The committee met at 12:02 p.m.

[J. Sims in the chair.]

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you, everyone. I know this is a busy week for everyone, even though you are back in your ridings. We did request this meeting, and I’m really, really glad that everybody has worked so hard to make it happen.

Thank you, Jennifer. I’m going to turn it over to you so you can start with your presentation.

My apologies. I’m going to ask all of you to reflect on the traditional territory that you sit on. I am speaking today from the Semiahmoo, the Kwantlen and the Katzie. Every day I’m thankful and delighted that I live in this beautiful country. Thank you.

J. Charlesworth: Good afternoon to all of you. It’s wonderful to see this checkerboard, and perhaps it won’t be too much longer before we’re actually in person together.

I’m really pleased to be with you to continue our conversation around the Excluded report and the experience of children and youth with FASD. I’m particularly grateful and just want to hold my hands up to you for making this a priority and for really leaning in and digging into the topic. The children, the families and the advocates are extremely grateful.

I want to begin in a good way by acknowledging where I am today. I’m on the traditional and unceded territories as an uninvited guest of the W̱SÁNEĆ people and particularly grateful today to be housed by these lands, the stories, the ancestors and the contemporary stewards of these lands.

I want to just introduce who is joining this circle today. First of all, I want to introduce the two deputies, Samantha Cocker and Pippa Rowcliffe. Just to let you know, the wonderful Alan Markwart is semi-retired. It’s his third time trying to do this. He has moved into a new role, and after a nationwide search, Pippa was the successful candidate.

[12:05 p.m.]

You will know her from her work as the executive director of monitoring. It’s just such a joy to continue to be able to work with Pippa in this new role. Sam and I are loving the opportunity of kind of imagining how the three of us are going to work as senior leaders.

I also want to acknowledge that Jeff Rud is with us as the executive director of communications.

Most importantly, I would love to introduce you to — I was thinking about it — three exceptional people, remarkable, fierce, warrior women that I have known and appreciated, in some cases, for many, many years. Leslie Varley, Jackie Brown and Gwen Phillips have joined us, and I’d like to give them an opportunity to introduce themselves so you know who’s in our circle.

L. Varley: Thanks, Jennifer.

Hello, everybody. I am so pleased to be able to join you today from the beautiful Musqueam First Nation, where I am an uninvited guest and have been for the last 20 years.

I am a member of the Nisg̱a’a Nation from northern B.C., and I’m the executive director of B.C. Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres.

J. Brown: Kiʔsuʔk kyukyit. My name’s Jackie Brown. I’m with Ktunaxa Kinbasket Child and Family.

I am seated on the beautiful ɁamakɁis Ktunaxa.

I am a Métis woman and have been with the agency for many years. I really honour my work and the people I work with.

G. Phillips: Kiʔsuʔk kyukyit. Ki’su’k kyukyit qapiniskil. Hu sukil qukni nawsanmiyitki, hiy.

[Good day, everyone. I am feeling good today, yes.]

[Ktunaxa text and translation provided by G. Phillips.]

I’m Gwen Phillips. I’m from the Ktunaxa Nation. I’m also a member of the First Nations Health Council, and I’ve been with that group since the beginning of the transfer process. I’m very pleased to be with you today. I’ve known both Leslie and Pippa for many, many years.

Jennifer, I was very pleased to meet you a number of years ago when you took on this role. Thank you very much for bringing us in today.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you for the introductions.

As we do have new people on, I am going to ask the MLAs to introduce themselves — your name and the riding you represent. I think that’s the best way to do it today.

C. Oakes (Deputy Chair): I’m Coralee Oakes.

I’m joining you today from Lhtako First Nations in the Southern Dakelh Nation.

I’m truly honoured and grateful to be here with you all, and I’m grateful for the work that you’re doing. I’m the MLA for Cariboo North.

M. Morris: I’m Mike Morris. I’m the MLA for Prince George–Mackenzie.

Leslie, I’ve had the pleasure of living with the Nisg̱a’a when I was stationed there with the RCMP back in the late ’80s. A beautiful part of the world there.

K. Kirkpatrick: Hi, I’m happy to here. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us. I’m Karin Kirkpatrick. I am the MLA for West Vancouver–Capilano.

I live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

H. Yao: Hi. My name is Henry Yao, MLA for Richmond South Centre.

I acknowledge that I live, work and play on the traditional and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Kwantlen and Tsawwassen Coast Salish peoples. I thank them for allowing us to live, work and play on their ancestral land.

S. Chant: My name is Susie Chant. I’m the MLA for North Vancouver–Seymour.

I am very fortunate to work, live and learn on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh. Particularly, the Tsleil-Waututh group is within my riding, and I’m beginning to work very closely with them as well, which is great.

[12:10 p.m.]

F. Donnelly: Fin Donnelly. Iyim Yewyews is my Skwxwú7mesh name. I’m the MLA for Coquitlam–Burke Mountain, and I am the Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Aquaculture.

I’m coming to you from the traditional, unceded territory of the Kwikwetlem, Katzie and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, the Coast Salish people.

Hay čxʷ q̓ə siʔem̓.

J. Rice: Hello. I’m Jennifer Rice, and I’m the MLA for North Coast.

I live and work in Prince Rupert, territory of the Coast Tsimshian First Nations. My riding is very large. It’s the North Coast riding, which also includes the Haida, numerous other Tsimshian communities, Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Wuikinuxv, Heiltsuk, Nuxalk. I think I’ve got them all. We actually have a lot of Nisg̱a’a living here in Prince Rupert as well.

K. Paddon: My name is Kelly Paddon. I’m the MLA for Chilliwack-Kent.

I have the privilege to serve on the traditional territories of the Stó:lō people.

I’m very grateful that you all were able to take the time to come today. We have very much been looking forward to hearing from you.

J. Sims (Chair): I’m Jinny Sims, by the way. I’m an MLA here in Surrey-Panorama.

Jennifer, over to you for the presentation.

Consideration of Representative
for Children and Youth Reports

Excluded: Increasing Understanding,
Support and Inclusion for
Children with FASD and Their Families

J. Charlesworth: Thank you so much. Lovely to be with you.

I really want to hold up the three guests that are joining you today. We heard, through Susan, that there was an interest in learning more about community and the impact of FASD in community and what could be done differently with community perspective.

The three people that are joining you will bring different perspectives. They will talk about their work in community. They’ll share stories. They will talk about the bigger system and the impact of stigma, shame and racism and how that gets in the way of us doing what we need to do to support our children to thrive. So you will have very specific examples and stories, and you will have an understanding of the broader systemic ways that we can lift our children up.

As we’ve said very clearly, FASD is not an Indigenous problem, although it’s often framed as Indigenous problem. The reason that we’ve invited three amazing First Nations and Métis folks to join us today is that in our journey around this province, some of the greatest strengths, some of the greatest insights, and the understanding about what was being called for was within Indigenous communities because of the more holistic and broader view that is brought forward through Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing.

This is where you’ll find the innovation. You’ll find the insights that are needed, and you’ll also find the innovation.

Our intention for today is to dig deeper into the Excluded report. What I thought I’d do, because it’s a little while since we’ve met, are some highlights of our key messages, the ones that are most pertinent to our conversation today, and some of those findings.

Then Pippa will be sharing a little bit about the knowledge mobilization strategy that’s underway. We, too, just like you, are wanting to make sure that the report doesn’t land on the shelf and that, in fact, there are ways in which we are actively engaging in raising understanding and awareness and mobilizing the system to be responsive to these young people.

Then I’ll turn it over to, first, Leslie and then Jackie and then Gwen, who will each bring a different perspective. I know that there will be more questions than answers, so I’m so delighted that we have a good, strong amount of time for discussions afterwards.

[12:15 p.m.]

Let me just begin by talking a little bit about some of the key messages. Now, you have these in your slides, so we’ll be moving through quite quickly. But for those of you who are visual, this might be helpful as well.

There are four key messages that I want to share with you and remind you of from the report. The first is that this is a rights-based issue, that children and youth with FASD, like any child with support needs, have fundamental rights. They are entrenched in conventions, in declarations, and our view is that they are not being upheld and honoured for children with FASD due to the long-standing and pervasive inequities in the systems of care. So one, we’ve got a rights issue.

Two — and you heard this from the stories that the families shared with you and that Myles shared with you — is that the children and youth and their families experience significant stigma and shame and bias and, sometimes, racism, particularly in the assessment process. As a consequence of that, they’re often excluded from the very opportunities that would enable them to thrive — that sense of belonging and connection to their communities, to recreation, to school and even to extended family and friends. That’s the next key message.

The third one is that that’s what their experience is, but we have to take a look at their gifts and their strengths. There is lots of evidence that if they are provided with the right supports, if they’re treated with care and understanding and compassion, they can be strong, capable and resilient. So it’s not a diagnosis that predicts the future. In fact — and our speakers will talk about this — when we see their gifts, strengths, talents, interests and capabilities and the ways in which they can bring that into their community, we are all better for it. But we have some work to do to make sure that those supports are provided in a good way.

The fourth key message is that it’s not about prevention. We know that there’s a lot of focus on prevention. “Don’t drink during pregnancy.” The challenge is that there’s an unintended impact of, first of all, mother blaming, and second, “you are a mistake,” if you are a young person with FASD.

These children are not mistakes. We know that there are many reasons that there might be alcohol exposure, including that a parent might not know that they’re pregnant or that alcohol is a coping mechanism based on the experience of trauma. We know that that’s pervasive in many communities.

