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Results: 31 - 45 of 126
View Leah Gazan Profile
NDP (MB)
Yes, that's perfect.
Thank you so much. I wish I had a lot of time, and unfortunately I don't.
Madam Camille, since the announcement of the national housing strategy in 2017, the federal government has promised an urban, rural and northern housing strategy. However, there still is no strategy. In my riding, 70% of individuals experiencing homelessness are indigenous and over half were in child welfare.
Given that those experiencing homelessness are mostly indigenous, why do you think the government keeps failing to prioritize the human right of housing for indigenous people?
Carol Camille
View Carol Camille Profile
Carol Camille
2020-11-19 16:04
I believe that concerns the ownership and responsibility of having to deal with our past and bringing it forward. Housing is central to healing from the traumas of the past. I think that once that acknowledgement is out there and we start working on it, there is an opportunity for things to change.
There is never enough money to put into it, especially when it comes to healing. Healing is the very depth of what is needed to answer some of the housing questions of all our indigenous communities and organizations.
It's really challenging when the housing project comes out and there is no strategy for it. Indigenous housing needs to be—and I've heard it said here already today—indigenous-led, indigenous-run and indigenous-operated for indigenous people, because that is where we will get most of our answers.
I hope that answers your question.
View Louise Chabot Profile
BQ (QC)
Thank you.
You mentioned the migration of members living off-reserve, which accounts for 20% of the need.
What problems or challenges does this cause?
Lance Haymond
View Lance Haymond Profile
Lance Haymond
2020-11-19 17:15
Well, it causes an increased demand in a community that already has huge housing needs internally. With the young demographics that we have, we see new family formations happening quite quickly, so the demand inside the community is already large. When members want to come back and live in communities, normally they get put on a waiting list, and they will wait in some instances for years—
Lance Haymond
View Lance Haymond Profile
Lance Haymond
2020-11-19 17:16
—unless they have the financial ability to move in the direction of home ownership, which is also an important aspect. Housing is not just social housing. We need to have a spectrum of housing that meets the various realities of communities.
In some communities close to urban centres, you will see that the vast majority of their stock is home ownership, but the further you get away from those urban centres, the more reliance and dependence on social housing increases; it's proportional to the distance away from major centres.
Often people leave because of poor housing situations, but after a while living in the city—as Madam Hache mentioned, with the inherent risks that come with moving to cities—these people want to come back to their home community for culture, for safety, and just for the reality of.... Do you know what? As an indigenous person, it's hard to live in a city after you've spent the majority of your life living in a first nation community.
View Adam Vaughan Profile
Lib. (ON)
Right.
In terms of your building projects, have you ever built housing outside of your reserve?
Lance Haymond
View Lance Haymond Profile
Lance Haymond
2020-11-19 17:30
We have not. No.
View Adam Vaughan Profile
Lib. (ON)
Not in Montreal or in Val-d'Or nearby, say, or in any of the regional centres?
Lance Haymond
View Lance Haymond Profile
Lance Haymond
2020-11-19 17:30
No. Again, it's mainly because the financial resources are not enough for us to deal with on reserve—
Lance Haymond
View Lance Haymond Profile
Lance Haymond
2020-11-19 17:30
—and again, it's really hard to extrapolate and provide services to your off-reserve population when they're spread across the province and across the country.
View Michael McLeod Profile
Lib. (NT)
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I did have a few more comments and questions.
First of all, in the north we don't have reserves, but we have indigenous communities. The community I live in is 95% indigenous, but it's not a reserve. We have a lot of band councils. I think almost every community has a band council, and we have 33 communities. If there are first nations in the communities, there's a band council.
A number of programs have come forward that we're struggling to access, as indigenous governments are trying to put in applications.
First of all, in any of the programs that involve cost-sharing, there are limits to what they can do if they don't have the resources. Under the co-investment fund, we've seen no applications approved under the carve-out for the Northwest Territories. The shelter initiative also needs ongoing operating funds that, in other parts of the country, would come from Indigenous Services Canada.
There is a program that I think is called the ministerial loan guarantee. I want to ask the representative from Indigenous Services about this. This program was set up in 1966 and it was designed to help indigenous communities off reserve to access programs, to do initiatives in the area of housing, but we haven't been successful. We have not been able to get one project approved. Could you maybe tell me why that might be? Is there something in it that doesn't allow the Northwest Territories indigenous governments to be able to access that fund?
Chad Westmacott
View Chad Westmacott Profile
Chad Westmacott
2020-11-17 19:57
I thank you very much for the question.
The ministerial loan guarantees were created predominantly because first nations needed the ability to access financing and markets. Due to the fact that they were on reserve, there were elements within the Indian Act that prohibited the use of the lands for collateral, so that is why most of the ministerial loan guarantees have been directed towards first nations on reserve.
In terms of the specific questions about the access to ministerial loan guarantees off reserve, where they are on Crown lands, that's a question I'll have to get back to you on.
Éric Cardinal
View Éric Cardinal Profile
Éric Cardinal
2020-11-17 11:05
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning to all the members of the committee.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify before the committee. I am appearing as an individual, but also as vice president of Acosys Consulting Services, a company that provides services to indigenous organizations, communities and businesses. By the way, I want to say hello to my friend and the firm's president, David Acco.
