Western Canada: B.C. Indigenous child-care services still flawed, report shows

Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver this morning.

Eight years ago, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, then B.C.’s representative for children and youth, wrote a searing report into how Indigenous child-care services were delivered by the provincial government. The Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD) has been a frequent target of criticism over the years on this issue. However, that report in 2013 still stands out for Ms. Turpel-Lafond’s bluntness and willingness to condemn the Indigenous-run agencies delegated by the province to deliver care.

“There could not be a more confused, unstable and bizarre area of public policy which guides aboriginal child and family services in B.C.,” she wrote. “This area is rife with perverse performance measures, the absence of any real incentives for change and no end-state goals on how services to aboriginal children and youth will be improved.”

She concluded that, for more than a decade, the B.C. government had spent more than $66-million on a series of “chaotic and haphazard” programs that failed to deliver services to the vulnerable kids who need them.

A report released Tuesday by one of Mr. Turpel-Lafond’s successors provides little hope that things have improved much. Jennifer Charlesworth notes that a $40-billion agreement earlier this year, in which Ottawa is compensating those Indigenous families harmed by underfunding of First Nations child and family services on reserve, has only deepened an existing divide – that between the federal funding provided to on-reserve kids and the provincial funding provided to off-reserve kids.

As for children who are cared for by their First Nation’s own Indigenous Child and Family Service Agencies – once known as delegated aboriginal agencies – funding depends on where each child resides and is a mix of federal and provincial sources. It’s impossible to tell, Ms. Charlesworth writes, whether the money is being well-spent or how these children fare compared to non-Indigenous children.

“MCFD’s funding cannot be linked to priorities or goals, making it impossible to connect expenditures and results. There is no means of testing the adequacy and suitability of funding to meet needs,” said a report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, the agency contracted by Ms. Charlesworth’s office to analyze the delivery of child and family services. The report was attached to the representative’s own.

The MCFD’s “system for allocating funding is broken,” writes Ms. Charlesworth. “It is not possible to create a map of the ecosystem between First Nations, Metis, Inuit and Urban Indigenous compared to non-Indigenous service providers using provincial data, nor is it possible to connect spending with stated government priorities. The necessary information is simply not tracked.”

Indigenous children make up 68 per cent of those in government care, even though they represent 10 per cent of the province’s total child population, she said.

The Globe and Mail reported in 2020 on the death of one youth who died in the care of one of these agencies, Xyolhemeylh. MCFD audits in 2019 found that the agency had a compliance rate of just 11 per cent when it came to developing comprehensive plans of care. In 49 per cent of cases the ministry reviewed, no plan was on record.

Mary Teegee, B.C. representative on the National Advisory Committee on First Nations Child and Family Services through the Assembly of First Nations and a board member of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, noted that it took years of advocacy and lawsuits to force Canada to improve its funding system. That has led to incremental improvements on the federal side.

As an example of the gap, she pointed to the caseloads of social workers. A social worker working on the federal side, within the on-reserve system, may have as many as eight children to provide services to. A social worker on the provincial side working with off-reserve Indigenous children can have as many as 60 case files at one time.

“We’re at this crossroads, what is the province going to do?” Ms. Teegee said. “We don’t want to go to court, but we’ll do what we have to do.

Mitzi Dean, Minister of Children and Family Development, said in a statement she will review the two reports over the coming weeks. She acknowledged that these challenges have been raised before, and said the work to address inequities and “long-standing fiscal and data issues” has been under way for some time.

“We are committed to continuing the important work we have begun together with our partners on a new fiscal framework that will ensure equitable funding for Indigenous children, youth and families in our province,” the Minister said.

This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief James Keller. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.