Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Human Rights
Issue 9 - Evidence - Friday, September 22 meeting
VANCOUVER, Friday, September 22, 2006
The Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights met this day at 8:59 a.m. to examine and report upon Canada's international obligations in regards to the rights and freedoms of children.
Senator A. Raynell Andreychuk (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, ladies and gentlemen, we have produced an interim report, and we are interested now in some of the elements of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and any other supporting evidence with respect to implementation of human rights treaties in Canada.
This morning, we are pleased to have before us Adrienne Montani, Provincial Coordinator of BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition, and Krista Thompson, Executive Director of Covenant House.
Adrienne Montani, Provincial Coordinator, BC Child and Youth Coalition: You have my brief, senators, so I will skim through the highlights, assuming you can read the rest later in detail. In case you do not know who we are, first of all we would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this morning on some really important issues. We are pleased that the committee is looking at the UN convention and its application and implementation in Canada.
First Call, the BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition, is a cross-sectoral, non-partisan coalition of regional and provincial partner organizations around the province of B.C. We come together because we share a common commitment that children should have first call on the resources of government and society, hence our name, First Call. I will start with a focus on child poverty because we feel strongly about it. We spend a lot of time in our coalition talking about it: that child poverty is our national shame. I have given you some statistics in the brief about the failure to meet the commitment made in 1989 in the all-party resolution in the House of Commons to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. You are probably familiar with Campaign 2000. We are part of that campaign and issue a B.C. report card every year on that issue.
There are still 1.2 million children living in poverty in this country, and unfortunately, we have maintained a poverty rate of about one in six children over the last 30 years. In B.C. we have the shameful distinction of the highest child poverty rate in the country. B.C. has one in four children currently living on low income. Other shameful facts are: 65 per cent of British Columbia's female lone-parent families are poor, so you can see the genderization or the feminization of poverty there. Our two-parent families that are poor in B.C. live almost $12,000 below the poverty line, so while there is lots of debate about which statistics we use, anybody living $12,000 below any poverty line is in dire straits. Again, in B.C. that statistic is worse than the national average. Of course, as you probably have heard from others, there are subpopulations of children and youth who are over-represented in those stats, and those subpopulations are new immigrants, Aboriginal children, families with disabilities, racialized families, immigrant refugees, et cetera. These populations are dramatically over-represented.
We know the causes of this situation. Too many parents cannot find either enough work during the year to support their families or work that pays enough to support their families. We know that welfare rates in most provinces are criminally low. Kudos goes to Newfoundland and a few other places that have taken on the issue at a provincial level. We have let lone-parenthood become a social and humanitarian nightmare for women. We allow racism and other forms of discrimination to continue while we seem to look the other way.
Our concerns, obviously, given these facts, are that we have not lived up to Article 27 of the convention, and we think that Canada has the fiscal ability to end child poverty or meet the needs of children through a complex system that looks at both market, social, and income supports. We can afford that. We can look at public policy examples in other countries such as Sweden, Denmark and many other places that have brought their child poverty rates down quite far, if we are looking for inspiration or guidance, but we seem to lack the political will to act.
In the interest of time, I will not go through the positive things that have come up, certainly the National Child Benefit program and a number of programs. I think you will hear from some of them later this morning. We wanted to start with this focus on child poverty because it is so fundamentally linked to the denial of other rights that are promised in the convention. The outcomes of poverty for children and youth are social exclusion and increased vulnerability to a whole variety of harms. Their rights to play, to education, to nutritious food, to quality services and to full participation: all these rights are compromised by living in poverty and the social exclusion that comes with poverty.
The next area I want to highlight for you is the rights of young children. Our concern is that Canada has not yet committed to a comprehensive child care system. We were about to make great strides in that regard with the signing of federal-provincial agreements on early learning and child care, but unfortunately those agreements were cancelled and will end next March. We can only look to Quebec at this point for a child care system in Canada that gives families the kinds of support that they need. We are working hard to revive these agreements. The failure to recognize the rights of all young children to quality, affordable, and accessible care and learning environments is an important national issue for families, most of whom have two parents working. Child care also has significant implications for the sustainability and health of our society now and in the future.
