The committee met at 8:03 a.m.

[J. Sims in the chair.]

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you very much, everyone. We have quite a cast in front of us this morning.

My name is Jinny Sims. I’m the MLA for Surrey-Panorama and the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth.

I’m chairing today from my riding here in Surrey, Surrey-Panorama, which is in the unceded territory of the Coast Salish, including the Kwantlen, Katzie, Tsawwassen and Semiahmoo. We are forever grateful and privileged to work on and share this space.

I’m hoping all of you will take the time to reflect on the lands that you sit on.

The committee will be reviewing two reports that were released by the Representative for Children and Youth. First, we will be considering the representative’s report At a Crossroads: The Roadmap from Fiscal Discrimination to Equity in Indigenous Child Welfare.

[8:05 a.m.]

What I’m going to have people do is have the committee introduce themselves. Then I’m going to turn to our representative, and she will be introducing those who are joining her today and joining us.

Can we start with you, Mike.

M. Bernier (Deputy Chair): Good morning, everybody. I’m Mike Bernier. I’m the Deputy Chair, and I’m the MLA for Peace River South.

J. Sims (Chair): Don’t be shy. Just step in, please, committee members.

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

I’m coming to you from the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish.

K. Kirkpatrick: Hi. I’m Karin Kirkpatrick, and I am the MLA for West Vancouver–Capilano.

I’m on the beautiful lands of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam.

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

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

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

I’m speaking to you today from the territory of the Coast Tsimshian here in Prince Rupert.

Welcome.

F. Donnelly: Good morning. I’m Fin Donnelly, MLA for Coquitlam–Burke Mountain.

I’m coming to you from the traditional territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking people — namely, the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations.

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

The same as my colleague, I’m speaking to you from Victoria, B.C., which is located on the traditional and unceded territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking people, specifically Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations.

Welcome.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you. I think that’s our team.

I’m now going to turn to you, Jennifer, to introduce yourselves and your guests.

Consideration of Representative
for Children and Youth Reports

At a Crossroads: The Roadmap
from Fiscal Discrimination to Equity
in Indigenous Child Welfare

J. Charlesworth: Thank you so much, Chair. Lovely to be in virtual circle with you.

I would like to acknowledge that I am joining you today from the beautiful traditional unceded lands of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ people, the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations. Ever grateful to be here.

As I look out of my office, I look at a beautiful promontory over Songhees land. It’s actually a very sacred space where children, once they had reached a certain age of about one, when they’ve decided to continue to be on this Earth with us…. It was a place of naming. I think that’s just so important for us when we think of the work that we’re in circle to do together.

I would like to begin, actually, by introducing and inviting our guests to introduce themselves. As I’ve said many, many times, we are only as strong as the circle of people that walk alongside us and inform us about what matters. So I would like to invite…. We’ll do it in this order: Mary, Bill, Adam, Yvonne and Bart. If you could introduce yourself to the select standing committee, please.

Over to you, Mary.

M. Teegee: Good morning, everybody. I’m very privileged to be here with you all today to discuss this most important matter. My name is Mary Teegee, Maaxswxw Gibuu, White Wolf.

I am Takla. I am Gitxsan and Carrier. I come from the House of Nyguup, in the Lax Gibuu clan.

I am the executive director of child and family services for Carrier-Sekani Family Services. I’m also the chair of the Indigenous Child and Family Services Directors forum.

I also am the president of the B.C. Aboriginal Child Care Society, and I am a board member of the First Nations Caring Society of Canada, which of course, is led by the indomitable Cindy Blackstock. I represent British Columbia on the national advisory committee for child and family services reform. I’m honoured to be here with you today.

J. Charlesworth: Over to you, Bill.

W. Yoachim: Good morning, everyone [audio interrupted]. It’s an honour to be here this morning. I look forward to the conversation.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you. I think we might have missed that.

Bill is with Kw’umut Lelum, an Indigenous child and family service agency based in the Nanaimo area, Snuneymuxw area.

I will turn it over to you, Adam.

A. Calvert: Hello, I am Adam Calvert.

I am coming to you from the Coast Salish — I’m probably just down the road from Jinny — unceded territory. I work in the Semiahmoo, Tsawwassen and Katzie and Kwantlen Nations’ areas.

I am with Métis Family Services. I’m their executive director, and I look forward to being part of this. Thank you very much for having me here.

[8:10 a.m.]

Y. Hare: [Secwepemctsin was spoken.]

I’m calling in from the traditional and unceded territories of the Secwépemc Nation and, specifically, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc here in Kamloops.

I am the executive director for Secwépemc Child and Family Services, as well as sitting on the executive for the Indigenous Child and Family Services.

W. Yoachim: Mary, before you proceed, I’m sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to say — I was broken up there — that I’m in Snuneymuxw, where I’m from.

I also want to relay that many moons ago, Ms. Sims was an amazing social studies teacher at Barsby, if it’s the same Ms. Sims. Thanks.

J. Sims (Chair): It’s a small world, Bill. You can’t escape me.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you. I expect Bill is doing duty this morning, making sure that people are where they need to be.

Bart is the final guest that we have, joining from the Indigenous child and family service agencies.

Over to you, Bart.

B. Knudsgaard: Kiʔsuʔk wiǂnam. [Ktunaxa was spoken.]

My name is Bart Knudsgaard. I’m the policy lead for the secretariat that supports the 24 Indigenous Child and Family Services Directors — the Directors Forum here in British Columbia.

I’m calling in from ɁamakɁis Ktunaxa, the unceded Ktunaxa territory.

It’s good to be here today.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you. I will briefly introduce the other RCY staff members and strong allies. Joining me today is Deputy Representative Samantha Cocker, who will be speaking to the Crossroads report. Pippa Rowcliffe is here as well. Blair Mitchell is executive director of individual advocacy, First Nations, Métis and Inuit engagement. Sheri Meding is the RCY researcher who is the lead author on the Crossroads report.

Jennifer Dreyer is the executive director of systemic advocacy, First Nations, Métis and Inuit research. She will be speaking to the Beyond Compliance report. Gemma Martin is the researcher who is the lead author on Beyond Compliance.

I’m delighted to welcome two people who have been of tremendous assistance in producing the Crossroads report: Dr. Helaina Gaspard, of the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, upon whose research we based most of our findings, an extraordinary support; and Donna Mathiasen, who was an integral part of our project team, bringing invaluable experience, making sense of things that were very difficult to make sense of. She’s a former MCFD executive director of finance and corporate services.

We’ve got a very strong circle of wise people today. Just to give you a sense of the flow, I will make a presentation on the highlights of our Crossroads report. I’ve just got a couple of slides that I’ll bring up, and then we will turn to Mary for some remarks. That will take about 20 minutes or so, and then we’ll open up for your questions. You’ll be able to hear from others that are in the circle today.

