Social Policy in Ontario

Ottawa must do more for Indigenous children

Posted on February 18, 2016 in Equality Debates

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TheStar.com – Opinion/Commentary – Canada will never be the country it was meant to be as long as denying support to the most vulnerable children remains government’s default position
Feb 18 2016.   By: Charlie Angus

As I read the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal’s damning ruling that denunciated Canada for its long-standing racial discrimination against Indigenous children, I couldn’t help but think of the recent funerals I have attended for Indigenous youth who had given up hope and committed suicide.

In fact, as the ruling came down late last month my office was trying to cut through the bureaucratic red tape of a young Cree teenager’s tragic and brutal death so that the family could bury her body. She may become yet another statistic in the list of 600 plus young people who have considered or attempted suicide in the northern part of my Ontario riding since 2009.

Even at the height of regional suicide epidemics we see a bureaucratic lethargy or indifference that is chilling. There is nothing accidental about a culture of discrimination that has been entrenched since Confederation. Time after time, Health Canada and Indian Affairs turned down pleas for mental health services and suicide counselling.

The tribunal may have ruled on the discriminatory application of child welfare services, but that is just one example of the systemic mean-spiritedness that runs through every department that deals with Indigenous Canadians.

In the provincial systems, when a non-Indigenous child is found to be at risk, whether from poverty or neglect, child welfare workers have two choices: provide in-home support or, in certain extreme cases, remove the child into foster care. In the vast majority of cases the former is chosen because it has been long known that working with the child and family in the home environment creates more stability and improved childhood outcomes.

And yet for Indigenous children on reserve the standing practice of Indigenous Affairs is to incentivize the removal of children from the home. Just as shocking: the former deputy minister of Aboriginal Affairs, Michael Wernick (now Canada’s top bureaucrat), told a parliamentary committee that the cost of providing support in the home for an Indigenous child was $20,000. The cost of removing the child from the home was five times greater — at $100,000 per intervention.

Rather than providing cheaper care that keeps families together and produces better outcomes for a child, we are choosing to spend more money to take children from their families and create discriminatory outcomes for Indigenous Canadians. No wonder there are now more children in government “care” than at the height of the residential school system.

The numbers of children who have fallen through the cracks or died in the child welfare system should make any parent in this country weep. And yet bureaucrats continue to come before committees to shrug their shoulders when asked about solutions.

So the question is: Where do we go in the wake of this ruling?

What is clear is that Canada will never be the country it was meant to be as long as these patterns of denying support to the most vulnerable children remains part of the operating culture of government.

Federal departments have been preparing for the Human Rights Tribunal to rule on this matter for 10 years. There are steps they can take immediately. For example, simply end the long-standing pattern of saying no to the most basic requests for child health care. This parsimony is codified right down to the level of denying handicapped children access to proper wheelchairs, prescription medicine and emergency dental surgery.

As Cindy Blackstock, the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, who fought this tribunal case on behalf of the children says, “the days of saying absolutely no to the needs of Indigenous children must be replaced with a culture of saying absolutely yes.”

But making the transformation from a culture of deniability to a culture of accountability will require major investments. There is a budget coming up and it will be the first budget of this new government. This is a once-in-a-mandate opportunity to reverse entrenched systems of discrimination in Indigenous education, child welfare and health.

Hope and change are important, but money and action are needed now to truly improve outcomes. With meaningful investments that we know are needed now, with a simple fulfilment of our obligation to Indigenous communities, I hope my community — and our country — will see fewer funerals for our youth and more school graduations to celebrate.

Canada’s future and our children deserve no less.

Charlie Angus is the NDP Indigenous Affairs critic and Member of Parliament from Timmins-James Bay

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/02/18/ottawa-must-do-more-for-indigenous-children.html >

Tags: budget, ideology, Indigenous, participation, rights, standard of living, youth

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