We can’t see these young people as mistakes or that they shouldn’t have been born. They are all amongst us, and we need to take a look and say: “How is it that we’re welcoming them and we’re integrating into community and seeing the beauties and the strengths in every child?”

Those are the four things that we wanted to highlight for you today. Just going into some of our findings, the first one was that there’s a fundamental lack of understanding throughout the whole system, whether you’re talking about education or the social care system or residential services. Throughout our society, even within families, there’s a lack of knowledge and understanding about FASD, and that has negative consequences for children in terms of their exclusion and their lack of opportunity to participate.

One of the things that we’ve done — then I just want to pause and give Pippa an opportunity — is to think about what our contribution is as the RCY to address that fundamental lack of knowledge and understanding.

I will pass it over to you, Pippa.

P. Rowcliffe: I’m just holding up that there were three recommendations in the report that all spoke to building an increased base of knowledge, awareness and transparency about the topic of FASD in health, in education and in the child- and family-serving sector. We felt a real obligation to be able to lift up from the report and consider how we could support that process.

I think also playing into it, really, was the urgency we felt from this report. What we found through the research was such a glaring degree of inequity and exclusion that we felt that we really needed to move through the report and into some other ways of lifting up awareness about the issues related to FASD.

[12:20 p.m.]

We’ve been working on a few strategies. I will just highlight the most important of these for you.

Actually, I should take a little step back here and say that I do want to honour Myles. Myles has been working very closely with us on this process. I speak to him every week. We get together on Fridays, and he has been part of everything that I’m going to describe. I just want to honour him while we’re here and reflecting on the knowledge mobilization process.

The Excluded report was the first thing that we produced. As with many of the reports that RCY produces, it was deep, broad and large. What we wanted to do first was consider the possibility that we could write something that was more accessible, in plain language. The reason for doing that was to increase readership, extend the audience of people who would lean into the content in the report and just make it more accessible. We wanted to produce something that was high on graphic content, so that it makes the issues more evident and really write it in a different way so that the words themselves were just more easily accessible.

We had a really clear focus here on wanting to reach front-line staff and parents who were doing a lot of work themselves to build awareness in the communities that they spend time in. We’re right in the design process at the moment, working with Drawing Change to help us with the graphic work on this and in the writing process to produce the report. We are hoping that we will have a good version, a working version, of this ready before the end of the year and ready to release in the new year.

I’m really excited about it because it’s the first time we’ve really prepared something like this. We’re really keen to understand how we can use it to support those who are working directly with children and youth but also with families in community. That’s the first thing that we’ve been working on.

The second is a set of two videos. Often it’s good to be able to bring folks like Jennifer and Myles into the room. We can’t clone them so that they can be everywhere, but the idea is that we can film them speaking, so that others can actually bring their voice into meetings, into workshops, into spaces that we normally wouldn’t be able to show up for.

We’re working on two videos. The first will be lifting up the messages that Jennifer has just summarized. That will be one that Jennifer and Myles feature in. Actually, I’m really excited to say that they are filming for that one right at this moment. Someone is up with Myles and actually recording his day and interviewing him for the purposes of that video. The second will be more on what FASD feels like for someone who experiences it in their world, so that it can be brought, again, into a variety of different settings to hold up what we discovered through the report.

Then the other piece that we’re working on at the moment is a set of slides that will allow us to do a series of workshops and conferences whenever we’re offered space. We’ve already started work on that with the directors-of-practice workshop for MCFD. Myles and I will be hosting a workshop for school counsellors. Actually, next week that will be happening. We’ll also — myself, Samantha and Jennifer — be meeting with the Family Support Institute, which has also started to build a network of family support around the FASD issue.

The relational work just simply notes that we’re also in touch with a lot of people much of the time to continue the work that we need to do. I think today’s meeting — bringing in Leslie, Jackie and Gwen — is a part of that process as we build our ongoing relationships and connections around the work.

J. Charlesworth: This is the first time that we’ve ever done a knowledge mobilization strategy following a report. We’re having a wonderful time. Jeff hired a new communications person that brings videography and documentary experience. We’re very fortunate that we have this opportunity to work on this and the other knowledge mobilizations — Skye and Skye’s Legacy. That’s finding No. 1.

I’ll just whip through these next ones. The key finding that we made was there were tremendous inequities in the special needs support systems, and it leaves children and youth with FASD out. It leaves the families without access to those support services. There’s one program — it’s a family-based program, and it’s distributed very inequitably, in and of itself, around the province with very different mandates and expressions of it — the key worker and parent support program. There’s a tremendous inequity.

[12:25 p.m.]

The ministry — I will give them credit — is trying to do a transformational review of children and youth with support needs, and they have a framework that has been moving forward over the last few years. They do understand how important it is to bring an equity-based lens to this work, but it’s going to take a lot of effort to make sure that we can ensure that there’s equity and inclusion. That was the first finding.

The second finding was — obviously, the title of the report — that many of the children and youth and their families experience exclusion. So there’s a responsibility that we all carry around on how to be more inclusive and to enhance our understanding and our ability to walk alongside young people and their families.

The third finding was around the shame, stigma and blame. There’s, as a consequence, very much a focus on the origins of FASD. As I said before, it translates often to mother-blaming or parent-blaming, rather than what the support needs are. These are children that need our care, love and support.

Then the fourth one was that we couldn’t help but uncover and speak out about the structural racism and stereotyping, and that that influences so much about FASD. It influences the way in which referrals happen, the assessment processes and the access to diagnosis and assessment.

I know that some of our colleagues will have shared with us just how difficult it is to get an assessment and a diagnosis. Although we know that it’s often a diagnosis to nowhere, in some cases, it could make a real difference. We often see, in our advocacy work, that the lack of assessment and diagnosis means that a young person can’t access Community Living services when they turn 19. There are lots of implications of the structural racism, stereotyping and bias that has led to the circumstances that we’re dealing with.

Then the final one is schools. Schools came up over and over again. I know the Chair has spoken about this, drawing on her own experience within the school system. But unfortunately, the capacity of the school system to meet the needs of these children and the understanding — and, oftentimes, the judgment that’s levelled — around these children has led to exclusion. There were some pretty powerful stories within the report.

I’m going to just stop there. That just gives you an overview of the report and some of the things that we felt were important to situate our conversation today.

By the way, one of the things was just so lovely. We speak about relationships and connections. Leslie just shared with me earlier today that she was involved when Gwen was providing leadership in her community of the CHIP program. You will hear more about that. It was actually the first systemic initiative that I heard of, and I couldn’t believe that it didn’t get continued funding. It’s such an important thing to learn from.

So gratitude to Gwen for the work that has been done for decades. These people know a lot. They worked together. They have insights, and it’s our time to shine a light on what they know. But it’s pretty cool to know that these connections have been going and that people have been trying for decades to shine a light on this.

I’ll turn it over to Leslie first.

L. Varley: Thank you so much, Jennifer.

Yes, I owe deep gratitude to the Ktunaxa Nation, because everything I learned about FASD, I definitely learned from the Ktunaxa people. They were leaders in this area. They pushed forward, addressing the shame and the stigma. They just pushed through it and got some important work done. It should have been a pilot project for the rest of the province, but we saw what happened with that.

I just want to say that the result of not funding FASD support programs is what we see in the Downtown Eastside, where we see exploited men and women who are self-medicating themselves. They are working in the sex trade, whether or not they want to be working in the sex trade. They’re trying to find ways to just survive.

[12:30 p.m.]

The long-term repercussions of not funding Gwen’s program we can see across the province. I just wanted to start there, but I’m here to talk about friendship centres and what we do.

First of all, we have 25 friendship centres throughout the province. Many of you have a friendship centre — or, in Jennifer Rice’s case, you have three or four friendship centres — in your region. So I’m sure that you know what we do. We are an open centre where anyone can walk in through the doors and access services. Every door is the right door for us. We do not exclude based on gender or race or status or non-status or Métis. Everybody is welcome to walk in through the door.

The bread-and-butter of our work has always been child and family services. We did some research about five years ago and we found that about 70 percent of our programs are family-based programs. Mostly, they’re funded by MCFD.

We provide a lot of prevention and intervention services in terms of FASD. We don’t have any specific FASD funding, but we do provide pregnancy outreach programs. We’ve got doula supports and post-natal-care programs that we are also providing.

Then we move into Aboriginal infant development and Aboriginal-supported child development. Then we move into daycares and Aboriginal Head Start programs. Many friendship centres are building or have just recently built daycares and are providing Aboriginal Head Start programs. However, our access to diagnosis remains critically poor. This is a real challenge for us.

The other challenges that we face as Indigenous organizations is that we are Indigenous not-for-profits. We will publicly admit that we probably receive at least 10 percent less funding than mainstream not-for-profits providing the same service.

Just as an example of that, the going rate for the workers in these programs that I talked to you of starts at about $21 an hour. We are funded through government contracts at $16 an hour. So even though we have a high need for these prevention and intervention programs, we essentially have to rob our own programs in order to pay a competitive wage to our workers.

What happens is we’re constantly developing new workers all the time to skill them up in this field. If they’re not Indigenous, we have to teach them and facilitate their learning in culturally safe and appropriate practices. They have to learn about the nations that they’re working within.

Then often we lose them to a better paying job because, let’s face it, we all want a better paying job. We lose them to on-reserve agencies so there might be a tax benefit for them. We lose them to other not-for-profit agencies who are funded at a higher rate than we are and are able to provide that. We end up incubating these services constantly. It’s very difficult for us to stabilize our services and funding, just because we’re constantly in the development stage.