The reason I’ve invited, and gratefully so, the members from Indigenous child and family service agencies is because this is how you’ll understand how things get translated into practice. They’ll be able to speak about the impacts of fiscal inequities.

The bulk of our time is going to be on the At a Crossroads report. Then we’ll shift to the Care Planning report. I am going to the full title of our report. I will just very quickly share the screen, just a few things to draw on here.

The report At a Crossroads: The Roadmap from Fiscal Discrimination to Equity in Indigenous Child Welfare is about money, as the title suggests — how it’s spent, on whom it is spent. But it’s also, at its essence, about human rights. Specifically, it’s about moving toward equity for all B.C. children and families when it comes to the important government services that support them.

The findings of this report are troubling. They show that the provincial government and MCFD have considerable work to do in order to ensure that the rights of First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous children and families to that equity are consistently upheld. At the present time, they are not. I’ll just give a little bit of a background and context here before we get into the findings and recommendations. I’ll just stop here, just so that we can see one another.

[8:15 a.m.]

Our intent of this work was to map the fiscal ecosystem of funding to services in order to reveal gaps and to create a comprehensive picture of how, and how much, money is being spent on First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous child and family services compared to non-Indigenous child and family services. We wanted to dig into how that spending translates into the services being delivered and what kinds of outcomes are being achieved for these young people.

We knew we needed to examine both federal and provincial funding practices to gain a full understanding and comparative picture of the fiscal ecosystem, even though our jurisdiction includes only B.C. The complexity of child welfare funding made it necessary for us to work with experts to accurately assess federal and provincial fiscal systems.

That’s why we contracted with Dr. Gaspard and the Institute for Fiscal Studies in Democracy to gather and analyze the federal and provincial data. As I mentioned, we drew from IFSD’s work to establish our findings and recommendations.

This is a very long report. We appended IFSD’s larger report, entitled Resource Analysis in the Provision of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Child and Family Services in British Columbia, to our RCY report. Dr. Gaspard’s report contains much more information than what we were able to focus on in our report and, indeed, provides fertile ground for work by my office and for the Ministry of Children and Family Development. As I mentioned, we also worked with Donna, a subject-matter expert in MCFD finances, to interpret the ministry’s complex internal practices.

It’s important to understand that we undertook this project with a broader agenda in mind — fundamentally, to be of service to First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous people in this province. This is especially important at a time when First Nations and Métis governments are in the process of making decisions about child and family services and beginning to assert jurisdiction over their own child welfare.

There are two main findings. The first is that the level of child welfare services a First Nations, Métis, Inuit or urban Indigenous child or family in B.C. receives depends on where they live, on or off reserve.

This is due to different funding methodologies and the fact that Indigenous Services Canada and MCFD have different approaches to funding child welfare services, which leads to discrepancies, depending on where a child lives. These discrepancies, in turn, lead to gaps and inequities for First Nations, Métis, Inuit or urban Indigenous children and their families, gaps that simply should not exist in a province that’s committed to reconciliation.

Now, the differences in funding levels today are largely due to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruling of 2016, which determined that federal government funding practices for First Nations children living on reserve in Canada were discriminatory. That decision effectively forced the federal government to begin paying for on-reserve child welfare services at actual costs, based on a needs-based budget that includes culturally rooted pre­vention services focused on community wellness.

The problem is that provincial funding for Indigenous children and families in B.C. has not kept up and, in fact, has left some children behind.

I’m just going to take a moment to share a slide for you, because I think it might help. This is a complex area, so let’s try and make it as transparent as possible.

There are different funding pots. Federal funding comes, for those on reserve, to Indigenous child and family service agencies that are federally funded. So First Nations children…. Over here are First Nations children with status, eligible for federal funding. The Indigenous child and family service agency provides all services.

If you get some funding from off reserve, it’s MCFD, provincially funded. Those are children not served by Indigenous child and family services. There are 84 nations that are not affiliated with Indigenous child and family services. The provincial government receives funds from the federal government, but MCFD provides the services.

Then you’ve got situations in which you’ve got agencies that are receiving funds both from MCFD and the federal government, and that’s where some fundamental inequities also arise.

The problem, as I say, is that the provincial funding hasn’t kept up with what’s happening federally. So the result, as you can appreciate with this, is a confusing and inequitable mixture of funding, depending on where a child and family resides.

For example, funding for on-reserve child welfare services, again, for those First Nations that work with Indigenous child and family service agencies — as an aside, they used to be known as Delegated Aboriginal Agencies — includes the federal funding, and that has the culturally rooted prevention services at needs-based actual costs.

[8:20 a.m.]

But if you come into the funding from the Ministry of Children and Families, it comes in at lower rates, and it doesn’t account for the actual costs and the culturally rooted prevention costs.

That gives you just a bit of a visual sense. I’ll stop there for a moment.

As you can see, we’ve got a very mixed array. We’ve got Indigenous child and family service agencies that are on reserve and serving their nations getting the full amount. There are those agencies and nations that are receiving funding through the Ministry of Children and Family Development. We’ve found it very difficult to track that and to ensure that they were getting the full funding. Then you’ve got off reserve that is not receiving the same level of funding from the provincial government.

That’s the situation that we’re in. The situation, as a result of this, is you’ve got a hodgepodge of funding streams. That results in the fiscal discrimination. Two children and their families, with the same life circumstances, could receive vastly different services, depending on where they are living.

First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous children living off reserve, many of them who are served by child and family service agencies, are at the greatest disadvantage because provincial funding for services for them is much less than their counterparts living on reserve and being served by an Indigenous child and family service agency.

I want to highlight, as well, that during our analysis of the research for this report, we discovered that MCFD’s current funding approach mirrors, in at least one clear way, the old federal approach that the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal found to be discriminatory, in that it ties funding to children being in care. This, in our view, is a perverse incentive.

That is contrary to the spirit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action, and it can be interpreted as continuing to discriminate against B.C.’s First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous children who live off reserve as well as those First Nations children living on reserve but receiving their services through MCFD.

The second main finding is that MCFD’s system for allocating funding is so broken that it’s impossible to link the ministry funding with the commitments to reconciliation that government has made or to outcomes for children and families. It’s not possible to create a map of the fiscal ecosystem between First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous children compared to non-Indigenous services provided to children using the provincial data, nor is it possible to connect spending with stated government priorities. That information is just not tracked.

This was a surprise to us, and it would be problematic at any time. But it’s especially so in an era of reconciliation. As you can appreciate, without knowing how much money is spent on Indigenous child welfare, and what the outcomes of those expenditures are, how can any assessment be made of how well First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous children and families are being supported in B.C.?

Let me put this into context. I’ll talk about our recommendations, and then I’ll pass it over to Mary.