Again, I will not go through the positive initiatives right now that have helped support young children and families, but the young children's services remain a fragile and often hodgepodge collection of programs that struggle constantly to stay afloat. This situation underscores, again, our failure to see these services as a right and entitlement of all children rather than a privilege or the luck of the draw if you happen to be in the right community or in the right family.
Again, the promise of Canada's National Children's Agenda raised the hopes of advocates across the province that a sustained focus on children's rights was about to begin. That progress has been disappointingly slow, but whatever its limitations, at least a start has been made in the early years. That cannot be said for what has happened with the focus on the rights of older children: school age, middle years and youth. In our opinion, the promotion and protection of the rights of these older children has had little visible or coherent attention from successive federal governments despite the best efforts of the community sector and advocates within government service agencies. Again, there have been some good programs and piecemeal funding. There is a Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement, but generally the kinds of investments and the necessary prominence given to the rights of those children, in our opinion, have not gone beyond token compliance with the commitments in the convention.
We want to bring to your attention our concern around section 43 of the Criminal Code which legalizes, I guess you could say, corporal punishment. We see this section as a denial of children's right to freedom from violence, whatever the section's intended purpose. Section 43 perpetuates the belief that hitting children is acceptable and the section has been used as a defence by people who abuse children. The Supreme Court decision on this issue in 2004 disappointingly narrowed the use of the defence in law to using force to correct children between the ages of 2 and 12, so this group remains the only one deprived of the protection of the criminal law in relation to the use of force.
Our partner organizations also wanted to bring to your attention a range of concerns around the right of children to grow up in a safe physical, healthy environment and to be protected from toxins. Their growing bodies are more vulnerable. We are concerned that when limits are set on pollutants or exposure to toxins, they are not normed on young and growing bodies, and therefore, children are at a high risk. When standards are set, often the standards are based on adult studies. We want the measuring stick of the best interests of children to be inserted into those kinds of processes as well. Similarly, the right to information that is promised in the convention: a lot of families and children are not aware and find it hard to access and obtain information even in institutions such as schools about what they are exposed to — what kinds of cleaning products or pesticides are used — in sites where they spend a great deal of time.
I know this committee has made a recommendation to establish an independent children's commissioner. We concur with that recommendation and support you in those efforts. I think that covers the points I wanted to outline quickly. Thank you for this opportunity. We welcome your questions. We wanted to say also that we hope that the efforts to breathe life into the convention can rise above any partisan considerations and that we can all work together to implement the convention for the benefit of our children.
Krista Thompson, Executive Director, Covenant House: Senators, in coming to see you today I am humbled by the list of people who are presenting information and also by the work of the individuals of this committee. I am relatively new to the sector. I have been the executive director at Covenant House for six months, and prior to that I worked in health care in British Columbia. I wanted to bring you information that I hope is of use that relates specifically to homeless youth because that is who I represent today.
Covenant House is an organization that was founded in the 1960s in New York City, and we are now an international aid agency with over 21 sites around North America and South and Central America. We provide shelter and support programs to homeless youth in Canada, ages 16 to 24. We see ourselves as working with a population that will shortly become the parents of the next generation of children in Canada, and so we see ourselves working in the prevention side of the world of homelessness. Our mission statement is to serve the suffering children of the street. We do this with absolute respect and unconditional love.
Covenant House is primarily funded by donations. Approximately 13 per cent of our budget comes from government, so we in Vancouver have over 40,000 individual donors who support the work of Covenant House and the well-being of street kids. We have an annual budget here in Vancouver of $7 million. We offer a clear exit from the street to over 1,500 young people each year in Vancouver. Of the youth that come to Covenant House, and last year it was approximately 1,800, 70 per cent have experienced some form of sexual or emotional abuse at the hands of their parents or other adults. Street kids most often come from abusive and unstable homes. Many have lived in foster homes or group homes. At Covenant House, about 50 per cent of the children and young people come from the foster care system here in British Columbia.