Even though we have these problems, we’re still really proud of the work that we do. We have a lot of committed staff and committed executive directors who’ve long been in their roles and have seen the consequences of not funding the supports for FASD programs but also are working really hard to provide those prevention and intervention supports.

One of the other challenges that we’ve had and that we’re only now beginning to address is we’ve never had access to Jordan’s principle, which is funding that has mainly been thought of as accessible only on reserve. We’re starting to work to get some supports through Jordan’s principle.

Our big challenges are not so much that we haven’t…. We don’t have any problem getting pregnant women through the door and women with young families through the door and coming into our centres. Our problems are that we are so poorly funded that it’s really hard to provide the services that we need to, to fund them — so recruitment and retention, wages, contract stability, etc. As I said, we’re constantly losing staff to agencies that can pay better for their programs and services.

[12:35 p.m.]

That said, FASD is a…. There is huge stigma around it. We find that when we’re working with other community agencies and working with the education system, as Jennifer said, there’s huge stigma for our clients in this area.

Again, as she said, the very few people who we can get a diagnosis for — what does it lead to? How does it benefit them? Sometimes all it does is add to the stigma, because now they’ve got an FASD diagnosis, but it doesn’t magically result in increased supports for the client or for the family. These are some of our challenges.

Of course, last month was FASD Awareness Month. We were doing some wonderful work in that area. We have a wonderful program in the Smithers friendship centre, for example, called the Tadpoles program, where they are creating awareness for parents and making sure that those services are culturally relevant and giving children and babies a really strong start.

We have Aboriginal infant-child development for families who are not necessarily accessing friendship centres. So those Aboriginal infant-child development programs are part of our friendship centre network, but they’re not necessarily tied to a friendship centre. These are home-visit type of programs. We’re trying to find every possible way to reach the hard to reach and to provide supports to those families who are in need of some sorts of services.

What we see, and we kind of drool over, are some of the mainstream supports and services that are out there. I was talking to Joanne Mills, who’s at Community Living B.C., and asking her what kinds of services…. What are their rates for diagnosis for Indigenous FASD kids versus autism? Of course, that remains a really big challenge for us. Everybody makes the assumption that our kids are FASD and don’t have autism.

One of the things that I can say, over the years, is that we’re starting to see more and more of our young parents reaching out and asking for services from us, particularly asking for the autism diagnosis or the FASD spectrum, looking for a diagnosis for their child. But there’s just a full lack of that service, particularly for Indigenous children. We see that the older the child gets, the less likely they are able to get a diagnosis. Those are some of the challenges that we see.

Jennifer, I know you and I just had a conversation ahead of this. Anything that I have forgotten to mention?

J. Charlesworth: I think you’ve done a beautiful job. There are some really powerful things that people are doing within the friendship centres, often without that kind of support, often off the sides of their desks.

There are real strengths, but it’s very hard to execute, given the challenges you’ve raised. Thank you so much for that. Also, speaking into the stigma, shame and racism. Thank you, Leslie.

Maybe we’ll move on to Jackie next, unless, Chair, you would like to pause for questions. I know we had this chunk of time that we were going to do the presentations and then move into questions after the break.

J. Sims (Chair): I think we’ll stick with the plan of doing the presentations. I see people have been taking notes and making sure that they’ve got all their questions ready.

J. Charlesworth: Terrific.

Jackie, over to you.

J. Brown: As I mentioned earlier, I am with Ktunaxa-Kinbasket Child and Family Services. I’ve been here for 19 years. I have worked in all capacities, from family support to social worker to director of practice. I’ve had many different experiences of not only working with the children, the youth, but also the families and the vulnerable adults. I thought I would talk about the impacts of FASD on children.

[12:40 p.m.]

Many affected individuals experience many different shortcomings, like short attention span, trouble learning new concepts or forgetfulness. They have trouble relating to a new concept and difficulty with transitions, often feel oppressed and easily distracted. My experience has been that they can be with one group — for example, that group may be the group that’s attending different sports — and go across the street and somebody is smoking a joint. And then they’re smoking a joint.

They’re just easily distracted. They get agitated. Often they fall into substance misuse and can be impulsive. We also need to really remember that they’re often gifted, and they have different skills — like photography, music, hairstyling — and really creative and unique ways of thinking.

I know there’s a slide on here that shows the back. But when it was the CHIP program, they made this for many of the professionals. At that time, I was working at CMHA. They made us business card folders with thanks on the back, because they appreciated the work, the support and the advocacy that they were receiving.

Onto my next slide, talking about intergenerational trauma and the colonized effects. There’s been lots of research, many different topics on the impacts of intergenerational trauma historically — residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, all the discrimination, how families or nations were put onto small plots of land — and all the effects that has created.

Then for the last several generations, we have mothers that, because their kids were going to residential school, then turned to alcohol, and it just became a cycle. Coupling the trauma with the effects of alcohol has just compounded it and made it much more complex.

As was talked about, the community healing and initiative program that Gwen, through KISS, had started in 1992 was a five-year-project program. That program provided health, community development, hope and potential for the communities that were affected by FASD.

There was an increased number of formal assessments and diagnoses. There were FASD warning sign bylaws implemented. They worked with the city of Cranbrook. In all the pubs, in all the washrooms, they had posters about what the effects of alcohol do to unborn babies. They created a resource library at the College of the Rockies. They built strong multidisciplinary FASD networks.

They also…. Where I showed you that business card folder was a pilot project through the FLY program, which was the Foundational Learning for Youth program. What the youth did was rather…. They got their schooling in a manner that suited what their needs were at the time. It was really successful — and really unfortunate that because the other ministries didn’t buy into or didn’t take over the pilot project, the FLY program was dismantled.

[12:45 p.m.]

Through the FLY program…. At that time, doing youth outreach and taking the kids…. You didn’t have to go and support the kids to go to the program. They were eager to go. They wanted to go. Many of them were successful and moved on in later years and were able to get jobs and feel really good about themselves.

Then — I can’t even remember the year — about 2012, the program started to diminish. We had two workers here at Ktunaxa Kinbasket. The program was still…. It was more supportive, but I had a young man. His mom had a disability. She was actually FASD. He couldn’t live with her — him and his little brother. So he was in care, and he couldn’t understand that. He was also affected.

Elaine, at the time, was one of the workers. She did a boardwalk program with him. It was pictures. It talked about his mom’s disability and why he couldn’t live with her and also about his own shortcomings. He ended up getting right up to his lifeguard. So he could become a lifeguard, and then he chose not to do that. But he’s worked in the community in a couple of different areas, and he’s been very successful. He’s been able to live on his own. He never did take the road of using substances and feeling less about himself. He’s been way more successful.

Then when I go on to the…. I have several stories here. We have a 23-year-old young man. He was also in care, along with his other five siblings. He was really affected by the trauma, FASD and the stigma of not being accepted. He wasn’t accepted by his siblings. He wasn’t accepted by his peers at school. He really struggled. It came out in behaviours.

As we continued to give him support and really wrap around him, he did. He was able to graduate from school. He was able to go on the AYA program. Now he has been doing his…. He’s got an apartment for two people so that he could take over the care of his younger brother that is still in foster care — but as a gradual process. We want to make sure it’s successful for both him and his little brother.

Then Rocky’s story just talks about the supports provided that were constant, adapted and modified to meet the expectations and really look at his strengths. He’s had several jobs, long-term jobs. He started out as a dishwasher in a local restaurant. He worked a long time in Walmart. He just continues to broaden his education goals and his work experience.

Our next story is about Billy. Billy was diagnosed when he was nine years old. The family was receiving supports from another agency and didn’t like the supports they were receiving. They came over to Ktunaxa Kinbasket, where we provided wraparound supports for him, also keeping that connection with his family, the teachers, community members and others. The workers worked really hard in the school on his IEP.

For an example, he said to his worker: “I can’t read this. When I read this, I don’t understand it.” So she went: “Do you think headphones would work?” Then he would be reading it and hearing it. She had to have the school adapt to what his learning needs were through these suggestions.

Sometimes it gets really frustrating. They should be looking at…. I hear a lot about the schools and experience about the schools. You would think that they would be able to modify and adapt programs that help youth or children learn. Sometimes it takes all senses to learn.

[12:50 p.m.]

Billy has been placed with a caregiver that allowed him to have interdependent living, because when we put him on a YA, a youth agreement, he wasn’t successful. He had difficulty living totally on his own. But in this interdependent living, they’ve modelled independent living for him, and now he has transitioned to a YA and still accesses supports and guidance from Children and Family.

What are some of the strategies? I think before, if I have a little time…. When I think about stigmas…. You know, I’ve talked about, too, quite successful stories. But we have stories, we have people…. They’re people. They’re humans. They’re 20-some years old, and they’re not doing well.

I have, actually, a family member — my sister-in-law. The stigma and the shame and blame that she has put on herself. Her son is now over 30 years old. It’s been really difficult. She’s just waiting — he has OD’d five times — for that phone call that he never made it. Because of her stigma, it hasn’t worked very well.

The strategies we need to fill the gaps. We need to offer supports past 19 years old. We’re talking about the development of 15-year-olds. We need more FASD training. We need life skills, earlier diagnosis. They’re really hard to get here. You have to go to Nelson. And applying for persons with disability earlier than when they’re aging out. And the FASD justice system navigator. That would be very helpful, because many of the youth are in the justice system.

I’m really grateful for today and grateful that you’re taking this, our FASD, seriously and that you want to hear about it. So I honour each and every one of you. Thank you.

J. Charlesworth: Beautiful, Jackie. Thank you so much for bringing young people into our circle and into our thoughts today. Wonderful.