In 2022, First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous children still outnumber non-Indigenous children in B.C. government care by a ratio of almost 3 to 1, even though they comprise only 10 percent of the province’s total population. Currently 68 percent of children in B.C. government care are First Nations, Métis, Inuit or urban Indigenous, a shameful situation that has often been referred to as a continuation of the residential school system.

The fact that levels of funding are inequitable amongst various subgroups of these children is also shameful. As I previously stated, in our view, it’s fiscal discrimination, and the ministry needs to correct this.

We have three recommendations in this report. The first is that MCFD seek the budget capacity to adopt the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal principles of funding and provide funding models that are needs based, that provide for substantive equality for all First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous children and that prioritize community wellness and culturally rooted prevention services. As part of this recommendation, I recommended that MCFD, in partnership with the 84 unaffiliated First Nations rights holders….

[8:25 a.m.]

As you probably know, there are 204 First Nations, and 84 of those are unaffiliated with an Indigenous child and family service agency. They said that they receive their services from MCFD. But what we felt was important was that the ministry work with those rights holders to negotiate a transparent distribution of funding from Indigenous Services Canada that flows from the feds and that will include any and all funds associated with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruling.

The second recommendation called for MCFD to update its ministry-specific fiscal management tools and reporting practices to align with public funds allocated to First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous child welfare to stated spending objectives and declared government and ministry priorities. From our view, that makes sense for a government that prioritizes reconciliation.

The third recommendation. You’ve heard me speak about data stewardship in virtually every report, and we felt that it was important for MCFD to improve its data stewardship. I recommended that the ministry incorporate the grandmother perspective in relation to the data it collects, as described in the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner’s 2020 report on disaggregated data collection. Collecting disaggregated, race-based data would enable MCFD to understand the diverse and greater needs of the First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous population it serves.

We felt it should include needs-based data to define the services and supports that are needed, finance and contract data on how funding is deployed and outcome data. The purpose of which would be to align the forthcoming anti-racism data legislation and to reduce and, ultimately, eliminate fiscal discrimination against First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous children, youth and families and achieve equity in funding and services.

It’s also about supporting the First Nations and the Métis Nation of B.C. in asserting their jurisdiction over child welfare. They need information in order to be able to do this in a good way, and they shouldn’t have to wait for it, as they have been waiting for it. The principal and the federal act respecting First Nations, Inuit, Métis children, youth and families is that nations should not be stalled in asserting their jurisdiction over child welfare because of colonial governments. And that’s a worthy principle.

The final thing I’ll say about this report is that provincial leaders and MCFD repeatedly stated their commitment to reconciliation and they’ve used legislation to reinforce it. Of course, we strongly support that. If they are serious, and I believe they are, they need to pay attention to these findings and act now to eliminate the fiscal discrimination.

Now I’m going to turn it over to your colleague, someone who is extremely helpful in ensuring that we have access to information. Many of the case studies came from the Indigenous child and family service agencies. So over to you, Mary, as the chair.

M. Teegee: Thank you for that, Jennifer. Just a great, great report. Always honoured to help you in any way that we can with all the benefits to children.

I really wanted to ensure that the committee understands the dire situation that’s occurring here in British Columbia not only for our children but also for the government of B.C. When we started….

When I say “we” in this capacity, I’m talking about the First Nations Caring Society all those years ago. When we started the court action against Canada, it was the first time in a first-world country where the citizens of that country charged the sitting government with discrimination and the citizens won. In this case, the citizens were First Nations children. British Columbia is in that exact some position right now, as we speak. If something isn’t done, there will be action taken, because there’s no recourse that we have.

At that time, when I came into this position, 15 years ago, when I was only 20 years old, there was a situation where I was very appalled because, at that time, our federal funding was based on an archaic model. You may have heard of it — directive 20-1. It didn’t look at the needs; it just looked at population data. It didn’t look at what we actual needed as a community. It didn’t adjust for inflation.

When I came into this position, when I looked at my budget, all I could do was pay my social workers between $3 to $6 less per hour than MCFD workers. We had no money for prevention on reserve. So we took Canada to court, and, of course, in 2016, we won.

One of the first acts as chair…. After we won that ruling, in our first directors forum, we did tell the ministry representatives that we wanted them…. We gave them the recommendation at that time to adopt the BCHRT recommendations and also to implement them.

[8:30 a.m.]

Now, that fell on deaf ears. They said: “Oh, we’ll go back.” We went again and again. We’ve said this again and again. It’s nothing new. We’ve asked the provincial government to do this for our children.

The other piece, as well, is…. Don’t forget that British Columbia, all those years ago in the ’90s, was the first province to fully support and endorse Jordan’s principle. Today there is still no implementation of Jordan’s principle at all within the provincial government.

I say this because you have heard of the $40 billion settlement that we negotiated this past Christmas holiday. That $40 billion from that inequity in funding. Of the $40 billion, $19.7 billion is for long-term reform for child and family services, and also $20 billion in compensation for the discrimination that occurred.

Right now we know the At A Crossroads report…. I would like to thank Dr. Helaina Gaspard and Donna and Jennifer for getting all the information together and doing a tremendous amount of work and bringing that forward. We know that right now, as we speak, British Columbia is discriminating against Indigenous children that live off reserve. It has become more and more apparent, especially since now, while we’re working to rectify the discrimination that occurred for on-reserve First Nations children, we now have a bigger disparity, a bigger gap, between on and off reserve.

I’ll tell you what that looks like. We have now post-majority services at actual cost, for example. A youth that has been removed on reserve I could provide supports to. I could provide housing. I could provide life skills. I could provide their basic human necessities. But if a child comes into our sector and they’re provincial — they were removed off and not in community, off reserve — I don’t have funding to pay them the same as I could pay for a child that’s post-majority on reserve. That’s what it looks like on the ground.

Also on the ground, what it looks like, on reserve, there’s a family…. I’m giving you a bit of a case study. On reserve, the father lost his job. The mother is going through a difficult time. She has a new baby. They have three children. The ministry becomes involved because the two older kids can’t go to school. So the ministry comes in. It’s a protection concern. They come in. They find that there’s not very much food. The kids aren’t taken care of. The father has started drinking, and they don’t have a vehicle.

So what happens in that case on reserve? We come in. We’re able to get staff to bring those children to school. We’re able to pay for groceries. We’re able to pay for the arrears in hydro and in rent because the father lost his job. We’re able to provide support for the father to go to treatment, if that’s what he needs. We’re able to provide respite for those children.

Off reserve? We wouldn’t be able to do that. So what would inevitably happen is that those children would end up in care.

I want to quote here. It’s really important. I always think that it’s the young people that teach us everything. I brought this up the other day to our First Nations Leadership Council. They’re very well aware of the situation.