I have given you a brief portrait of some aspects of street youth in Vancouver. Over 70 per cent in Vancouver have reported being hungry a few times; 45 per cent often go without food; 40 per cent have been beaten over three times in their experience as a street youth; 37 per cent often spend the entire night in a donut shop; 44 per cent often spent the entire night walking around; 74 per cent reported having committed theft; 80 per cent have reported selling drugs; 66 per cent have reported committing assaults; and 34 per cent regularly engage in prostitution in order to survive. These are the streets of Vancouver we are talking about.
Covenant House is currently undertaking a research project that will help us determine the critical gaps in the service continuum of homeless youth. Highlights are from anecdotal reports by our outreach workers in Vancouver and from the youth themselves. I have included this information in your brief, and it is really only a snapshot. My outreach workers tell me every day that there is an overwhelming demand from our perspective for mental health support and limited access to service unless there is private pay. There is a significant demand for drug and alcohol treatment services for our youth, and limited access to service unless it is private pay. My frontline workers tell me that they have experienced personally a significant increase in the amount of downloading of traditional government services for youth to Covenant House and other private and non-governmental agencies. I am told regularly by our frontline workers, who talk to the social workers who have the cases of our kids, that the social workers admit that they are so stretched that they actually do not even look at the files of kids who are 16 years of age and older. The last time I looked, a kid of 16 years of age is a child.
At Covenant House we often say that we are re-parenting our youth, and we are committed to, and are offering them, the love and care that they missed as a child and as a young person. If we in society and in government are parenting abandoned children, then as parents, we need to do all in our power to provide care. We need to go above and beyond, as a parent will, to ensure that our kids receive the care they need.
I want to tell you one little story, and then I will close. We help a lot of kids get jobs, and we help them with pre- employment training and those kinds of things. I noticed that often when a kid is dressed up and has his shoes polished and we help him with his résumé, he has a hard time connecting with people. A lot of the kids do not smile very often. I thought it was because they were crabby and pissed off, and I do not blame them. In actual fact, they do not smile because their teeth are so bad they do not want to show anybody their mouth. This is a small thing it seems, but without a smile, a kid has a tough time connecting to the world. In Canada I think we have come a long way, but there are some minimal services and basic services that we can stretch a little farther to provide.
The Chairman: Ms. Thompson, I want to follow up on that. You are not the first one that has come here and cried, so you have just joined a long list. That is to make you feel in close knots. Why is it that your message of the compelling need that you obviously feel for young people who have not gotten the kinds of advantages that we would expect is not felt across this country? We talk about children. We talk about the resources. Then we get into the minutia, and I say this to you, Ms. Montani. You lauded a structure last year on child care, but that was last year. We have been a country for a long time. We are facing homelessness now with more resources, more specialization and more understandings. We are still on the one hand excited about even a promise, and on the other hand, the agony of people who are on the front lines. They are stressed. They see the needs. They cannot cope. What does that say about our society?
Ms. Thompson: I might take a crack at initially answering that question. As you are speaking, I think about so many conversations that I have had with typical Canadian taxpayers, who are our donors, by the way, who tell me that they did not know. They do not know. Maybe they did not choose to know, but they in Canada live in a utopian society. Frankly, until not long ago I was in the same camp thinking those things. Going up to see my donors on the hill in West Vancouver, where they live in an enclave that is largely separate from the difficult circumstances that so many young people live in, you can go your whole day in Vancouver without dealing with any of this, without seeing any of it, except maybe the odd old fellow with a cart or the odd panhandler. It is not being examined. I think we all have to say to ourselves, no matter what side of the house or what side of the fence we sit on, "We have a ways to go, folks. Here is the reality."