Let’s turn it over to you, Gwen.

G. Phillips: Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you for allowing us to be here to speak with you today about this very important issue.

Leslie, a blast from the past. Thank you for still doing what you do.

When I was the director of operations for the Ktunaxa Independent School System in the early 1990s, I did establish the CHIP program, the community healing and intervention program. I’ve worked for my nation, the Ktunaxa Nation, for almost 40 years now.

As residential schools started to close in the ’60s and by 1970, most of the Ktunaxa children were attending public schools, and we saw that many of our students were not achieving success. As our nation started to negotiate contracts for economic development and community members became part of mainstream workforces after years of residential schools and reserve isolation, our young people found it difficult to acquire and hold jobs. We saw much reliance on community programs.

When negotiating local education agreements…. Yes, the Ktunaxa Nation broke the master tuition agreement, which was the federal-provincial payment for Status Indian students normally residing on reserve. We did that so that we could actually take some control over the education that was being provided to — or at least influence the education that was being provided to — our students. When we were negotiating those agreements, we became, again, very aware of and were asking ourselves why our students were not being successful learning and functioning both in the provincial system and in post-secondary and the trades.

[12:55 p.m.]

When we finally learned about fetal alcohol spectrum disorder…. It was kind of a hit-and-miss that I learned about it back then, because there were not a lot of people talking about it. Doctors weren’t talking about it. Systems weren’t talking about it.

When we finally learned about it and we related it to our historical circumstances — colonization, poverty, residential schools, multiple generations of alcoholism, similar birth defects and learning difficulties — things began to make sense. There was actually a label for what 40 percent of our school-aged population was experiencing. And yes, I say 40 percent. We know this because we conducted a participatory action research project with UBC, and we identified 40 percent fetal alcohol affected individuals through this process.

Now, we could have sat at that time and cried about that circumstance we found ourselves in, or we could say: “No. We were taught differently.” At that time, we knew that our people were being labelled as stupid, non-compliant, lazy, violent, promiscuous, negligent by authorities — by schools, employers, health care workers, child welfare workers — when, in fact, they were people who had significant special needs that had not been recognized as children, not been recognized as youth or adults, and they were not being addressed.

Our Elders told us that there was a time in our history when there was nobody sober because we felt so much pain, trauma, grief and suffering, and alcohol was being used to dull these feelings. At that time, our nation started to…. Really, it was myself leading this work but our nation supporting the leading of this work and then fully embracing and investing in this work. We started to shift away from looking at these manifestations, these behavioural manifestations, and really looking to the root causes of the issues.

We started to move away from just trying to manage these programs and focused in on strategic planning, looked at individual training plans, family growth plans, education environment plans — so looking to change the environment that people were learning within. We looked at comprehensive community development plans, creating a future where we could accommodate the diverse population we had.

We took on full delegated authority of child welfare so we could do whatever we could to keep our families together and to support the people we knew had special needs. We provide services — my nation — on and off reserve. We don’t have a friendship centre here. So we provide on and off reserve so we can actually take care of our people regardless of where they reside. This false boundary of a reserve line is just crazy.

The B.C. treaty process, for us, was just a way to access resources, to begin making the program and policy shifts that we knew we needed to make to address our reality, and we’re now on our way to determining and really rebuilding.

What we learned is that when we provide for the least-advantaged citizen, all of our citizens thrive. The Ktunaxa government acknowledged that they had to put the people in the middle and wrap ourselves around them. The community created an intervention program. It started out as a research project, and then it was funded for awhile under various short-term programs, but really, we embedded the philosophy, overall, into our working with the social investment sector. But the challenge is we don’t get funding to actually do the work we need to do.

We acknowledge, for the Ktunaxa, that there is probably not a Ktunaxa alive that has not experienced trauma, and intergenerational trauma, as some of you may know, actually affects you at the level of your DNA. Your DNA gets methylated. It changes over your life by the experiences you have and the environments you’re in. So history had to be acknowledged — the assault on our culture, the devaluing of our women and our overall lack of inclusion in the Canadian body politic. No legal policy decisions. We weren’t involved in those.

Alcohol was introduced during trade, and then when our rights and our children were taken away, it was used to drown our sorrows. Acknowledging this history and the impacts of that history on our people is one of the first steps in healing. We had to support healing first, and then we could undertake interventions.

We utilized a population health approach, because fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is a societal issue and requires a full community response. It requires a whole-of-government response. As we started to really understand what we were dealing with, our philosophy became: “Try differently, not harder.”

[1:00 p.m.]

Many children have experienced early childhood trauma, and in the case of fetal alcohol exposure, this trauma has impacted brain development. The jails, as has been noted earlier, are full of people who have experienced prenatal alcohol exposure and people who are likely continuing to be traumatized. Not only can trauma cause physical, emotional, economic and spiritual impacts, but the epigeneticists have proven that early childhood trauma can cause all sorts of health and wellness issues, like addictions and inflammatory disease like arthritis, amongst other things.

We’re addressing extremely complex behaviours brought on by extremely challenging environments and circumstances. We have learned that some people are vulnerable in certain environments, yet those same people can thrive in a different environment. Individuals need support to heal from trauma, and they need support, in some cases, with their daily living for their whole life. Some fetal alcohol spectrum disorder children never grow up and need public guardianship.

My nation was exploring assuming the responsibility of the Public Guardian on behalf of our nation. Ktunaxa are caring for our adults with fetal alcohol exposure and supporting their children as well. You don’t outgrow fetal alcohol exposure. Early interventions can lead to inclusion, success and productive lives. We have proven that. But as noted — thank you, Jackie, for reminding everyone — we still see the self-harm and destructive behaviours of people who feel that they are facing dire circumstances and who are unsupported.

Every human deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. We have human rights. Every human deserves to be included and to be productive members of society. For many generations, First Nations people were excluded from participating in mainstream society. A lot of people don’t even know, for example, that we couldn’t even vote in federal elections until 1960. Most people are only now becoming aware of, or believing, our history, that we suffered like we said we did, and many today — our communities — still lack infrastructure and clean drinking water.

Canada was slow to acknowledge the declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples, but we now have DRIP law in place to help advance the rights of Indigenous peoples and also to address many shared interests, government to government. Fetal alcohol exposure is one of our shared interests. It’s not an Indigenous experience, but we are the ones leading the healing in this experience. It affects any population where there’s alcohol use.

Our Elders have told us that blame, shame and guilt are no foundation for our nation. Knowing, understanding and accepting our history and its impact on who we are empowers us to actually make positive change. It’s truth, then reconciliation. Everyone needs to be honoured in their journey and acknowledged for their gifts and strengths.

We have renamed the environmental scanning process as SWOT — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats; you know that — starting with our truths. We utilize appreciative inquiry, looking for strength, population health, examining and exploring the needs of distinct populations and community development, which is really about using the strengths of the community to build the futures that they want for themselves.

We use these philosophies when approaching fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and in everything we do. We focus on identifying and building the inherent strengths and reducing barriers. Policy barriers exist everywhere. That’s your job, lawmakers, to help get rid of those policy barriers.

In the early 1990s, when I was the Ktunaxa Nation director of education and Elizabeth Cull was the B.C. Health Minister…. You remember Elizabeth, the first female Health Minister, I recall. She and I met on a number of occasions regarding the Ktunaxas’ early experience with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and she was responsible for supporting changes to the School Act and the related regulations, to have fetal alcohol spectrum disorder identified as a high-cost, low-incidence special needs category.

Even today, still, many years later, diagnostic challenges mean that many people still go without appropriate interventions. We’ve explained that sometimes it’s the diagnosis or the lack thereof. We still don’t have appropriate responses.

[1:05 p.m.]

Sometimes we, in this space — I call us “we” when I talk of governments because I work for the Ktunaxa government — create these philosophical approaches to things, and we create these beautiful philosophies — lovely words that sound good on T-shirts. Sometimes it’s a philosophy if you’re working together, but it takes moving something from this philosophical space to an actual practical space to see if it’s working, to see if it can work.

The United Nations declaration, for example — a very philosophical document — is full of: “They, they, they have rights.” But it really didn’t mean anything until I did a search and replace, and I put one of B.C.’s First Nations groups into that declaration. I put the Tŝilhqot’in peoples in there. You will know if the Tŝilhqot’in have rights. Court cases have said they do. But when I took that distinct Nation group, that identifiable people, and put them into that declaration, it now became something very different. Tŝilhqot’in people have rights. Ktunaxa people. Nlaka’pamux. The St’át’imc. The Snuneymuxw.

Every one of our 34 linguistically unique, distinguishable groups of B.C. — we each have rights. Each one of these Nation groups will be putting themselves into that declaration, so that the provincial government can actually see us, identify us, recognize us and work with us, so we can try differently, not harder, to advance all of these issues that have been identified through the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, through the MMIWG inquiry and, of course, the In Plain Sight report.

Now we have the B.C. Office of the Human Rights Commissioner’s grandmother perspective on disaggregated data report. We can take all of this insane busyness that we know is there and bring it into one contextual framework to address things over time. Each one of those rights will translate to a responsibility. As we’re doing that, the Tŝilhqot’in, the Ktunaxa…. Each nation group, working government to government and nation to nation, can make sense of these things, make them real and begin to address those complex challenges we have in a very comprehensive but very real, simple frame.

For the Ktunaxa Nation, years ago, as we’ve started to think about our journey back to self-government, we wanted to adopt a strategic framework, because what we saw other governments doing is identifying problems and trying to attack those problems, creating more problems, rather than looking to see what it is we want in the future, and investing in processes and people to make that future come about.

