The First Nations Child and Caring Society and the Assembly of First Nations launched a complaint with the Human Rights Commission more than seven years ago, saying the federal government discriminates against aboriginal children by providing less for them than is spent on other children.
The government’s lawyers stalled and threw up false arguments, hoping that the case would be dropped or the aboriginal side would run out of money. But the organization’s executive director Cindy Blackstock never gave up and continued to push the case forward.
More than 200 First Nations people and their supporters crowded into two hearing rooms in downtown Ottawa last month to witness the closing arguments from the Child and Caring Society and the government.
A group of directors of child-welfare programs learned in 2000 that their federal funding was 22 per cent less than comparable provincial funding to children. This was based on numbers from the Department of Indian Affairs itself. Fourteen years later, that shortfall has grown to 34 per cent, again based on the government’s figures.
First Nations child and family services have a long history of tragedy and failure. The 1960s scoop replaced the boarding-school experience, with similarly disastrous consequences. Children were taken from their parents and placed in foster homes throughout Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia.
When these children reached adulthood, they sought out their roots. They returned home with no aboriginal culture, strange accents and a loss of identity.
The trend was reversed as First Nations leaders and social institutions began to demand control over social services for their people.
Aboriginal family services consist of a range of services to keep children safe. The first choice is to keep the family intact. The policy today is to keep children out of foster care. This requires family counselling, children’s shelters and long-term programming. However, the problems persist, and there are more children in care today than there were in residential schools at the height of that program.
Kidsrights, an international organization headquartered in the Netherlands, ranks countries on the basis of five areas: the right to life, health, education, protection and child rights environment. Canada ranks 60th on this scale, just behind Costa Rica and ahead of Saudi Arabia. This is largely because of the shabby treatment afforded to our First Nations’ children.
It’s disgraceful, and Canada needs to improve. But the federal government stubbornly has dug in its heels.
Blackstock says the government broke the law on two occasions: first, by failing to disclose all the facts at its disposal; second, by spying on her. She made an access-to-information request in 2011 to see what information Ottawa had on her and was surprised to receive hundreds of pages of documents that revealed 189 officials from Aboriginal Affairs and the Justice departments were routinely monitoring her movements, speeches and even her Facebook page.
She was barred from Aboriginal Affairs offices, unable to attend meetings she had every right to attend. She was the victim of blatant abuse and intimidation. It was the cost she was expected to pay for speaking out.
The tribunal will release its report in the spring of 2015. If the tribunal rules in favour of the Child and Family Caring Society, that will be a black eye for the government as it heads into an election.
It will also open the door to examining other funding arrangements with First Nations, including education, housing policing and so on. It also will reveal the dysfunction within Aboriginal Affairs.
Ottawa has made fiscal cutbacks in two areas. It has failed to provide new funding and has actually cut budgets; it also has had the civil service underfunding aboriginal programs and returning the money at the end of the year. Last year, for example, Aboriginal Affairs lapsed $30 million in education capital spending.
The department’s approach of underfunding, over-regulating and intimidation has held back First Nations and proven to be a costly mistake. It’s increasingly apparent that Aboriginal Affairs should be disbanded and a new relationship developed between the First Nations and Canada.
Doug Cuthand is a columnist for the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