The Chairman: To follow up on that, you say they do not know. The crowd you are describing reads. I believe today's newspapers are filled with homelessness, particularly here. Yesterday, another issue brought forward was rural issues versus urban issues, the plight of all of us, not just children, but including children, that you are worse off if you live in a rural area. You are likely to die faster and get more diseases, et cetera. Are all these methods that we talk about working to create a real change, or do we need to find another approach?
Ms. Thompson: I think political will is important. Unless people in our communities come to decision-makers and say, "This is good: We need to go further," and really put pressure on our decision-makers to do so, it is unlikely to happen. I do not think the homelessness sector necessarily has the credibility with the average taxpayer that we would like to have.
The Chairman: The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is a rights-based document. If it were the law of the land, which is what we advocated, it is not necessarily intended to be a question of political will. It would be a question of right. Have you changed any of your programming to take that into account?
Ms. Montani: First Call, as an advocacy coalition, does not do programming, but we try to raise the issue of these are rights we are talking about: not just needs. In response to your question about why the information out there is not having an impact, I guess there is no easy answer. We probably all have our individual analysis of why that happens, and how people insulate themselves sometimes from knowledge. As Ms. Thompson describes, you can step over someone on the street and get on with your busy day: not notice and not think about what is happening to them. We focus a lot on the issue of poverty and low income. Unfortunately, there is still a fair amount of blaming the victim, both in the media and in public discourse. "People made poor choices. Why should I pay for them? They chose to have those children." There are those kinds of uncharitable responses, and yet everybody is focused on charitable responses. Food banks have grown exponentially and other kinds of responses are picking up the pieces sporadically: "I have done my thing. I have contributed." The task in front of us is to bring the information to those who understand how to run a business, how to run large systems, and to look at the evidence of the trends. For instance, around the issue of poverty, you cannot say that people are poor only through the choices they have made, if you look at the 30 years of trends, because you would have to say, "In 1994 a whole bunch of people made a bunch of bad choices." Poverty is tied to market conditions and other social trends. We try to bring that evidence to people who will then speak to their peers hopefully. Business will speak to business, and people in government will speak to government.
As Ms. Thompson says, from the service sector or the advocacy sector, we are often dismissed as special interest. We do not get a lot out of it usually, so I am not sure what our special interest is. That is true, though. We are seen as bleeding hearts who raise this issue again. We need allies, and that is why First Call came together as a coalition: to try to have representation from many sectors speaking to their peers to say, this is the evidence, there are solutions and not, poverty will be with us forever or abuse will be with us forever. There are solutions, but we really need to pay attention to that.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Your last comment for me deals mainly with systemic change within Canada: not all this $7- million-a-year charity stuff that you need to raise when nothing changes. Politicians tend to be elected for four years. They do not really deal with systemic change. Have you any suggestions? We have the advantage of being senators. We are actually here longer than four years. Dealing with systemic change is a major problem in every sector, whether it is environment or anything else.
Ms. Montani: I can share a little experience. I was an elected school trustee for six years at the Vancouver School Board. It is a big ship. It is small relative to the Government of Canada but still a large district in our province. I went there thinking we and my team could make changes. However, it was challenging just to address something like school fees: to get the research and the data, and then work with all the community groups and parents who were afraid they would lose programs if we stopped charging them school fees. I understand. I have experienced that. I think it takes huge courage, and we need to be careful about who we elect. We have to demand of our politicians or whoever is elected that they represent the whole of society, and we are not interested in their four-year timeline or their five-year timeline. We are interested in the long-term interest of our kids.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Can you think of any tax incentives and so on that would help? The present government is about to cut $2 billion, and historically it is usually the poor that get knocked. Is there any encouragement you can think of in existing systems that would assist in the perpetuation of monies for your projects or to deal with child poverty in a systemic way: something structural like that?
