what a first nations community is, given the very mobility factors we've talked about before, you would find that their community may.... One may want to think of defining the community in terms of those people who consider themselves a part of the community and who have their homes there, because for a great many reasons they travel out of the community for employment from time to time, for schooling from time to time, etc.

When you only consider the community at a particular point in time as to who's actually living there, you're bound to come up with a different image of what the success or non-success of the people in that community is than if you consider all the people who more sociologically or psychologically consider themselves as part of that community.

If you have a lot of people, for example, in a community who move off into very successful jobs—and I've recently heard the example of the people who go down to New York and who were working in the towers at the time, but they regularly travel back and forth. They are part of that community, and when you talk about them statistically as part of that community, it gives a much different impression—probably an impression of greater success—of what that community is if you don't take that into consideration.

• 1630

The Chair: To which the statistical research answer is....

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: We can't do that yet.

The Chair: By the way, I'm just going here until somebody raises their hand. I'm finding this interesting, so don't be bashful.

Ms. Carol Skelton: Yes. I'd like to add something with Saskatchewan. Your current policy is that the provinces and the territories are responsible for the children off reserve. Is that correct? Is that right?

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: Yes.

Ms. Carol Skelton: Are there active plans to improve the coordination that we have now? Are you looking continually at improving, especially in my city of Saskatoon, with the population growing as it is? This is astonishing, to me anyway. I knew it was a large movement, but I didn't realize it was so large. Are you working extensively on cooperation between the federal government and the provinces?

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: There are two aspects to that. One is that, in general, under SUFA—the social union framework agreement—there has been a general undertaking for greater federal-provincial cooperation, to work in a more coordinated and cooperative fashion in all social programs and to look at how we could be doing that better. The other is at a more practical or technical level among various programs. This very much depends, quite frankly, on the region and the degree of rapport that has built up among the people who are delivering the programs in the regions.

It is certainly our intention to work more closely with the provinces. Sometimes it is more successful and sometimes it is not.

Ms. Carol Skelton: Okay.

When I asked the question before about how long the evaluation was taking, I really didn't get a definite answer, like “We're going two years at a time”. How long have you been working on the evaluation of your programs, the total overall? If you're saying two years, it's going to go on another two years. How long have you been working already on this?

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: Let me give the answer, and then we'll see whether or not....

The program has to be evaluated on a certain schedule. The first evaluation is an interim evaluation and the second one is a summative. I guess they have a four-year frame for looking at the summative evaluation, but before that happens there's the interim evaluation.

The interim evaluation took approximately five months to do, and it's just finished now. We have a draft report. I don't think it has been released yet, but it will be as soon as possible. Then the next schedule is a larger evaluation. So I'm not quite understanding—

Ms. Carol Skelton: That helps, because I was just kind of looking....

Mr. Chairman, may we have that draft report when it comes out? Is that possible?

The Chair: Is that possible? Is the draft report a secret document of any sort?

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: No. It's not a secret document. We are in the process of making sure it is released. It's going to be released in due course. I don't know how close it is to release.

The Chair: Can you file that away to do it through the clerk? That would be very helpful.

Ms. Carol Skelton: I would appreciate that very much, Mr. Chair.

The Chair: Perhaps I can return to a question. I am now focusing on the statistical challenge of children. Mr. Beavon, maybe you can help us out here a bit, or Ms. Campbell.

I think it was yesterday or the day before that the Minister of Human Resources Development released the first baseline report of early childhood development services for which the Government of Canada is directly responsible, and there you have it.

I have just seen the press release. I haven't read the document yet. Am I to assume that is simply a listing of the various kinds of child care and prenatal nutrition programs, all that sort of thing? How does that relate to the aboriginal population, to aboriginal kids? Do you want to describe what that document...?

• 1635

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: Yes. The purpose of the document is to respond to our obligations, the federal-provincial obligations under the early childhood development agreement that went forward in September of 2001, I guess. It was signed by the provinces and the federal government.

We've been involved with this particular report because we've provided the description of programs that are available to first nations on reserve. Again, it is primarily driven by Health and HRDC as the overall lead in the early childhood development programming area, and they have described the programming otherwise available for all children in Canada.

The Chair: On the subject of ECDI—you know where this is going—would you remind us of the obligation the Government of Canada has made to have something specific in the early childhood development initiative for aboriginal kids? What are we committed to and where do we stand with regard to the implementation of that commitment?

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: We are working very hard to come up to the obligations, I guess, or commitments that were made in the Speech from the Throne. The Speech from the Throne mentioned working with first nations communities to ensure children's programming there, but also to respond to the needs around aboriginal head start and FAS, fetal alcohol syndrome, FAE. So that is pretty well all I can say at this point.

The Chair: This is a question for Mr. Beavon. Can you tell us where aboriginal kids fit into the national longitudinal survey of children and youth? You might want to just remind us what that is about and then tell us whether there's a missing component with regard to aboriginal kids.