We didn’t want to continue to look at problems. We were getting tired of being called “the Indian problem” and that we are “people with problems.” We are people with strengths. We are strong, healthy people that can become stronger and healthier when systems support that work. Our Elders told us: “We don’t want welfare. We want to be included.”

The Ktunaxa economy was an economy that included everyone. Our Elders have told us there are not enough Ktunaxa to throw even one away.

The common framework we chose to use when meeting with the other governments were the social determinants of health — the 12 broader determinants of health. These determinants have been in play and recognized by social scientists and others for decades. When we looked at those determinants and saw that one of those determinants was culture, every one of us, as unique cultural groups of British Columbia and Canada, as unique groups of people, has a uniqueness to us that has to be recognized.

When we, as the Ktunaxa, think about those determinants from our world view and we look above us to see where the healthy child is and how the healthy child will come about, it’s by investing in those determinants, by changing, by supporting the social support networks, by looking to make sure that the access to health services is there, and by helping people to build better coping skills.

We chose to have our children know themselves as children, to be able to stand up and say: “I have been affected by prenatal alcohol exposure. These are the challenges I have.” This is what we were doing with the CHIP program: helping people to know themselves and helping them to identify what they needed from other people. If a child has no legs, we help them to become mobile. We don’t demand to know how they lost them first. We shouldn’t worry about labels all the time. We should worry about helping children to become the strongest, healthy people they can be.

The most important lesson I would say that we’ve learned in all of these past 30 or 40 years of work for ourselves is that we needed to try differently, not harder, and that truly, where there is hope, there is potential.

[1:10 p.m.]

The Ktunaxa word for “to think,” kniⱡwu·tiyaʔtin, really means “to ask yourself how your heart feels.” It’s no longer an intellectual exercise. How do we feel about this? We want our people to feel good about themselves and their future. We want to stop the pain. We want to stop the opioid crisis and the suicides.

We want to again be strong, healthy citizens and communities. We know we can, but we need to work government-to-government. We need to understand that there are better ways to do what we’re trying to do right now. We need to work in that space of collaboration and to work in a holistic manner.

I know we’ve made policy attempts to do this. I’ve seen the policy work. I’ve seen the different approaches that exist. Right now, again, because of systems failures and the lack of funding for our community healing and interventions, we know we have failures as the Ktunaxa. It’s not just your systems that are failing; it’s our systems, because we can’t do what we know we need to do. We know better, but we can’t do better.

We see children lacking care because of diagnosis or no diagnosis and falling through the cracks as they chronologically become adults with no care system. We have a number of Ktunaxa Nation members right now who the systems of care, including our own, are failing.

These children grew up in foster care and are disconnected from their families and from their communities in some cases. They’re impacted by low IQ and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Some have mental health diagnoses — schizophrenia, ADHD, psychosis. Most are involved in the criminal justice system.

They struggle with addictions. They’ve been kicked out of residential programs since they still use drugs and alcohol to cope, and they’ve been violent toward staff and others. They can’t go back to the psychiatrist because they won’t apologize for a racist remark. They’ve been failed. Kicked out of homeless shelter because they’re violent or have been making threats of violence.

We’ve seen what positive change can happen when appropriate early interventions are provided, and, sadly, we also have seen and are witnessing what happens when people are not supported.

The Ktunaxa governments want to be able to measure things. We want to be able to measure changes for the better in child welfare, education, health and in addressing human and Indigenous rights. We want to be able to measure what matters, to see what is in plain sight, to make sure we’re not excluded. We want to address racism and stigmatization, and we want to see that all people are looked at from the grandmother perspective. When considering the need for disaggregated data, we want to know because we care.

Thank you so much for listening.

J. Charlesworth: My goodness. Thank you so much, Gwen.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you to all the presenters for your passion, for your commitment, for your big hearts and for this very informative and moving reality therapy for many of us.

Gwen, I’m not going to say I feel your pain, but I can definitely say I know how much you are feeling this and how committed you are to doing this work. I know I’m speaking on behalf of every member. I really, really want to thank you for coming and having such an important conversation with us and for sharing the stories of the individuals, of our kids, and putting a face to titles.

Gwen, for me, one thing that struck me was when you said that we’re really good at coming up with slogans and nice campaign labels. That’s one of my big beefs. What happens after the slogan? What happens after we launch a campaign? So thank you so very much.

What I am going to suggest now, with everybody’s agreement, is that we take a ten-minute break, if that is okay. Unless somebody is going to object, we are going to take a ten-minute break. So we will be back on at 1:25.

S. Chant: Jinny, are we going to have a chance to have questions with the presenters when we come back?

J. Sims (Chair): Absolutely. That’s why we’re taking this break. So everybody can do a comfort break and decompress. Then we will come back, and it will be questions to our wonderful presenters. See you in ten minutes.

The committee recessed from 1:15 p.m. to 1:27 p.m.

[J. Sims in the chair.]

J. Sims (Chair): Welcome back to the meeting. We do have a number of people with their hands up. We will start with Susie.

S. Chant: This may be a very naive question. Where did the CHIP funding originally come from, and at what level did it come from? Was it under a particular ministry, distributed or what? That’s my question A.

Question B is: is there any evidence that the rate of FASD folks is diminishing? Is it staying about the same, or is it increasing? What is the rate happening?

G. Phillips: The community healing and intervention program was through the Ministry of Health, provincially, back in the day when they had an Aboriginal health branch. So it was that long ago.

It was just at the time when the Aboriginal health branch was getting ready to close. The director that was there was a wonderful First Nations man who did a brilliant thing and signed the province onto a five-year contract that was actually something that had a succession clause in it that was going to give us five years of funding for this participatory action research framework to be completed.

The branch ended up closing, and the project got transferred over to the next in line. I can’t even remember who it went to at that point, but it was sort of a protected project, initially. After that, we tried to get bits and pieces of funding from various ministries — the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Children and Families, etc. But there was never really any ministry that had a dedicated fund for this work.

Now with rates, I am pleased to say that we don’t see the number of births. Again, we did a massive education campaign.

The five years…. The first three years were really about healing. Can you imagine being a mother and being told that you’ve caused brain damage in your child? That was a time when, actually, physicians were saying: “Go ahead and have a drink of wine in the evening. It’ll help with this.” There wasn’t even the scientific connection between alcohol and brain damage at that time.

[1:30 p.m.]

It was a real challenge, initially, to have people understand. We got the awareness. We saw people actually reaching out, and we saw people self-policing. We had young people telling other young people: “I know you’re pregnant. You can’t be drinking.” That societal shift in what was right and not right was starting to take place. So we have seen a reduction in the number of fetal alcohol exposures, we would say. We don’t have diagnostic capacity, so we can’t say for sure. But we’ve definitely seen a change.

That said, we are seeing other effects, because we see other substances being used now.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you for that.

I have Mike next, and then I have Henry.

M. Morris: Great presentations, Gwen, Jackie, Leslie.

Gwen, I wish you could be cloned. I can see all kinds of places where we would benefit from your wisdom and your guidance.

Over the years…. I reflect on my 32 years in the RCMP and many years policing remote locations, First Nations communities and other communities. FASD is not isolated to First Nation communities. Being a policeman, dealing with alcohol abuse, drug abuse and some of the other abuses that we see out there…. If we didn’t have alcohol abuse, we could reduce our policing costs by about 80 or 90 percent. It’s a social issue that leads to so many other things.

I love the work that you’ve done, Gwen, down in your area there. I wish we could do it around the province here. But we need to have more integration with the resources that you’re talking about, with policing on the ground here. I would have loved to have worked in all the communities I worked in with somebody at my side from that particular community, with the wisdom and the experience and the interconnectivity with the Elders and the seniors in the community to try and prevent some of the behaviour before it entered the criminal element, because that led to so many other problems that we have.

One of the other things I saw…. One of the communities that was in my area of responsibility…. I looked after the northern 80 percent of the province here in my last ten years as the police manager. In one of the communities, a university went in, along with some experts. They looked at all the children under 18 in that particular community, and 100 percent of them were FASD. They weren’t all the children from there, but all the other children had been moved out of that community to attend school and to be in a different environment, away from the violence and away from the drinking and whatnot.

There are so many issues out there. It’s like a hot-potato issue today, when you look down so you don’t have to look someone in the eye and admit that we have a problem in a particular area with FASD and some of the other problems we have here.

My hat’s off to you. My hat’s off to all three of you for the great presentations that you’ve given. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and government has a lot of work ahead of them and, collectively, us here to try and make a dint in this problem that is leading to so many other problems in society. Thanks very much for all your words today.

J. Sims (Chair): Should we hear from Henry? Then we’ll look for a response, if there is one.

H. Yao: First of all, I do want to take a moment to thank you, Gwen, and to acknowledge the fact that you don’t just hear and share information. I’m pretty sure through sharing knowledge, you also relive the trauma experienced as well. So I thank you for enduring that just for the benefit of our education, our learning and our appreciation of the depths of a challenge that would have been faced by many of your people in the past.

I have a few questions. I’m hoping maybe Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth will also help me provide some answer as well. You mentioned a lot about ADHD and FASD being intermixed. It sort of becomes almost a feeding system into systemic racism within some of our systems, especially our relationship and our engagement with our Indigenous and Aboriginal community members, which is definitely a dark stain on our Canadian history and community and, unfortunately, in the future as well.

[1:35 p.m.]