Ms. Thompson: I have some knowledge of tax legislation related to charitable giving, and I have been somewhat involved in helping government change legislations around tax attractiveness of disposition of capital property. I would say, keep going. I know the charitable sector has a role. I know it does not have the entire role. I think at Covenant House we are seeing young people who will require life-long support. That is not the role of a charitable organization who survives on donations. That is the role of society and government to provide, in some cases, life-long support to these young people who have been so damaged. I think that is important.
This will sound trite, but I am an eighth-generation Canadian. I am sure many of you here feel strongly as well that we have created a country that on the world stage is seen as a caring, civil society. I do not hear our leaders speaking about that often enough. I hear the current prime minister talk about why we are in Afghanistan. The reasons why we are in Afghanistan are the same reasons we need to put the pedal to the metal here in our own country. Tie the two messages together. Help lead our country, people and communities to remember who we are.
Ms. Montani: I also have a response to the question. If you look at part of the Campaign 2000 national anti-poverty initiative, we have brought the same recommendations forward for ten years or so now around the national tax benefit, so the creation of the Child Tax Benefit and National Child Benefit Supplement was a good thing. We have recommended that those programs increase, and we have set targets. We would like them to be about $4,000 per year for families at the maximum level.
Other structural changes would be to look at a living wage or at least bring the floor up on minimum wages, and to look at systemic change in the area of welfare. Welfare rates now are set absolutely arbitrarily by provincial governments. Rates do not seem to relate to what a basket of goods would cost or what the rent is in a particular town or that kind of thing. We need to make changes to rationalize how we set those rates and index them because those families are the poorest of the poor. However, increasingly we need to look at the working poor, too, because most poor children live in working poor families. We need a government response in terms of income support programs when the market fails to deliver an adequate living wage. We also need government work to be done within the market system or within the business sector to make sure wages are adequate. Government can provide guidance: some floors, and better maternity and paternity leave. There has been some improvement in that recently. It could be better. Again, we can look to Sweden, Denmark and other places with wonderful family supportive policies.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Ms. Thompson, given what Ms. Montani has just said about living wages and welfare rates related to the consumer index, you said the kids you talk about you come from dysfunctional homes?
Ms. Thompson: Seventy-eight per cent report physical abuse.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Even if those things were there, it is possible you will still have 70 per cent of the kids from these homes with bad teeth and all of it. How do you relate those two?
Ms. Thompson: With respect to the young people we see, their parents have little or no education. Their parents survived in some of the same ways these children survive. It is a cycle. It helps if you can put a shiv in the circle, which is improved living conditions, improved access to education. I am a single parent with four kids, who lived in a basement suite myself one time for almost two years. The kind of stress when you cannot figure out how to pay for groceries for the next two weeks adds to the level of stress in a household, adds to children leaving school to work early, adds to children being abused, and adds to all the things that our kids report. I think that the things that Ms. Montani advocates for will make a difference over time to the quality of these kids' lives.
The Chairman: You say that poverty ties back into the cyclical nature. I think we have heard that is true, and we have some evidence. Those living in poverty are disproportionately represented in all our systems, but are you leaving the impression that children in distress come only from those families? We have heard in other areas that the drug issue hits all socio-economic groups, and then the kids are on the streets and have problems. Abuse is not only in low income. It is throughout income levels. Can you help me with that? Are your statistics geared more to the disadvantaged parent that creates these problems, or do kids come from all streams of Canadian life?
Ms. Thompson: I can speak to the Covenant House experience only.
Ms. Montani: I can give statistics about vulnerability across income levels.
Ms. Thompson: That would be great. Children do come to us from mainstream middle class families. The things that are prevalent in those families are addictions. Addiction and violence are prevalent and exist in West Vancouver on the hill. Violence and addictions are present in a middle class family as well, but the next generation who is a product of that family may not be a middle class person. In British Columbia, addictions treatment is not even accessible to a middle class individual because middle class families are living pay cheque to pay cheque like so many others. If they are asked to spend $15,000 on a treatment program for their young person, they cannot do it.