Years ago, when we were working on the Tsawwassen accord — that was for all the First Nations leadership to come together and work for the betterment of our children and families — a young boy, maybe 12 or 13, had asked the panel of leaders, including MCFD, one simple question. The youth asked: “Why did you give money to strangers to take care of me, but you couldn’t give money to my parents to keep me?”

So that’s what we’re talking about. On the ground, that’s what it looks like. It’s the human toll that it takes on families because they cannot take care of their children. They don’t have the funding for prevention. They don’t have the supports.

When we talk about reconciliation, we have to understand that reconciliation is not cost neutral. The more important R words are reparations and redress. We cannot move forward as a society if we know something is happening to our most vulnerable and do nothing. So at this point, this report shows you what is happening in your province.

The other thing that is happening that is perpetuating the discrimination and that is causing more stresses to children and families and for our agency directors and our leadership is that the federal government provides us with a child tax benefit.

[8:35 a.m.]

Every child in care, every child in British Columbia that receives child taxes…. They receive it federally. What happens in the province of B.C.? If you are a provincial billable child, the child tax benefit or the child special allowance, as they call it, doesn’t go to the children. They don’t benefit from that. It goes into…. We don’t know where it goes. It goes into general funding, never to be benefiting those children. That’s what happening.

We’ve said this again and again to ministry workers. One simple gesture of good faith to say that the province of B.C. is committed to ending an inequity is to actually allow those child tax benefits to go to the children in care. This is happening across Canada. Manitoba right now is in court because of this.

In B.C., you know better. This needs to change. That would be a gesture of good faith. There are many other things that could happen, in the immediacy, to get to where there is substantive equity.

Yesterday we started the first negotiations for the final settlement agreement. That compensation is going to be coming down, the compensation of $20 billion to compensate those children that were discriminated against because of inequity in funding.

I want to remind you…. Some of you are not going to know. All those years ago, when we took Canada to court, we had provided many reports. We provided…. The Auditor General gave recommendations in their report back in the day. We had the Wen:de report, which talked about the inequity in funding and showed the federal government a roadmap for how to end the discrimination. It was left unheard.

At that time, in order to end the inequity in our funding model, it would’ve been just $120 million. We are here, all these years later, and the price tag is starting at $40 billion.

British Columbia is in that same situation. We’re telling you how to do this. There’s a roadmap. Those recommendations are very, very clear. It’s not grey. This is what you need to do.

We also have different resources. We have the Spirit Bear Plan that was developed by the caring society. That came from all the representatives across Canada. Again, that’s to end the inequity. We have the CHRT recommendations and their orders, again, to end the inequity. We also have the opportunity for Jordan’s principle to be fully implemented in British Columbia.

British Columbia could be the leader in Canada. You could set the path forward that other provinces and territories could follow. That could be your legacy. That would be your name in history. You have a choice at this point as to what you’re going to do.

You have an opportunity, as well, right now. MCFD, the province, is looking at amending the CFCSA, the act, and developing and creating a new one. The province supports jurisdiction for First Nations, and we applaud that.

I always say this. We’ve always had the inherent right for jurisdiction. What we haven’t had are the resources to breathe life into our own laws. We can make the best plans. Trust me. Our staff, our workers, make the best plans for our families. What is disheartening, what breaks our hearts, is when there is no funding to follow up on those plans. What inevitably happens is those children end up in care.

When we talk about all of the research and the statistics and everything…. Those numbers link to a human life. There’s a human toll when there is discriminatory funding, not only on the children and families but also on our staff. Right now my heart goes out to executive director Penny Trites, to executive director Jennifer Chuckry, to executive director Adam Calvert, to executive director Bernadette.

I say this because we receive money both federally and provincially. Those agencies that I just talked about predominantly get money just from the province. So they’re not able to provide the full wraparound services.

There are reports right now in the media around the sad death of Traevon. We’ve all heard of it, the young man that was found in a closet. He had been in ministry care for years and years and then came over to Xyolhemeylh. That totally could have been avoided had they received enough money to provide the wraparound supports, which they still keep asking for.

[8:40 a.m.]

I’ll give you another example of inequity. Right now in the province of B.C., the funding formula in the North is 1 to 27. Basically, that’s one FTE for 27 children. We know that’s not happening. We know in the North, it’s one social worker to 65 children.

In my agency, my max is one social worker — not an FTE, one social worker — to maximum eight children. We have one social worker, in some cases, to four children, based on need. That is how dire the issue is here. Really,I’m hoping that….

More recently the DRIPA action plan was released. I’ve heard the support again for jurisdiction from the province. I’ve heard the talk of partnership. We’re absolutely willing, but we need to ensure right now that this issue of discriminatory funding and the inequity in funding is rectified so that we can move forward together in a good way, in the spirit of reconciliation. That’s what I’m hoping that people are getting out of this report.

I also must commend Samantha Cocker, who is part of the representative…. She was, for years and years, at the helm of Xyolhemeylh Child and Family. I know her heart ached because she could not ever get to the place where there was non-discriminatory funding, and she moved mountains with the limited funding she had. Now she’s in a role where she’s the deputy RCY and helped to do this report. I think it’s come full circle that she’s able to make some change or get information so that we can make change so that we can do right by our children.

I think, really, the question, at this point, for the select standing committee is: how are you going to be remembered? I often say this: we are the ancestors that those not yet born will speak of. What will they say about us? That’s the question.

J. Charlesworth: As this committee knows well, when we bring the people who are most closely connected to the children and families — whether it’s the families themselves, the service providers, the caregivers — you get an entirely different view. You get the heart, you get the passion, and you get the reality of what’s happening.

I’ll very quickly share one final thing so it puts a fine point on it. This is what we’re dealing with — significant inequities. If you’re a visual person, this helps you understand what is happening right now. As Mary says, that translates into very different experiences for Indigenous children in this province. Let’s stop there.

Thank you so much, Mary, for bringing your heart and passion and the work that has been done for decades with the CHRT rulings. The beautiful thing is that with Dr. Helaina Gaspard’s work, we actually have an incredible roadmap. So there are a lot of places to start and to move forward in a quick way.

Let’s open up. Back to you, Chair.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you, Jennifer, for your presentation.

I want to take a moment to say a special thank-you to Mary for your very compelling and passionate and very informative presentation. I can say that with Bill there from good, old Nanaimo and seeing Adam and seeing all of your other guests, I could see a lot of nodding as you were speaking. So thank you for coming and sharing all of this with us.

I’m sure the committee members are now going to have questions, so we’re going to turn it over to the question-and-answer period, so to speak. This is not like question-and-answer period in the Legislature. This is much more friendly and collaborative.

We will take hands. I can see we already have them. We’ll start with MLA Chant.

[8:45 a.m.]

S. Chant: Thank you so much for your presentation and for the way that you helped illuminate the vast problem — even further that I originally thought it was. Thank you so much for that.