Is there any kind of discussion about focusing on actual diagnosis? Can we focus in on different measurements that speak to observable behaviour, because a lot of them…? Again, I’m not an expert. I just want to put it out there. ADHD, FASD and ADD also share very similar support. We’re dealing with different behaviour that can be identified. So we can remove the unnecessary labelling and, unfortunately, mother shaming — this is something I learned about from Facebook; it’s called mother shaming, unfortunately — when it comes to a socially different diagnosis. Just putting a question out there.

The second question I have, too, is: financially…. After listening to Gwen’s explanation of the challenges facing us in her community, there’s a huge amount of financial benefit long term. Often we justify how much we invest in a program because of how expensive it is, but we often lose sight of how much it financially benefits our community as a whole as well.

Of course, allowing individual potential to fully blossom, so you still have somebody who needs extra support from the community…. That person becomes a contributing, productive member and actually turns out to be a beautiful benefit to our society, even contributing to our Canadian and international economic development too. I thought I’d put that question out there as well. Can we also maybe have a bit more information on area?

The third one is — and I do want to say, because I used to be a youth worker — that a lot of funding programs we’re hearing about are very westernized. I would love to hear, maybe, from different perspectives. Removing all this pre-established, westernized mentality…. Maybe you can enlighten us with some Indigenous community strategy, like being provided proper funding, while used differently, that has worked, has historically been effective and supportive and culturally sensitive to the needs of our Aboriginal community.

I hope you don’t mind me asking all three questions at the same time.

J. Sims (Chair): Henry, you’ve asked for three, and I’m sure Jennifer has been tracking them.

Who is going to have a go at answering first?

J. Charlesworth: Okay. Maybe I’ll start on the diagnosis and assessment, but I think our guests can speak beautifully to the shifting perspective, both in terms of our western models and thinking differently — and I’ll have a little insight on that — and also thinking about how oriented we are towards costs rather than thinking about if we shift and support people to thrive and what the benefits are within our society.

I’ll just start with the diagnosis versus assessment. Actually, a number of reports that we have issued, starting with Alone and Afraid, which was early on in my tenure in the fall of 2018, and then also with the FASD…. We actually think that we need to shift the thinking away from diagnosis-driven systems of care to functional needs assessment. Diagnosis has a place from time to time. It might open up some understanding about: “Oh, this is how the brain has worked. This is what’s going on, and these are some interventions that might be helpful.”

Fundamentally, as our colleagues have shown, something like FASD manifests itself very differently. There is a wide range of how it is expressed in a young person. That’s depending upon, as Gwen has talked about, the environment and the conditions, but also just the way in which…. At what point was alcohol consumed, and where was the fetus in the developmental process? So it has a wide expression.

Really, what does a diagnosis tell us? What we’re most interested in is: how is that young person doing? What are their functional needs? What are the things that make a difference for them, in terms of the ways of making sense of the world, as Jackie talked about?

Sometimes it could be about having a set of headphones and having a different way that education is offered. We are strong proponents of shifting away from a diagnostically driven system to a functional needs–driven system, and that is something that the ministry is considering in their new CYSN framework. As you say, many of these things — ASD and FASD — often look very similar in terms of the behavioural expression.

The other piece. I just want to maybe go to No. 3 around the westernized mentalities, and then I’ll shut up and let my colleagues speak. Here’s one of the things I’ve noticed over 43 years of practice. We often focus on programs. It’s like: “Oh, we have to have more money for this program” or “We’re going to take money from this program in order to put it over there.”

[1:40 p.m.]

I think what our speakers have really illustrated today is that that actually just keeps us chasing the programs and the dollars and not thinking transformationally. It’s like: “Okay. Well, if we’re trying to raise a child up in a good way, how do we need to think about the child’s context, the child’s environment, and how do we support the families to support the child to thrive?” It’s a very different kind of systemic orientation.

I think your point about how we’ve got a very Westernized approach…. I’ve been raised up in that. We very much are program- and funding-driven, not taking a look at: what’s the system that we’ve created, and what’s the environment in which we’re lifting up our children and our families and our communities?

With that, I’ll look to Leslie, Jackie and Gwen. Each will have something beautiful to offer on that and also that cost-and-benefit piece.

Who would like to go next?

G. Phillips: I’ll give you a piece of philosophy. Our Elders have told us the best place to store your extra meat is in the belly of your neighbour, for example. Now, that type of philosophy, what does it mean? It means that we are a social economy. We are people that were so dependent and interdependent on each other and our environments. We still recognize that. We still know that what you do to the soil will determine how well that tree will grow.

My language, the Ktunaxa language…. The word ʔa.kuk’pukam means, literally, taking your life from the earth. It’s a tree. It’s a plant. It’s roots, really. ʔa.kuk’pukamnam — I’m adding a suffix, nam, to that original word. It now turns to a human’s children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.

Philosophically, you get the sense that we understand that everything is related and that we become what our environments cause us to become. It’s that sense of, again, children and where children fit within our society.

The Ktunaxa value and belief is that we don’t own our children. The Western culture brought us the thought that the man owned his wife and minor children and could do whatever they wanted with them. Our values and belief system say the woman has as much responsibility and honour as the man does in our culture. The children are gifts from the Creator. They’re born whole, and they’re born the way they’re supposed to be born. They’re not…. Every child is a gift.

I have a niece who has a child who has Down syndrome. Her partner is a non-Indigenous person. That child was looked at from the other side of the family, and the parents were almost given a pat on the back. “Sorry. This is such a…. I’m so sorry for you.” That kind of feeling, whereas we were going: “You’ve been given such a gift. That child will teach you things that you would not be taught otherwise, that you would never have the opportunity to learn.” We all get the gift from that child.

How you look at things…. It’s really about how you approach them, how you address them. At one point, we were studied. We were considered less than human. They were putting a tape measure around the head, etc., not so long ago.

Really understanding these deep philosophical values, clashes, and then how they rise up through our institutions…. They can harm, or they can help. I see more harm in our Western institutions, given that they are siloed. They treat a component of the human, not the whole human. We are doing more damage than good. Look at our education system and the number of mental health reports from all Canadian children, not just Indigenous children.

L. Varley: It’s really hard to follow Gwen, but I will try.

One of the things that friendship centres have always done — I know that First Nations organizations have done this too — is take funding under the mainstream model, which is these postage-stamp pieces of funding. We try to wrap that all up together and create a service model that works for our people.

Imagine it as circular. Imagine that every single piece of that postage-stamp funding gets slotted in that model circularly, so it goes from pregnancy to babies, toddlers, children, youth, teens, parents, genders, Elders. We try to serve the whole family.

[1:45 p.m.]

We’re all still working to decolonize ourselves, to address the ongoing racism of colonization and the ongoing trauma of it. At the same time, we’re also trying to address some of these issues.

What we do is enter into agreements through the contracts and promise to do this piece of work, but then we have to take it ourselves and we have to find a way to make it fit into our model of service delivery, which is different than a mainstream model of service delivery. As much as government tries to understand that, there are very few people within the government system and funding structures who understand how Indigenous service models work.

Like Gwen said, the best way to store your extra meat is in the belly of your neighbour. That’s what we try to do. We’re trying to give back to our community. We’re trying to facilitate growth and capacity-building in our community, and we’re trying, also, to maintain our Indigenous values of being a good neighbour and helping everybody around us.

We don’t have this sort of hierarchical model of: “I’m the executive director, and I provide this role.” We all pitch in and help each other. I think probably every Indigenous, First Nations, Inuit and Métis executive director is what we would call, or what you would call, a working director. We get our hands dirty. We get in there on the front lines and stuff. We have to be contributing, otherwise we’re really not walking our talk.

I think that’s one of the differences in terms of how we…. It’s a struggle because we always have to explain ourselves to the funder. They say: “Well, why are you doing this? Why are you using this funding for that program?”

“We don’t fund food.” That’s the other big thing that we hear all the time. For us, funding food is how you get people in the door. A lot of our people are coming in hungry and in need of some nourishment. In our culture, it’s extremely rude not to offer food when people walk through the door, even if we’re a service agency. We don’t really differentiate that between somebody coming into your house. Would you sit them down and have a conversation and work with them without ever offering them a cup of tea or something to eat?

Those are some of the differences that we’re constantly struggling with within that service model. That’s culturally safe. Those are wraparound services and stuff.

In an urban Indigenous community, it’s a little bit of a bigger challenge because, I think as Gwen said, we’ve got 33 or 30 language groups here in B.C. alone, plus we’ve got a lot of people in our urban centres who are coming in from other parts of Canada. We’ve got the Métis and we’ve got the Inuit and every door is the right door for us.

We’re working hard to try to find ways to serve everybody and make them feel that they are welcome. The best compliment for us is if they come back and think: “Yeah, this is….” Sometimes they say: “Well, it’s not that great because nobody there speaks Cree, but it’s better than what’s on offer elsewhere.” Those are parts of our challenges.

Supporting people versus costs. That’s another area that is a real struggle for us because we’re held accountable through these very specific contracts that we receive through government, yet we still want to make it culturally safe and inclusive and appropriate. That means supporting people sometimes at the expense of our contracts. In some instances where we know that there’s a really high need to address something that has come up, we will go ahead and address it and then ask for forgiveness later.

Sometimes we’re not forgiven. Some friendship centres are paying…. I’ve seen one friendship centre that was paying up to $400,000 back to the ministry because how they were delivering services wasn’t aligned with how the contract was to be expended. In that case, I had to go back in and facilitate some discussion with both agencies and say: “Okay, look, you did do it this way. It’s just that we’re reporting it differently.”

[1:50 p.m.]