Ms. Montani: I take your point about vulnerability across economic levels. A famous chart is used in a lot of presentations by a researcher named Doug Willms. You have probably heard of him. It shows four quadrants of income: poorest up to richest quadrants. The gradient is like this. There is greater vulnerability in low income, no question. If you saw the article in today's Vancouver Sun, "Poor children more likely to be injured accidentally," the vulnerabilities, the risks of abuse, accidental injury or school failure are greater at the lower end. The bulk of vulnerable children in Doug Wilms' research are spread across income levels, so that there are greater numbers, which is why we advocate for universal programs because if you target your responses only to those children that come to your attention or to the poorest of the poor, you will miss a lot of vulnerable children.
In the area of early childhood, we advocate for universal access for all young children. It is their right to have quality care and learning environments before they enter school and when they are in school. We have all agreed to have universal education from K to 12. You can talk to education advocates who say it is underfunded, and I agree with them, but at least we have agreed as a society to that as a floor. Everybody who hits age six can go to school. We have not done that for young children. We need universal programs that give them a good start in life. I take your point, and it is true. We will miss people if we target.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: What per cent of the youth in your programs find jobs? Is it half or less than half?
Ms. Thompson: The incidence of that kind of success outcome is decreasing. When Covenant House first started to offer pre-employment and employment training programs, 60 to 70 per cent of our young people reported employment after one year of leaving our programs. That percentage is decreasing. We think that the reason is because the capabilities and the damage that we see amongst our population is increasing. For example, particularly in the last 48 to 60 months, crystal meth is cutting a swath through our young people here in Vancouver. It is a relatively new phenomenon. A concurrent disorder is most likely, but the addiction itself impairs, and in some cases permanently impairs, their ability to be employed. We are seeing a rapid decrease in positive outcomes. We are re-engineering our entire programs because of it.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: What about their education and transportation? Some youth can find a job. Maybe they are not educated enough or they do not have transportation to these jobs and no money to buy the uniform that they need.
Ms. Thompson: Bus tickets are big.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: What will happen to the youth and homeless people during the upcoming Olympics? Will they hide them away, or will they disappear?
Ms. Montani: I do not know. There was a headline today in the paper that homelessness is predicted to increase by some exponential increase. I do not remember the figure. We are concerned. The cost of housing in the Lower Mainland generally is astronomical and going up all the time. Meanwhile, families on income assistance had their shelter rate cut in 2002 by the provincial government, and families, especially with more than two children, lost shelter revenue. They are supposed to somehow find economies of scale or something. In the social services sector we are all apprehensive about the displacement of young people.
Ms. Thompson: I am sitting, by dint of my position at Covenant House, on the Greater Vancouver Regional Steering Committee on Homelessness. The steering committee has been operating since 2000, and it is funded. We all sit on the committee as non-profit representatives, but staff who help implement planning and meetings are funded by federal government grants. Funding from the Supporting Community Partnership Initiative, SCPI, helps put that in place. I have seen the numbers recently. Over the last four or five years, $58 million has been spent and the SCPI grants have had significant impact from the perspective of our non-profit organizations and other NGOs to help mitigate some of the concerns here in Vancouver. I can copy you on some of those findings. Keep doing what we are doing. I think SCPI is important. I advocate that SCPI funding be continued in some form.
Senator Nancy Ruth: What is SCPI?
Ms. Thompson: SCPI is a Service Canada initiative specifically to alleviate homelessness across the country. Funding is given through agencies, in our case through the Greater Vancouver Regional District, GVRD, which is the combination of municipal governments. Federal government transfers funds to the GVRD. The GVRD, through a body of 40 different non-profit organizations, makes decisions about how to distribute those funds, and it has targeted homelessness. The funds have made and are making a difference. I understand the government, Service Canada and the minister are reviewing the SCPI Canada granting process and have not given us any indication whether that program will continue past March 31, 2007.
Senator Nancy Ruth: That is true for everybody.
Ms. Thompson: I know. I am putting in my two cents' worth here.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: I do not know if you answered my question but nobody knows what will happen to the homelessness during the Olympics.