I’m interested, and perhaps this is directed to Dr. Gaspard…? Am I right? I don’t know. If the fiscal distribution system is so broken, how were you able to pull data enough to make these comparisons? I heard very clearly that you could not track money to child. I’m amazed. Well done, you, at being able to pull this all together. How were you able to do that work?

H. Gaspard: MLA Chant, thank you very much for the question. I think it’s an excellent one.

There were a few different ways in which the work was carried out. Oftentimes, when we are doing this fiscal work, we have to manage two issues. One is the numbers that we see that are reported by the province, in this instance, and another is what actually happens on the ground. So we are oftentimes working with two perspectives. That’s very deliberate on our part, because we know that numbers tell one story, but oftentimes what’s actually happening on the ground can be quite different.

In this instance, we were fortunate to have had wonderful participation from the Indigenous child and family services agencies in British Columbia. We also had a number of case studies that came from the MCFD service providers.

One of the things that was very important for us to emphasize in this report is that the challenges that were highlighted by providers across the spectrum were actually the same challenges that had been highlighted for decades in the province. This goes back to contracting. This goes back to alignment of need and resources on the ground. This also goes back to the issue of allocation.

For us, when it came to that portrait of understanding or better understanding what perceptions of adequacy would be, we actually had a perfect control with the agencies. Because by virtue of the agencies that were reporting, the agencies themselves…. We move inductively, right? We look at the data, and we ask the data….

We’re looking at the data to find the story. In this instance, the story that came out was that if are an agency that’s principally funded by the federal government, you perceive your funding to be adequate. If you are principally funded by MCFD as an agency, you perceive yourself to be inadequately funded.

That’s what the numbers, the questionnaires, the surveys were telling us. Then, of course, we would verify, so to speak, that perspective through the case studies. We would ask: “What’s happening on the ground? What are you seeing?” That was very much the storyline that emerged. For us, it’s always about looking at those two portraits.

Certainly, thanks to Donna for this. If I can, MCFD’s tracking system did not make it easy to understand where funding was going. It took a person like Donna, who had to develop her own approach. We actually note this in the report — that we consider the approach illustrative, because we had no way of verifying what would come out. Poor Donna had to actually do this manually — to be able to run through thousands of entries to try to figure out how you would actually tag the allocation.

Purely from a fiscal perspective, purely from a transparency perspective — and, certainly, if I were a member of the public or if I were sitting in your shoes — that, to me, would be especially preoccupying. Because now I have no way of testing a political narrative against an allocation.

K. Paddon: I’m not sure who I will be asking this of. I’ll put it in the circle here.

At the end of March, not only did this report come out, but the Declaration Act action plan came out. I’m seized particularly by sections 4.16 to maybe as far as 4.21. I’m assuming that we’ve looked at it. I’m just wondering about thoughts on whether those sections or whether the plan itself moves the work forward in what we are talking about today, as well.

[8:50 a.m.]

J. Charlesworth: I’ll be honest. We have not done an analysis as to whether the Declaration Act action plan will actually address fully the concerns that we have.

I think, in a general sense, what we often find is the importance of drilling down from higher-level aspirations into actual practice on the ground. I think that what Helaina has spoken of so well is that you have to keep pulling the layers of the onion out, if you will, to actually understand what’s happening on the ground. It might look good, but then, as you start to gather more and more information, you see that it’s not entirely as it seems.

I’m going to provide a very specific example.

I might call upon you, Yvonne, about the work on the fiscal framework.

The ministry will say that they are doing a great deal of work in this area already. They are working on a fiscal framework. They’ve been working with the First Nations Leadership Council on that. However, as we start to pull away the layers of the onion, it’s only for some children in this province, not all children. Yvonne sits on the working group associated with that.

I’m digressing a wee bit from your question, Kelli, but trying to use this as an illustration of how important it is that we get beyond the broad statements into the actual practice.

Yvonne, could I call upon you just to give an example of…? It sounds good, but maybe it’s not so good.

Y. Hare: Yeah, Jen. Actually, I think I have a great example, as a technician with many, many years of service supposedly sitting on the working group for that fiscal framework.

The technical committee has pretty much…. Well, it has really dissolved. They’ve taken any of that out of our hands — to be able to inform that fiscal framework. That work has been handed over to consultants to do engagements across B.C. The technical working group is no longer involved.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you, Yvonne.

K. Kirkpatrick: Some of my questions have been answered.

Thank you very much for the work that you’ve done.

Mary said something very powerful, I think, for all of us on the committee. How will we be remembered in the work that we do? I think that it is very important that, as a committee…. I’m sure that all of us on this committee heard that and take that very seriously.

Mary, it was very helpful to have the examples of the same scenario on-reserve and off-reserve. I found that very helpful to illuminate this. That final slide was very good, just in terms of giving us that visual.

You said, if I understood — this is for Jennifer, I believe — that the federal government, although this isn’t perfect, has been moving in the right direction with respect to the funding. Is there a roadmap there? You’re saying that the provincial government has not been. Does the provincial government have a roadmap, by looking at what the federal government has done, in order to be able to help them get to that point, and if so — and you can’t answer this question — why haven’t they? Maybe you can answer that question.

J. Charlesworth: I would say that one of the reasons for this report….

Maybe I’m going to queue you, Samantha, on this one.

One of the things that we wanted to do with this report is to encourage the provincial government to take a look, to develop that roadmap. As I say, the work that Dr. Gaspard did in that report, which we appended to ours, and then the recommendations are a way forward.

Samantha, would you like to offer anything?

Then Mary or Bill, speak to it from your perspective.

I think it’s always really important to bring these different perspectives in, just as Yvonne was saying.

S. Cocker: Yeah. Thank you, Jennifer.

I think Mary alluded to this in her comments already, anyways. The pathway is there. Cindy Blackstock, and the work that she’s done alongside several allies, has been amazing. It’s been a very clear path forward for this province and for every province to follow.

[8:55 a.m.]

There have been questions asked. There have been encouragements made by the Indigenous Child and Family Services Directors for years. This is not new information.

I think Cindy said that in her journey with the tribunal…. This isn’t where the story started. In 2008, that wasn’t where the story started. It was years and years and years before that.

The same is true in B.C. These statements, these gentle nudges over the years, these very hard pushes over the years have been…. The story started a long time ago. It started with Nita Walkem and Warner Adam and Maurice Squires and Deb Foxcroft, years and years and years ago, who were the pioneers and the warriors in B.C. But again, falling on deaf ears over and over and over again.

I think the pathway is there. It’s a clear roadmap. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s certainly a very, very good start. The province has had ample opportunity to step in and follow that lead.

K. Kirkpatrick: Thank you, Samantha and Jennifer.

I have more, but I’m going to pass to my colleagues so I don’t take all the air time.