There are still some barriers in terms of how we receive contracts and how we deliver them and then how our funders recognize that delivery. They’re still recognizing our service delivery within a mainstream lens, while we’re still trying to take that funding and deliver it within a culturally appropriate lens. It’s an ongoing challenge for us.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you very much.

The next person I have on the list is Kelli. Then I have Susie and Mike back on again.

K. Paddon: I’m going to be brief because ten minutes was not long enough for me to pull myself together. I don’t have a question. I’m still processing. I think I’ll be processing the words and the stories that were shared for a while. I know that Dr. Charlesworth will answer questions for us, if we have to at any other point, so I’m going to be comfortable and sit in the information that I’m currently sitting in.

I just wanted to express my gratitude, as my colleagues have. I know that sometimes sharing these things that are painful and unfair and traumatic has an impact that you carry after this conversation ends. So I just appreciate taking that risk so that we could understand better and so that, hopefully, it will inform our work.

I do have to say, Gwen, that I have Gwen quotes written down next to me from all of your words to remind me about things that you’ve said, points that you’ve made. So thank you.

There’s no question. Like I said, I’m still sitting with the information you’ve been so generous with. Thank you very much.

J. Sims (Chair): I’m going to turn to Coralee first, since she is a first-time questioner, to speak, before I get back to the other list.

C. Oakes (Deputy Chair): I, too, am sitting in that space of trying to process some incredibly important information. I just want to thank all of the panellists for sharing such critical information with us. I also want to recognize and thank Dr. Charlesworth for acknowledging the fact that as a committee, we’ve made the commitment to make sure that these aren’t sitting on the shelf.

I’m pleased to understand and hear today that this is the first time we’re having a knowledge mobilization with a report that’s being brought forward. I think that’s critically important. I think part of that knowledge mobilization, as well, includes us as legislators and how we take the information that we’re hearing and process it and distribute it out to our colleagues — our communities as well.

One of the things that I have found critically important about the work of this committee…. I’m so glad that Myles is still engaged in this process, because I think every committee meeting that we have, I find myself reflecting and learning, and things stay with us for a long time. For everyone on this call, I want to thank you for contributing to that.

Kelli, I’ve got lots of notes, too, of Gwenisms.

Gwen, I think you are going to be one of those exceptional individuals that we’ll remember for a long, long time. I want to thank you for all the work that you’ve contributed for so many years, as all of the panellists have said today.

Leslie, I just want to turn to you because I am…. One of the things that I have tried to do, as a committee member, is take information I’ve learned and go back into my community and understand how things are working within the context of what I have the best ability to go out and reach. I’m glad that we are reaching school districts. I’m glad that educators….

Dr. Charlesworth, you talked about the fact that there’s an interest in that. I think that’s so critically important in reaching out to councillors. I went back to my school district and asked: what are we doing locally, and how can we be supportive of that as legislators and individuals in our community?

Leslie, our friendship centre — Tony and the entire crew through the Quesnel Friendship Centre and the Quesnel Tillicum Society — has done such incredible work for so, so many years. I know how challenging it is to come up with the necessary funds to manage the programs.

I just think, for all of us on this call, it is again: how do we make that switch in government? We have policies that direct, that you’re always having to change how programming dollars get distributed. You get something like the CHIP program that is working extraordinarily well, and then governments come in, and we change policies, and we decide that we’re going to find ways to do things better without taking that moment to sit in the space and reflect on what is truly working in our communities.

[1:55 p.m.]

I guess, for me, as I’m still processing this, again, it’s understanding exactly what supports we have in our communities. Information is critical — the more information that we can get as we sit down with the different ministries. I’m very much looking forward to that meeting on understanding how their recommendations are being moved forward. I think that’s critically important.

It’s understanding exactly that transparency of what programs are actually being treated so that we are supporting the child so that we can also understand what those gaps are so that we’re making sure organizations that have done outstanding work, such as our Quesnel Tillicum Society and Quesnel Friendship Centre…. It’s so they make sure that their programs and services be kept whole and that they don’t spend all of the their time trying to write grants and proposals only to have that process switched two years down the road and that constant wheel that I think so many non-profits are on.

How can we better support our friendship centres? Identifying those gaps, transparency as we move through this. If you had a question to ask the ministry, as we look at these recommendations — as committee members, we will be asking that — what would you like us to ask on your behalf?

L. Varley: Not prepared for that question, Coralee. I ask myself the same question: what can we do better?

I actually had the privilege of living in Scandinavia for two years a long, long time ago. What I found amazing…. I got to know some of the politicians there. I was going to university, and I was working on an anti-apartheid piece of work. I’m dating myself. It was the mid-’80s.

The politicians there, the whole government system there was more long term and strategic in their thinking than we are here in Canada and, indeed, in North America. I think that’s a change that we need. If this government turns over, and the next government comes in, and we go to them about Indigenous issues, and they’re looking at their clock while you’re trying to talk to them…. You know you’re wasting your time, but you have to say all these things anyways. Then we have to kind of wait it out, wait for a favourable government. Those programs and services get disrupted.

That’s what happened to Gwen’s program. A new government came in and shut it down. Off we go. Then we have to come back and rebuild. This is not just in this area; this is in every area too. It’s in justice. The native community law offices all got shut down. There are just so many areas where this happens.

I would change the culture of our elected government and ask people to make long-term strategies and ask everybody to commit to those. That would be the first thing that I’d do. I was witness to how well that worked when I lived in Sweden. I will never forget that. It was a long time ago, and I still have yet to see it happening anywhere else as well as it happens there. So that is one thing.

The second thing I would ask for is your million-dollar question. Recruitment and retention is just an ongoing crisis for us because we can’t match the wages of our non-Indigenous not-for-profit partners. We are funded less than they are. I gave you that example of $16 an hour for what’s in our contracts versus $21 an hour that our partner agencies are able to provide in their contracts. So we actually have to rob the program dollars of food and pens and transportation and child care and stuff. We end up with this skeletal program, and we are trying to do something amazing with a skeletal program. So that’s another thing. I would ask for equity in our funding, in our contracts.

The other thing I would ask for from our contracted partners like MCFD is long-term contracts so that we’ve got the ability to stabilize our organizations and plan for the future. We’ve started to do that, but it’s inconsistent across the province. Some of our centres get a five-year contract, and many of our centres get a one-year contract.

[2:00 p.m.]

You can see these patterns across regions, where…. Up in the northwest, they’re getting two-year contracts. In the Okanagan, they are getting five-year contracts. It doesn’t make any sense. So that’s the other thing that I would ask for: to review it, to provide wage parity. And even within that system of wage parity, where we have unionized workers versus non-unionized workers, the unionized workers are getting the increases, and the non-unionized workers are not. There are all kinds of areas in there that we really need to address and find supports for.

One of the things that government is really, really good at and could do is to start a media campaign — really work with us — to address the stigma around FASD. Everybody is making the assumption that it’s all of us. It’s all the Indigenous people. You know, we might have autism., but we’re…. People assume that we have FASD. We need to….

A big part of the problem that we’re experiencing as Indigenous people and within Indigenous organizations is still racism and stigmatization and stereotyping and bias. I think government needs to take the lead on that and to disrupt that thinking.

There’s my $1 million. I think that was a $1 billion request.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you very much.

I’m hearing from a number of people, when you share what you have shared with us, the time it takes to process. I’m letting committee members know that we will have time at a future meeting where we can have a discussion to reflect on what you have heard.

Today is a good time, while we have these wonderfully talented people with us, for us to ask any questions. So we will proceed.

Susie, it’s your turn.

S. Chant: My question…. It’s maybe more of a comment.

I want to reflect back on what Jennifer Charlesworth was saying in terms of the other piece of this, which I don’t know we’re getting a lot of emphasis on in our conversation. It is there, and I know that it’s there. It’s the support of the people that are dealing with trying to figure out how to support a person with FASD. The misery and the frustration and the anger — all those things are there as well.

Whether they have a program or whether it’s just somebody who hears and understands and can say, “Yes, I get it,” all those things are also critically important. A lot of times when programs are being established, that piece just isn’t there. The program is focused on the individual with the whatever it is.

I come from a health care background. I’ve been through initiatives and programs up the hoop. So I get that. So little, at times, is focused on the fact that there’s a whole family there or a whole group of people there. In some of these places, where somebody is completely disenfranchised, the only place that they’re getting that support is across the counter at the friendship centre or at the community centre or wherever they touch base occasionally.

I don’t want that to get lost either. I’m sure none of us do, but I just want to articulate that.

J. Charlesworth: Would it be okay if I just…?

J. Sims (Chair): Yes, please. Go ahead.

J. Charlesworth: A couple of things I wanted to come back to, but I’ll do that later, after Henry has had an opportunity.

I think that point, Susie, of just how important it is that we see the child in the centre of a broader ecosystem…. I keep looking at Gwen’s background — you know, you’re taking the social determinants — and Pippa’s work around keeping families safely together, understanding that if we hold the child in the centre, then there are all those rings of people extending out.

If we go back to…. One of the things that I feel most strongly about, which I hope will be a legacy from my term, is really speaking to connection and belonging. That goes for the child but also the family and the people who love that child as well. You heard from the parents raising children with FASD how isolated they felt.

[2:05 p.m.]

We’ve just been learning about some research…. Well, we heard a year ago about research that was being done by Jennifer Baumbusch about the mental health of family members who were trying to support kids with support needs and how it’s getting worse through the pandemic as well.

