“I never want to hear one single Liberal pronounce the word ‘reconciliation’ ever again,” said former NDP MP Romeo Saganash on hearing that the federal government is appealing a ruling to compensate First Nations children harmed by the on-reserve child welfare system.
Justin Trudeau was elected in 2015 partly on a pledge that “no relationship was more important” to him than that with Indigenous Canadians.
Yet, the news that the government will seek judicial review on a ruling by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to pay $40,000 to each child taken from homes and communities since 2006 suggests devotion to a cause closer to home – his own re-election.
Acceptance of the CHRT decision before the October 7 appeal deadline would require the Liberals to account for a compensation package likely to total more than $2 billion in its election platform – just as the Green Party has done.
The Conservatives, whose platform is even more strapped for cash, are also urging a judicial review. Neither can afford the expense. The Liberal platform indicates a deficit of $27 billion next year, even without the customary $3 billion risk adjustment cushion. The Liberals include some dubious assumptions about operational savings (billions are booked before they have been realized) and there is a lack of detail about costs (such as pharmacare and non-taxation of maternity benefits).
Adding in the compensation package to the Liberal plan would have been like Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote rounding off his meal with a wafer-thin mint.
That’s frivolous because there is nothing funny about this country’s treatment of at-risk, on-reserve kids.
A decade after the tears and remorse of the residential schools apology, Canada is still pulling Indigenous families apart. Indigenous children make up more than half of children in foster care, even though they represent just seven per cent of all children under 15.
Kenneth Jackson, a reporter at Indigenous broadcaster APTN, has produced a harrowing look inside the child welfare system – Death as Expected that he says has been connected to the deaths of 102 Indigenous children in Ontario alone between 2013 and 2017.
Jackson first documented the case of Amy Owen, a 13 year old from Poplar Hill First Nation, who committed suicide in an Ottawa group home. His subsequent investigation over two years found chronic underfunding in children’s services agencies funding First Nations and a system that was incentivized financially to take kids from their families.
In a statement issued by Seamus O’Regan, the Indigenous Services minister, the government acknowledges discrimination and the principle of compensation but said it wants time to “address important questions and considerations such as who is to be compensated and the role of the Tribunal.”
Elizabeth May, the Green Party leader, said the decision to appeal went far beyond the normal reach of a writ period “caretaker government.” “Trudeau must explain and reverse this outrage,” she said.
But O’Regan’s statement suggested it was the timing, rather than the substance of the CHRT judgment, that the government objects to.
“In order to give us both clarity on the ruling and time to have these conversations with our partners, which are not possible during an election, we are seeking a judicial review and stay,” he said in the statement.
Trudeau must explain and reverse this outrage
Elizabeth May
If he’d said Indigenous groups were “asking for more than we’re able to give right now” – as Trudeau did when asked about veterans fighting their own government in court – O’Regan would have been closer to the truth.
Best to wait until safely ensconced back in power before adding further billions to the deficit.
The number one call to action by the post-residential schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission was on child welfare and the need to provide adequate resources to Indigenous communities to keep families together.
The Trudeau government took steps last spring to overhaul the system and move away from a model that tied funding to the number of kids in care – a mechanism that provided an incentive to agencies to apprehend more children. An extra $1.4 billion was added over six years to provide services at the needed levels.
But Jackson’s research showed 48 of the 102 deaths happened in two of the years the Trudeau government was resisting multiple orders by the CHRT that found Canada guilty of underfunding children’s welfare.
The challenge to the human rights tribunal’s decision to compensate children victimized by a toxic system is just the latest example of the Trudeau government saying one thing and doing the very opposite because it suited its self-interest.
• Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter: IvisonJ