M. Teegee: I’d like to expand on that question. That was a very good question.

Absolutely, the province has got a roadmap from what we did at the federal level. It’s a very easy roadmap for the province. Step one: adopt the CHRT recommendations and orders. You’re done. That’s it. That’s the roadmap.

You have to understand, though, that it has not been easy. We have taken Canada back to court almost 30 times. I would really recommend — strongly recommend — that you go on the First Nations Caring Society site. You will see the history of the court case when we first started. There are easy one-pagers, which you can read, about what’s happening right now with the compensation, the agreement-in-principle. There’s a lot of information, I think, that you can learn from just the one site. Again, you have at your disposal, as well, myself and my colleagues to assist you.

I wanted to let you know that at the directors forum…. At our last forum, we had put it out there for the ministry to establish a fiscal working group to end the inequity. We have a draft terms of reference, but at this point, we’ve only met once. What I have asked the working group for…. We’re fully committed to working with the province. I wanted that working group to have a very clear mandate. Their mandate would be simple — to end the fiscal discrimination in child and family services. You have the Aboriginal policy and practice framework at your disposal as well.

Again, it’s how you do good work with Indigenous communities, looking at it from an Indigenous world view. There’s good work that the province has done in collaboration with the agency directors, Indigenous communities. It’s just really implementing that.

For certain, the province has to learn their lesson from what the federal government went through and is still going through. I know the federal government has spent millions. I don’t even know…. I would hate to calculate how much millions of dollars they have spent taking us back to court.

I will tell you this. We’re 100 percent. Every time they’ve taken us back to court, we’ve won. Every time we’ve won, we’ve gotten better results than what we initially asked for. So definitely, you can learn a lot from the feds of what not to do.

W. Yoachim: I’d like to thank the representative, Ms. Charlesworth, for bringing this forward today and the politicians, on the screen, for making time in your busy schedules for such an important subject and having a real conversation. Discrimination is alive and well, unfortunately, in our province.

For the politicians, I’m going to give you a simple experience. Recently — what you may find mind-boggling — we opened up a shop in Duncan. That one will serve our nine nations off-reserve, and the funding envelope will come from MCFD. It is, drastically, in our budget. Our audit is the one that’s in the negative, unfortunately — constantly, from being underfunded.

We’re funded by files, meaning you’ve got to have files to get dollars, and we’re trying to eliminate files. The whole goal, when you get into this business, is to have no files. So there are no child welfare files. Nevertheless, we’re funded for files off-reserve, and then on-reserve is the proper way.

Mary and crew will help with that template. I just wanted to share that that’s alive and well, which is really not the way, in any era, it should actually ever be funded, through files.

[9:00 a.m.]

Then my last comment would be that there is good work happening and good practices happening, and we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But a part of this discrimination conversation is to always, absolutely…. Also, the folks that want to do other service lines, where MCFD just closes the door, where we want to use probation, mental health and the other service lines besides child welfare, and they won’t engage in a conversation. We find that very discriminatory as well.

That may be off subject, but I wanted to put it out there, because it’s equally as important. Our people deserve mental health. Our people deserve to have us oversee youth probation, etc.

I wanted to share that and, most of all, thank everyone for their time. I’ll carry on listening to the wisdom in the room.

Thank you. Huy tseep q’u.

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

I’m going to turn to MLA Yao now.

H. Yao: I know that we’re running out of time. Similar to my colleague, I actually have a lot of questions I would love to ask, but I’m going to pick, in my opinion, the most important questions to ask at this point. It’s actually for Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth.

I think, after reviewing so many reports coming in from you, it feels like it’s not simply just this issue. It feels like our system, our government needs…. Our relationship with Indigenous communities within our province needs a complete overhaul. I think one of the interesting comments Mary was talking about…. Why are we giving money to take care of a child when we actually should have invested money in keeping the child with their family?

Then, of course, we’ve been talking about the importance of not just mental health, but we’ve been talking about how we can preserve culture and really not come across as a colonial strategy saying that the provincial government has this system set up, and it’s funded accordingly, but really ask what we can do from an Indigenous community, Indigenous lens to really understand how we can actually create a system that actually facilitates and allows conditions to self-determine, self-define and self-develop in a way that they can foster culture, relationships and, of course, preservation of family and the health of the community.

I guess my question for Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth — sorry for rambling on a bit — is: do you foresee an actual need for…? Maybe we actually need a brand-new committee to really sit down and say: “What we need to talk about is an overhaul of overrepresentation of Indigenous individuals in youth in care, in the care facilities and what we can do.” Based on our conversation, it almost sounds like the funding system is not just inequitable. It’s discouraging people from leaving the reserves, which I think is indirectly almost a form of…. It’s like a territorial claim, indirectly a form of territorial claim.

I would love to hear, from your perspective, what we can do to really work with our Indigenous communities to have a relationship overhaul and to really answer: what can we do to build up their…? I’m sorry. I’m having a hard time putting words together. Building up their perspec­tives and really foster their strength instead of saying: “We have a system.” Let’s find out what kind of system they have to offer and what we can do to foster that growth.

J. Sims (Chair): I’m fascinated to know who you’re going to direct that one to, Jennifer.

J. Charlesworth: Well, I think every one of us would have a lot to say. It’s actually, I think…. I just want to take a step back and say that one of the things that’s extremely important at this point in time is to recognize the federal act enabling the rights holders, duty holders, to assert jurisdiction. There are many extraordinary examples that are emerging of practice about reclaiming the laws and the ways of being, and then bringing it into contemporary times. We could spend a long time talking about this, and it probably is a good thing to do.

I’ll digress for a moment and then see who else wishes to participate in this. I want to speak to that notion of….

We don’t want to keep nibbling at the edges of change, a little bit more money over here or a bit more of a program over there, because what really has been illuminated, and I think this notion of fiscal discrimination is a part of this, is that we have a structural and systemic problem. The systems that we designed were designed at a different point in time, with a different intention, and haven’t achieved the outcomes — particularly for First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous children — we all hoped for.

[9:05 a.m.]

I walk around every day thinking about how I want for every child what I was able to provide to my children and the young people in my life. That is not the case for many families. As Mary and…. The people that we have in this circle from the Indigenous Child and Family Services will give you lots and lots of information about the way in which those inequities play out.

I don’t have a simple solution, other than to say there are things in place, as has been spoken about: a federal act, the CHRT rulings, the wisdom of the Indigenous communities as they’re doing their work, going forward. There are lots of signposts as to how to do things differently, and there is no one-size-fits-all.

Fundamentally, what we’re dealing with is a structural and systemic problem that is colonial and decades and decades long. I would love…. As we were talking about in the budget committee yesterday, in fact, we are at a very different point, and we actually have to take a look at the deeper structural and systemic issues.