All that to say…. One of the things that I think is a fundamental shift for all of us to think about is that we have organized ourselves, as many of you have said, program by program by program but not seeing how interconnected we need to be in understanding the whole child and creating the conditions for that child and the people who love that child to be successful in raising the child up. It really does require us to kind of look at some of those underlying beliefs — or, as Pippa often talks about, the mental models — that we carry about how our system is and to disrupt that.

We’re not talking, for any of our work, about just nibbling at the edges. Even CHIP…. If that program were to be brought back, that’s not…. Of course that’s important, but the power of CHIP was that it was embedded in a way of thinking about the whole community. That’s what matters. You can’t just replicate CHIP and expect everything to change. It’s like: what were the values and the principles and the philosophies underlying CHIP? Well, there was a whole systems approach. So that requires us to think differently.

Then it gets right down to the details, as Leslie was talking about. It’s procurement, recruitment and retention, training and education, public campaigns of awareness. We can get to the details, but it does require us to think a little differently — well, a lot differently — about the system.

I hope that’s helpful. Anyway, I’ll be quiet now.

J. Rice: Thank you to all the presenters today. Definitely, lots to take in and digest. Lots of learning on my behalf. So thank you for that opportunity.

My question is for Leslie. It just goes back to the wage discrepancy. I’m really struggling with why that would be. I’m curious to know if there’s an explanation for why we would fund one set of providers at $16 an hour and another at $20 or $21, if they’re providing essentially the same type of service. What was our explanation for doing so?

L. Varley: Thank you for asking that obvious question, Jennifer.

There’s no explanation. There’s none. Our workers are required to have the same credentials as other workers. Across the board, not just in this ministry but in all of our funded programs and services, we, on average, are funded a minimum of 10 percent less. I don’t have the answer.

J. Rice: Thank you very much.

J. Sims (Chair): Over to you, Henry.

H. Yao: Thank you so much. Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth probably answered most of my questions already, because I do want to have a conversation around…. I know we are part of the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth, but it sounds like there’s a huge need for cultural revitalization.

As I know some of my colleagues mentioned earlier, we want more of a wraparound support. We’re also talking about looking after the child. But what about the grandparents? What about the parents? What about the uncles? How can we actually put them together?

I hate to say it, but my concept of the nuclear family could be completely different than a lot of Indigenous nuclear family concepts as well. Of course, the concept of culture and community will also differ too.

I’m wondering. Is there any kind of work or maybe com­munication with the Ministry of Indigenous Reconcil­iation about a revitalization of culture and a revitalization of community-building as a priority as we move forward? That way, we’re not just having a child who will be successful but a child becoming one of our many pivotal points. We’re all a community, as a whole, thriving together.

I just want to put that question out there.

G. Phillips: Another title that I have, just by the way, is the co-chair of the Indigenous community development national strategy implementation working group.

[2:10 p.m.]

Yeah. There has been some philosophy established. It was born with the Health Canada bureaucracy years ago to liberate us from these frozen funds and allow us to move funds between categories and have five-year plans with evaluation built in, etc. But it’s one small unit in a bureaucracy of many doors. So one has a philosophical shift; the other ones don’t. It’s like dragging one dead leg along, if you think about what Indian Affairs does to us or Indigenous Services. They kill you with the programs as well as try to liberate us. That’s why we need whole-of-government approaches.

I put into the chat box a link to the Indigenous community development strategy, which is that philosophy. Now we’re actually on the ground in every province and territory, trying to implement it with the nations of the region, knowing that every province or territory has rights holders that belong there, the nation groups, and that we can move from program-based relationships and program-based funding to actually nation-based relationships and then direct funding for comprehensive approaches. This can happen with the friendship centres that are serving us. It can happen with all of what should be recognized as our public service agencies.

The First Nations governments in our societies have equal rights, and we have no equal funding at all. So even giving us the recognition as a governing body is an important thing. We’re not there yet, because DRIPA is in this philosophical space. We really see that there is an opportunity by recognizing us and then working with us just over the next little while here. We could come up with a very different structure, a very different relationship, and when we can change the relationships, things start to change. When people understand and people become aware, it’s amazing what we can do within the existing legal framework by tweaking a few policies.

I think that there has been a lack of understanding in general that the space that we occupy on the federal land, with the lack of jurisdiction of the federal government for anything of an exclusive…. Those things that you guys have exclusively, those things that take care of people, predominantly…. That then causes all of that program backup on their side, because they have to go every year for spending authority to the Treasury Board, to a spending authority. It’s a crazy thing, because they have no legitimacy for those authorities. We have that authority. Every nation does.

When I sat at a treaty table with you guys, we were talking about child welfare, talking about education — all of those things. So there is a big-picture shift that can happen. It has to happen. And then it starts to…. All of these groups like the friendship centres and all of the other organizations that exist out there need to be recognized as part of our public service agencies, part of our network of care and funded under permanent authorities. That’s really the shift that has to happen — higher level to then liberate all of these wonderful, beautiful, impactful things to continue to happen.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you, Gwen.

K. Kirkpatrick: I thought I’d better ask a question, or Dr. Charlesworth would wonder if there is something wrong with me because I ask so many, normally. I was just being very reflective and appreciate everything that you said.

I had a question. Leslie, just very briefly, what is your funding model, and did the wage discrepancy exist prior to the low-wage redress? Has it always been kind of a chronic or systemic issue?

L. Varley: Yes. It has always been there. Friendship centres have always been underfunded, since the day that they opened, and we still try to address that.

We’ve been in discussion about this for a long time, but we really haven’t made any progress. As I said, the unionized workers…. We don’t have very many unionized workers in our friendship centre sector, but they got the lift. It’s at the expense of the people who don’t belong to the unions.

It becomes a real challenge for us. It becomes a challenge internally. We have some programs that are…. By contract, they have to be funded at a certain rate, but we’ve got somebody with equal skill and equal ability and the same training and education over in this program, and they’re getting $6 less an hour. We even see that within our own programs and services.

K. Kirkpatrick: Thank you very much. I used to run a family services organization and experienced the same thing with the family reunification programs and things that we ran.

Your funding model, though…. Are you primarily MCFD-funded? Do you fundraise? Grants? What’s your reliance on government for your funding?

[2:15 p.m.]

L. Varley: Well, we’re trying to build ourselves in self-reliance with social enterprises. Almost every friendship centre runs their own social enterprise now. About five years ago, 70 percent of the funding coming into friendship centres came from MCFD, child and family services. That’s changing now.

Of course, there’s lots and lots of…. As you know, we’re constantly chasing grants and after foundations and after proposal calls. That’s how we build our funding structures.

G. Phillips: Karin, that is not unique to friendship centres. That is every organization that is a First Nations, Indigenous organization. The only organizations that actually get core funding would be a band. That’s band support funding, and that does not support a lot of anything. Then we have some tribal council funding. That is very little as well, and that’s not a guaranteed thing.

The whole regime, the overarching regime, is what needs to change. Then it can cause so much….

Leslie, I would say that probably a good….

I know we did an analysis one time, and I think it was 35 to 40 percent of our managers’ time was spent actually responding to the proposal craziness, rather than actually managing programs.

K. Kirkpatrick: I feel your pain. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Leslie, Gwen and Jackie, I appreciate your time today. Thank you so much.

J. Sims (Chair): Before I wrap up, Jennifer Charlesworth — as we have two Jenns on the line — I’m going to ask if you want to say any final words.

J. Charlesworth: I first of all want to say a deep gratitude to Jackie and Leslie and Gwen.

As you heard, the ways in which the understanding of FASD and the ways in which things can be addressed on a community-based level or within families and communities…. We know what needs to be done out in the community. The challenge is that in some cases, we’ve created so many different barriers to doing the work that needs to be done. You’ve heard some very pragmatic barriers. Can you imagine what that feels like to the families and to the people who are supporting those children and families as well?

As you continue to work with FASD, as we continue to do our mobilization work, of course we’re going to raise public awareness and understanding and address the stigma and shame and the blame that’s so strongly associated with FASD, perhaps more than any other diagnosis out there. But we also have to start thinking about the ways in which our systems are constructed that actually create more harm or don’t allow the communities to do what they know needs to be done in order to support people.

This is about disrupting some age-old patterns and behaviours within our systems of care. So I’m deeply grateful that you are all leaning in and that you’re holding this space.

I really appreciate what you said, Kelli, about just needing to sit with this. That’s exactly what…. That’s the best I could hope for. It’s sitting with this and thinking: “Okay. Well, what does this really mean, and how is it that we can show up differently?” That’s really what’s being called for now.

FASD is a window into the inequities and the kinds of systemic changes that are necessary. So I’m grateful to Jackie and Leslie and Gwen for illuminating that even more for us and to all of you for listening in and really wanting to understand. Thank you.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you, Jennifer, and — I know I am speaking for every member of this committee — to each and every one of you who came and joined us today but also shared your perspective, your story, your learnings with us.

I think you used the word “disruptive,” right? I think you’ve certainly managed to shake up all of us on this Zoom call, both emotionally and to disrupt our thinking processes as well. I don’t use the word “disruption” negatively. For me, disruption often means you’re beginning to look at things with a different lens and different perspectives.

[2:20 p.m.]

A big thank-you to each and every one of you. I lift up my hands in awe of the work you do.

Gwen, in your journey, I know how many challenges you must have faced.

I’m sure you could write 100 books, all of you, but you kept that joy and that commitment and that passion for kids and for building better communities. At the end of the day, it’s about people. Thank you so much to all of you.

Okay, who’s going to move to adjourn? Henry moves that we adjourn. Seconded by Fin.

Motion approved.

J. Sims (Chair): Go and enjoy the rain, please.

The committee adjourned at 2:21 p.m.