We have been supporting a number of first nations councils in their management of the COVID-19 crisis for a few months already. During the first wave, we saw a fairly extraordinary reaction from various communities, which took the gravity of the pandemic very seriously and which, at the same time, embraced their responsibilities like true local governments. We have seen a number of communities adopt measures different from those adopted by governments and municipalities. For example, most Quebec first nations closed their borders much earlier than it was done elsewhere. We have also seen first nations keep some services and activities closed, while the province was announcing their reopening.
Therefore, during the second wave, we can expect those communities to reimplement stricter measures. They will obviously have to be supported by the federal government, through things like financial assistance, in accordance with their needs.
When I visited the committee last June, I talked to you about the Mi'kmaq nation of Gespeg, which had received very little government assistance because it is not a reserve as defined in the Indian Act. However, even if the first nation has no community to manage, its council still has responsibilities toward its members, just as other first nations governments do.
Since the beginning of the crisis, the Gespeg council has, therefore, adopted measures necessary to reducing the impact of the crisis on its members. Gespeg, like many other communities in a similar situation, has effectively found itself in a blind spot of assistance programs. That situation has still not changed. Clearly, programs must be adapted to better meet all the community needs in a fair manner for all indigenous citizens.
Where this hurt the most was in terms of economic impact. As in the case of many indigenous communities, Gespeg's economy is based on fishing and tourism, two sectors that have been hard hit by the pandemic and the lockdown measures. However, assistance is not arriving as it should be. That is what I would like to stress today because, during this second wave, the government will have to be even more mindful of the impact on economies in indigenous communities. Subsidies and financial support programs are not the only things being talked about when it comes to helping their economies.
There is another very simple way to help the communities' economies without it costing the government any money or hardly any money. It is simply a matter of ensuring that indigenous communities and businesses can benefit from their fair share of public contracts.
Acosys has the privilege of supporting the Indigenous Business COVID-19 Taskforce, which brings together the leaders of a number of national indigenous organizations: the Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers, better known under its acronym CANDO; Pauktuutit Inuit Women of Canada; the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada; and the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Businesses, known under its initialism CCAB. That team provides the Canadian government with advice and strategic input on two key topics.
First, it is a matter of identifying, engaging and....
View Adam van Koeverden Profile
Lib. (ON)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the ministers for joining us today. Thank you to a couple of people who subbed in as well for this extraordinarily late meeting this evening. I'm grateful to say that I am joining you from the sacred territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and I'm grateful, again, to be re-engaging in this important work.
My question is regarding friendship centres and how we are caring for indigenous people in urban and suburban settings. I know that my colleague and friend MP Pam Damoff has recently engaged with a local group in Halton to discuss this. There are implications for COVID, and beyond COVID, I think, but the more services we can provide to indigenous people in urban and suburban settings, the better.
I suppose that's a question for Minister Miller, and potentially Minister Bennett, but I'd love to hear about the progress.
View Marc Miller Profile
Lib. (QC)
Thank you so much for that important question, because it is a testament to the challenges we faced and the strict policy and legal authorities we all faced within our departments and how we've all had to think a bit outside the box in order to address where the vulnerabilities are expressing themselves, and that includes the 50% or more indigenous population that lives “off reserve”. More often, the typical iteration of that is large urban centres like Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton, but it is also the reality in places like La Loche, where we saw one of the largest outbreaks. This is something that's near and dear to MP Vidal's heart, because I know of his engagement in ensuring that proper resources were deployed in those communities.
We have acknowledged that challenge, because those vulnerabilities exist, but when you're talking about intricate overlapping jurisdictions, obviously there's an execution challenge in the delivery of health care, which is primarily and exclusively, in those cases, the jurisdiction of the provincial or territorial governments. This has been a challenge within the strict authorities of the funds that we appropriated.
We knew from the very beginning that $15 million dedicated to “urban supports” was wildly insufficient, which is why we procured $75 million to distribute across a wide network of organizations and grassroots-based organizations that are really doing some of the key work in keeping people safe, whether that's food security, cultural supports, or keeping doors open. I think of the Native Women's Shelter of Montreal, which is doing incredible work in keeping people safe, alive and well surrounded during this pandemic. I look at some of the mobile supports in downtown Toronto, which I think Pam was instrumental in announcing and pushing for. This is the result of advocacy across parties. There isn't a single party that didn't approach me to say, you have to do more for indigenous communities that are in urban settings. It has yielded results in areas that I mentioned previously, in supporting harm reduction models in various forms, whether it's a wet shelter or other supports for people who are perhaps not getting a safe supply, or the food security I mentioned earlier.
These are all elements where we see what I call a “jurisdictional hole”, where the federal government has not been present, and provincial and territorial supports, for whatever reason, have not been there. COVID doesn't check the Constitution before it infects someone, and where we've seen it, it goes after those who are most vulnerable. The indigenous communities that came together, the Métis, Dene.... La Loche is an incredible example of a very alarming spread at the outset of COVID, where 200 people were infected in a community that has had its challenges, but they rallied together with an emergency response team. We supported it with financial supports, and they were able to stamp it out, and that's amazing work.
In part, it is the federal government's response to a very tricky jurisdictional question where we could not close our eyes to it, but also because of the advocacy of voices that go across party lines. I think we need to keep going together in lockstep on this issue, because we're not out of the woods on COVID specifically, and there are needs that are, we must acknowledge, unmet, and we are not meeting them currently, whether we look at ourselves or at the provincial governments.
Thank you, Adam, in particular, for your advocacy, because I know how you've interacted with our.... This isn't a throwaway thank you; this is a real thank you and I mean it, in every single thing you do, because I know you've been passionate about this.
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