I want to create a bit of space. I know Adam brings a unique perspective, Métis. Yvonne, if you want to speak in on that comment, then feel free.

Or perhaps this is actually a good conversation for another meeting.

M. Teegee: I’m going to have to leave here, Jennifer.

I really did like the question, MLA Yao. You’re right. It’s not just this one issue. It’s broader, and there has to be something that looks at the broader issue — absolutely. Recommending a working group or something, a task force, an action…. I don’t care what it is, but it definitely has to happen. There has to be systems reform. We talked about this the other day with the First Nations Leadership Council. There has to be something fundamentally changing.

Again, you look at what’s happening with the federal government. In the CHRT, we talk about long-term reform — not just about the fiscal structures but also within the Indigenous Services Canada system, the ministry. We are advising them how they reform the system. That is a direct order from the tribunal, so something has to happen. So lessons learned. How are we going to replicate that in British Columbia?

We also have to think…. The belief that we have…. That has to change — that single belief that the resources are not coming from our territory. Those resources that are coming from my territory, our territory, Takla…. A third of all stumpage rates come from my territory, yet it’s my people that are begging, hat in hand. It is my children that are suffering.

When we think about reconciliation, when we think about the full definition of the declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples, this mindset has to change from non-Indigenous people that those territories belong to Indigenous people. If we’re saying that, those resources would take care of our most important resources, our children.

That’s what we’re talking about here: fiscal inequity. How do you change fiscal inequity? By money. Where do you get the money? From our territories, from our resources. So you need to think about it in that respect. Why is it that the most vulnerable people in B.C. are Indigenous children, yet we have the richest resources coming from our territory? That’s the question. We need people to be courageous. It’s the time to step up and be courageous and demand change so that there isn’t that inequity.

We also have a method, a way forward for you, and it’s very easy to be accountable. In the report, you’ll see…. They don’t know where the money was going. “How is the ministry funding this?” But we have developed with them, at the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, with Dr. Helaina Gaspard, Dr. Kevin Page, Sahir — amazing. We have a Measuring to Thrive framework that’s already been established that looks at outcomes and indicators, and that’s how the funding would be moved — not based on per capita, necessarily.

Then we’ll also know how much money it costs for prevention. We’ll also know what to target. We’re also going to be able to predict how much money we’re going to possibly need if X, Y and Z happen. It’s a framework, a fiscal framework based on outcomes and indicators. Really, Measuring to Thrive is the work.

But how do we get our children to…? And they’re right. They have the right to live up to their full potential. But what do we need to do to do that? How do we monitor? And then how do we change the system in order for the mindset to change — that we’re going to be providing funding based on outcomes, not based on per capita or based on some arbitrary formula?

We have the ability to do that right now. We just need courageous people to take that step.

[9:10 a.m.]

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

I’m going to turn to Adam. I’m very conscious of our time. We do have people on the list who have questions, but let’s have Adam speak. Then I think we’ll plan our next 20 minutes together.

A. Calvert: Thank you, Chair. I appreciate that.

I really believe that there are many, many reports that have been made. There are many documents that are before the government of British Columbia for them to follow and for them to use as a roadmap. What I see sometimes, and I mean no disrespect, is that there are all of these reports, and there are these roadmaps that come forward, and then the government doesn’t action them, because they’re concerned about what the outfall might be for the government.

That is a concern. That’s for all of the governments of B.C. I’ve seen that time and time again as a citizen. As an executive director for Métis Family Services, what I see on the ground is that our children and our families are highly impacted by the decisions to delay or to not move forward in a timely way.

The Tsawwassen accord and other accords and other decisions have been made many, many years ago, and there’s been no action. What I would hope…. The question was: what do we do?

Well, follow the reports and the roadmaps and the decisions that have been made. Don’t go to court with us and fight this out. That’s folly, and that just delays the decision for these children. I was sitting in a meeting when Grand Chief Phillip spoke about how the Tsawwassen accord was made 20 years ago, and a whole generation of Indigenous children have been languishing in care since then.

Just really quickly, think if all of the children disappeared out of your constituencies — disappeared. They were forcibly taken from their parents and their caregivers. They were taught a different language. They were abused. And then they were given back, and then they were taken away again. Do you think that you might act a little bit more in expediency pertaining to the issue of these children if they were taken out of your ridings today? I think you would.

What we’re saying is that the reconciliation needs to have money and action from the provincial government. We hope that this committee can make recommendations to the provincial government to take action now, not in 20 more years. Those are the firm words that I bring today to the committee.

J. Sims (Chair): Thank you, Adam. It’s hard to even use words after you have spoken and painted a picture. So I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all that you do.

I am looking at our schedule for today, yet we’re having a very rich conversation here. We have one more report to do, and we have 15 minutes left. I still have people who have questions. With the will of the meeting, what I would like to do is let the people who haven’t asked a question yet ask their question. Once we’re done with that, then we’ll move on to the new report.

Do I get agreement? Thumbs up, please. We do have to finish at 9:30, because all of us have to rush into another meeting right at 9:30 as well.

J. Rice: I’m not sure if this can be quick, so I’m happy to put it for another day. But maybe I’ll just put it out there.

[9:15 a.m.]

One is a comment. My riding is North Coast — so Prince Rupert, Haida Gwaii and all the Central Coast communities. Out of the 87 ridings in B.C., I have the highest percentage of Indigenous people. So these issues are really pertinent to my constituents. I have more Indigenous constituents than non.

It’s so interesting, for me, to see…. I am visual, so that graphic — I think it’s on page 40 or way down in the report — of the balls in the jar really helps me. For the longest time, I remember constituents on reserve getting the short end of the stick, so it’s really interesting to see that that’s reversed.

I guess the two questions are, one, in my community, people often work seasonally in Prince Rupert and then live winters in their communities like Metlakatla, Lax Kw’alaams, Kitkatla, Kitselas — all these Indigenous nations that are far away.

They have this movement, back and forth, where they live half a year on reserve and half a year off reserve. I’m curious to know: how do those people navigate? Because, quite frankly, I really didn’t understand. I needed the visual graphic to fully understand how things are funded. So I can’t imagine being a parent or a child in this system trying to navigate that.

Then my second question. I know I’ve asked this of you, Jennifer, before. For some reason, I cannot understand the whole Jordan’s principle aspect, because I thought Jordan’s principle would look after those people that kind of move back and forth. When I talk to Indigenous people — including Mary today, who said that we don’t have Jordan’s principle in B.C., even though we first adopted it a long time ago — they say the same thing to me. But when I’ve spoken with MCFD, they tell me that we practice it all the time.

So I don’t know. If on another day you want to explain it to me, that would be great — or send me a note. I’ll just leave it at that for now.