Mr. Dan Beavon: I think basically there's a bigger story than that. Basically, there are all sorts of surveys that Stats Canada does in between the census. They have to keep all those people busy doing other things. But the reality is that when they do most of these surveys they exclude first nations communities and they exclude the north, and they do that primarily because of cost factors.

So when they have studies like the national longitudinal survey of children and youth or the national population and health survey, all sorts of big surveys where there'll be all sorts of very important information to toss about, such as the conditions of aboriginal children and youth, their sample sizes are quite small, because they've excluded first nations communities in the north. So they're only capturing the aboriginal population that's basically urban, in the cities. Even then, depending upon the way they do their surveys, there's often sampling bias in those as well.

So you can take surveys like the GSS, the general social survey, which rotates different themes each year. If you do something like a victimization survey, it's done by telephone. A lot of these aboriginal people in some of the urban centres are living in substandard housing or residences and they don't even have access to a phone, so they're missing them in those surveys as well.

There are ways of getting around these problems. They could over-sample aboriginal populations or set up some sort of stratified sampling scheme for first nations communities, but it's a question of cost, I imagine.

The Chair: This is a question that goes to the policy. The very interesting challenge that Ms. Campbell raised about how you.... I think you kept marching up to the word “harmonization” and pulling back from it with regard to provincial policies. You used the example of the pendulum swinging between, as it were, the rights of the child versus the integrity of the family, if I can characterize it that way. But presumably there are other kinds of policy swings—for example, the Government of Ontario reduced welfare payments quite substantially and has a particular view of the world.

I guess the question is, given the particular challenges of an aboriginal population in the first place, why would we worry about harmonizing ourselves with 12 or 13 different regimes potentially, with the provinces and territories? Why wouldn't we try to do the best possible job we could, understanding the differences there are for the aboriginal population? Ultimately, it would be the gold standard for this sort of thing. Why wouldn't we try to simply get it right, without trying to worry about what bizarre notion of social engineering the various provinces are going through at any given moment, not mentioning by name, say, British Columbia and Ontario?

• 1640

You can ignore the last part. It was purely political.

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: There are a couple of reasons why we should maintain some harmony with what the provinces are doing. One of them is certainly not to induce what one would call “undue factors” for migration on or off reserve.

The Chair: You mean incentives that would encourage—

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: Yes, something that is so remarkably different that it is an actual reason and it's the only reason...something that is putting an artificial incentive into moving on or off reserve. There are arguments that there are so many incentives one way or another that perhaps this isn't a big factor, but I think it is a certain factor.

There is certainly a very strong reason for us not to be below what is offered to other citizens in Canada, because first nations people have a right to that level. The only argument for not being the absolute gold standard, I would imagine, would be the cost, as long as you were maintaining a certain degree of harmony with the province.

The Chair: Let me do a question for Mr. Beavon.

I think I heard you say there's a trend, over time, to move back to reserves or that the—

Mr. Dan Beavon: For the last 30 years there has been a consistent pattern of net migration back to reserves.

The Chair: What are the various explanations? Obviously it might be the gold standard of social services, but I hardly think so.

Mr. Dan Beavon: The difficulty is in determining the reasons for moving. The census doesn't ask why people move. However, the 1991 aboriginal peoples survey did ask that question.

In the paper I provided you with I give an analysis of the reasons given why people move. Basically, there are four types of movement: there is movement from on reserve to off reserve; there's off reserve to on reserve; there's reserve to reserve; and there's off reserve to off reserve, such as from one city to another city.

There's a graph in the report I gave you. We excluded the on reserve to on reserve, the first nations people moving to other first nations communities, because the numbers are really small. So if you look at the reasons, for instance, why people move from a city back to reserves, the number one reason is for family reasons. The number two reason is for better housing. A lot of people aren't finding good housing in cities. I'm trying to remember what the other reasons are. They're in the graph.

If we look at the other situations why people move from on reserve to the cities, the number one reason, again, is family. Another reason this time is education, because young adults can only go to post-secondary education off reserve. That's where the universities and colleges are. So they're not going there for employment. And the other reason is for housing again.

So 25% are moving on reserve for housing and 25% are moving off reserve for housing.

The other one that's really interesting is when you look at why aboriginal people move from urban city to urban city, and that's where the group is most dynamic. Again, the number one reason is family reasons, but this is the first time we see employment as a reason. Basically, they're moving from city to city looking for employment, and they're still not finding it, which is indicative of all the statistics you see with respect to unemployment.

Ms. Carol Skelton: I have one question, and this mightn't be fair. The department found that there is a group of approximately 200,000 seniors in Canada who aren't receiving their guaranteed income supplement. Do we have any figures of how many children we might be missing or we're not touching with these programs?

• 1645

Ms. Kathleen Campbell: In terms of the national child benefit itself, as Mr. Dedam mentioned, we're fairly sure it has virtually full coverage of the tax credit. Of the programs that are run by the communities, again, I think the programs themselves are community-driven. They may be targeted to certain audiences, like a school lunch program or a certain cultural program. So it's not a sense of the full coverage of all the children in that community, but there are benefits to all the children in that community.