J. Charlesworth: Both wonderful questions. I’ll look to…. I guess Mary would have been able to provide some insights, perhaps, on the movement back and forth. But really, it depends on where.

If people are moving back and forth…. Yvonne, you might be able to speak to this, because you’ve got many situations in which you have children from very far away.

It depends very much on where their home is and whether they are in a place in which their community is affiliated with an Indigenous child and family service agency or the money is flowing from the federal government to MCFD to deliver the services. So it is complex, for sure.

Yvonne, is there anything that you can help illuminate the first question that the MLA Rice…?

Y. Hare: I think, short and sweet, we do on- and off-reserve services here in Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Child and Family Services. I could say a lot more. But in that situation, we would do the best by our family, and we’d utilize their on-reserve address, because we would be able to, through that mechanism, provide all the supports necessary to support them.

W. Yoachim: Just quickly, Jennifer, if I may, on that. That’s why agencies have to have the jurisdiction and the service folks on and off where they reside to get away from those colonial borders. But agencies have had extreme push-back to service for people off reserve from MCFD.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you. Exactly.

J. Sims (Chair): Just so that you all know, we’re going to defer the second report. We only have ten minutes left, and it is a lengthy report and very important as well. So we’re going to use the rest of this time to carry on with the very rich conversation we’re having that is very informative and educating all of us as well. I just wanted to put that out there.

J. Charlesworth: That’s great. We thought that might be a possibility, and we really appreciate the level of questions and the curiosity that you bring.

I want to pick up the second question that you asked, MLA Rice, and invite Sam in to speak to Jordan’s principle.

S. Cocker: I know that my friends and colleagues from the agencies will have things to add to this as well. But as Mary suggested, I think the critical piece is around the implementation. I think it was Premier Gordon Campbell, back in the day, that said: “B.C. will be the first to adopt Jordan’s principle.” But it only went as far as saying: “We adopt it.”

[9:20 a.m.]

There isn’t actually a mechanism for children living off reserve to access Jordan’s principle, unless they are Status and recognized by their nation. The nation can claim them as a citizen living away from home. Then there is more opportunity for that. But if they are Status, non-Status, coming from another nation outside of B.C., living off reserve here in B.C., there isn’t a mechanism for Jordan’s principle to support them.

B.C. needs to implement that adoption that they said they were going to do years back. The ministry may say that they enact it all the time, because it’s so different throughout the SDAs and the local service areas. It really depends on the relationship the ministry has with the nations and the people there. Some get things, and some do not. That’s the inconsistency that creates further discrimination or inequity for families across the province. It shouldn’t be about the relationships. It should be about what’s right for kids.

I think part of what Yvonne and Bill were saying to the first part of your question, MLA Rice, was just around the moving on and off reserve. Again, some of that also depends on the relationship you have with the ministry counterparts you’re working with. As Bill suggested, they get push-back. So there has been some dialogue around…. I think reports out of this office have created some of those things, where kids falling between the cracks and moving between agencies, on reserve or off reserve…. There were those kinds of issues that occurred.

In some areas, it’s like if people are going to be moving and they lived there less than three months, then they’re still considered on reserve, if they’re only living off reserve for three months. In some places, it’s longer than that, and in some places, it’s less than that. It really depends on the push-back or the willingness by the ministry to work with the agency and the nation around recognizing that their families are transient. They do move around. They move into town for parts of the year, and then they move home to do harvesting and live on their lands and prepare for the winter — those sorts of things.

But if they’re living off reserve and something happens to their family and those kids need to come into care or be supported, that’s a provincially billable child, and they’ll get significantly less support than if the same instance happened to them while they were living at home and the agency needed to become involved then.

A. Calvert: I just want to add, perhaps, if I might. There is no Jordan’s principle for Métis families. There’s no such thing. There is an inequity for the people who are Indigenous who are Métis in B.C. They are an urban population in B.C. There is a small part in Fort St. John that’s considered a Métis settlement area, by the Métis, but there is no land base for them.

Métis people struggle to navigate the systems and the places and to reclaim their cultural connections. So when we’re talking Jordan’s principle, I want to be clear that there is…. Even if we fixed Jordan’s principle and made that perfect, in some ways, that isn’t going to change and actually answer the needs of what the urban Indigenous peoples are struggling with, and that is the First Nations, the Métis and the Inuit that live in urban B.C.

It will not help with the reconciliatory work that would deal with the trauma that I explained to you. If you had that happen to your children, there would be inexplicable trauma happening all over to families and to children. That happened for over 100 years here, a little more than that.

[9:25 a.m.]

Here we are. We’re sitting here with maybe 200 years of different colonial practices, 300 years if we go back far enough. But if we go back to the last 100 years, we can’t fix that without having resources being put into that, to fix that which we tried to destroy.

So the funding that is necessary cannot be based on a child in care. That’s crazy-making. That’s racist in its intent and, systemically, a structural barrier to actually changing the way that we look at things. We have to look at: how do we repair the last 100 years of damage that we did? It isn’t by great words or good speeches. It’s by hard work, rolling up our sleeves, putting in the monies and the work that is necessary to support the nations, and the nations will repair it.

If we defund…. You hear “defund.” I’m going to say decentralize the funding. Don’t give it to MCFD. Give it to the Indigenous agencies that are serving or the Indigenous peoples who can utilize that funding. But also, let’s look at what the real level of funding needs to be. That’s the level at CHRT that has been identified in these reports. That level of funding isn’t just taking from MCFD what part and portion we can calculate. It’s actually looking at what is needed based on the CHRT rulings and then giving that funding to the Indigenous peoples to navigate those things and develop the services.

Exactly what Bill was talking about — everything from mental health to housing to the opportunities to provide proper preventative services to children and families and many, many more. Youth justice. That is what is needed. And I would say that I wouldn’t necessarily focus on just Jordan’s principle. I would focus on the much larger issue of: how do we get to a proper level of funding? Follow the CHRT ruling. It’s that simple.

Then how do we make sure that that funding gets to the proper place? We shouldn’t be depending on MCFD to do that. This is why we got into this problem, because of that. We need to get that to the people who are the nations and have them support the service providers and develop those services that are needed. That’s Métis Nation B.C. That’s the Secwépemc. That’s Carrier-Sekani. All of those nations. I can’t even…. I don’t know them all by heart, but that’s where the money needs to go to.

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

With that, I do want to thank each and every one of you who joined this circle today for a very rich and informative discussion. We have got to the time of adjournment. We are going to schedule the second report for a subsequent meeting, and we’ll get back to the members with that.

For those of you who joined us today, on behalf of the committee, I want to thank you for bringing your heart, your passion to inform us, to educate us and to, as MLA Rice said, very graphically paint a picture for us.

With that, I am going to ask someone to move a motion to adjourn.

Moved, MLA Donnelly. Seconded, MLA Yao.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 9:29 a.m.