In terms of the child and family services, it's very difficult, as it is for a lot of areas, to find out what the actual levels of abuse are, be it on reserve or in any community. Dan might want to talk here too about a study he has under way. There is no doubt there is unreported abuse also. So in that sense of non-coverage, we're not sure what that level is.

I have had arguments with my friends in Treasury Board when you see that the incidence of children being taken into custody under program care has gone up substantially over the past three years, as have the costs related to this. I'm claiming it as a sign of success, because the objective of the program is indeed to provide protection. Therefore, given that the services are now culturally oriented, we are finding more children in need of that kind of protection and that kind of assistance. In the long run, they would like to see the ultimate goal of the program to be that protection is no longer required. So that requires more investment on the prevention side.

Ms. Carol Skelton: Do you have a comment, Mr. Beavon?

Mr. Dan Beavon: I think that Kathleen was referring to some of the current research we have in the field. We're doing a large victimization study in British Columbia. I'm doing it through a SSHRC grant. I'm working with the criminology department through Simon Fraser University.

Right now they are in the field in Vancouver. They've already interviewed about 600 aboriginal people in the downtown east side of Vancouver. There's a juvenile component in terms of incarcerated aboriginal youth. They've been tracking 80 aboriginal youth in terms of their recidivism rates, looking at the factors associated with their predicament.

For instance, provincially, half of the incarcerated youth in B.C. in their study are aboriginal. A lot of them are there for prostitution-related offences, drugs. Again, a very substantial number of the young males are aboriginal as well. As part of the study, we're tracking a cohort of these youth. I think some of the preliminary numbers show, for instance, that in a six-month period, over 80% of them have recidivated. Again, they are dependent upon resources available in the community in downtown Vancouver's east side.

We're about to start this week an aboriginal homelessness component to that victimization study. It's all preliminary right now, because they're in the field and it's ongoing. The results won't be out for another year.

I've seen some of the preliminary numbers from analysis, and it's staggering in terms of addictions to alcohol, crack cocaine, heroin. It's a question of what resources are available to these people. Part of the study is not so much focusing on the actual rate as it is focusing on the actual services available to them and how they use these services.

• 1650

The Chair: I'm anticipating that Ms. Skelton and indeed the committee, when we're up to our numbers, will want to see that and also want to stay in touch with you, even before you have done the full-blown analysis.

It's the intention of this subcommittee to focus our first line of inquiry on on-reserve programs for children up to 12. After the break we're going to do a second phase. We'll be looking at the cities and off-reserve aboriginal children and youth. We're going to want to know that kind of information.

We would like to develop a working relationship with you, because you obviously have very up-to-date information. We'll try to negotiate something that respects the rules of the game in terms of research and privacy and all the rest of it. I think it's important that we stay in touch on this, because we have a mutual interest.

Mr. Beavon, how do you actually negotiate with first nations themselves about the questions you ask...the way you go at it, all those sorts of issues?

Mr. Dan Beavon: I probably have about 18 different studies that are coming off first nations communities themselves. It has never been a problem. Usually we have a common objective in terms of what we want to look at. I'm not going into first nations communities that aren't interested in partnering with us.

Basically, we put a partnering strategy together. What we'll do is one of my staff will go in and work with one of the chiefs or someone from the tribal council. They will form a little steering committee who will set the parameters for what will be covered in the study. Then we'll hire a consultant to do the actual study. It's guided jointly; it's a true partnership.

I have research going on, for instance, with southern chiefs in Manitoba. We have done four or five with the united Nishnawbe in southern Ontario. I have done research recently with Kahnawake. I'm doing a whole lot of case studies in northern Alberta in Treaty 8 in the tar sands areas, looking at the relationship between governance and economic development, trying to replicate the research in the States done by Harvard University. They have some of their PhD students in the field doing research for me up there.

The Chair: Great.

Ms. Carol Skelton: Do you have anything going on in Saskatchewan right now?

Mr. Dan Beavon: It varies from year to year. Last year we did some case studies on our migration in Saskatchewan. I'm trying to think if I have anything in the field right now. I would have to go back and look. I have so many projects going on.

Ms. Carol Skelton: No, that's fine.

The Chair: Could you perhaps get the answer to us?

Mr. Dan Beavon: Sure.

The Chair: Thank you.

I have a feeling we could be going on for some considerable time, the two of us. Actually we're not admitting there are only two of us. We're claiming the third guy went to the bathroom and he just hasn't returned, because under the rules we're supposed to be three. But I tend to use the rules of the church, when two or three are gathered together.

On that basis, I want to thank you very much for coming. I think it has been a fascinating afternoon. As a research nut, I very much appreciate the complementarity of the presentations and the care you've taken in preparing the material and giving it to us. We're looking forward to continuing to work with you, because we all do have a common objective, which is the well-being of all of our children.

The meeting is adjourned.