Ms. Thompson: I think the steering committee on homelessness, which was organized in the year 2000, has been pedaling as fast as they can to provide solutions to homelessness in Vancouver, but it has been slow. The lack of coordination amongst the 40 of us that sit together is only starting to change. We have a deadline called 2010 here in Vancouver, so the urgency is building. We need to come up with creative solutions to hide the problem by the time the Olympics arrive.
Ms. Montani: We need to stop creating homelessness.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: That is true.
Ms. Montani: That would help. We need more shelter and services for homeless people, but we need to stop creating the demand as well. Income assistance rates and an adequate living wage would help a lot, as well as services for people with mental illnesses, supported housing for people with dual diagnoses and these kinds of things.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Is the living wage concept the same as what someone as old as me used to know as the guaranteed annual income?
Ms. Montani: I am not sure it is defined exactly the same way. The living wage concept is for the employment sector to pay a living wage and to define that: for communities to come to some agreement about what is a living wage. If you live in Victoria, B.C. or wherever, what is a minimum living wage? A guaranteed annual income has a bit more policy around it, I think, but certainly the intent is the same. The intent is to raise the floor for those who fall below and cannot adequately support themselves.
Senator Poy: Can young people below the age of 16 receive social security support, a minimum amount to live on? Are they able to access that support if they are under 16?
Ms. Thompson: Under 18 they are supposed to be wards of the court or wards of the government. What is the age of majority? Anybody under 19 is legally entitled to service.
Senator Poy: They would not be on the street if they are entitled to the help. They would not be on the street if they can be helped by the government. Maybe you can explain that.
Ms. Thompson: About 1,800 kids a year come to my building who are all eligible for service.
Senator Poy: Are they getting it?
Ms. Thompson: In some cases, yes they get it and in some cases, no. Many of them have simply gone beyond the reach, and in some cases it is purposeful. In other words, as I said in my presentation, if a youth is 16, our social workers say, "You are old enough. I have eight-year-olds to worry about. I do not have enough time, money, or energy to deal with you, so off you go." Often they are placed into what is called a youth agreement in British Columbia. They are given a welfare cheque basically, plus a little help to get started. They cannot pay for rent and groceries. Minimum wage here is $6 an hour.
Ms. Montani: That is for the training wage.
Ms. Thompson: The training wage is $6 an hour, and that lasts for three months. Then it goes to $8 an hour. The average cost of rent for a basement suite in British Columbia is $600 a month. At $6 an hour, you work 100 hours a month to pay the rent, and that is if the landlord lets you in with your bad teeth, bad clothes, bad smell and addictions problems.
Senator Poy: They cannot access subsidized housing?
Ms. Thompson: If it were available, I suppose they could.
Ms. Montani: There are 13,000 families on the wait list for subsidized housing here. There is a huge backlog of people waiting to get in.
Senator Poy: Ms. Thompson, you mentioned that in Covenant House the age group is between 16 and 24. Do you have volunteer psychologists who help these children in Covenant House?
Ms. Thompson: We have some volunteers. Our board of directors is all volunteers, and we have about 150 volunteers who help us sort clothes, load food into the kitchens and man the front desk. Three psychiatrists give us pro bono time. However, it is inadequate. We try to purchase the services of psychiatric professionals. However, we have been able to buy only half an FTE this year.
Senator Poy: What is an FTE?
Ms. Thompson: Full-time equivalent: only half the time of a psychiatrist. Three psychiatrists come in for about 10 per cent of their work day.
Senator Poy: Are they volunteering? Do you pay them?
Ms. Thompson: We have some volunteer psychiatry support, but we also provide an honorarium as well.
Senator Poy: Do you have dentists?
Ms. Thompson: Some dentists have offered us volunteer support. We are grateful for that, but it is not enough.
Senator Poy: From what we have heard, not only today, but in the last few days, a lot of people, especially NGOs, are providing a band-aid solution. There must be something more that we can do. Ms. Montani, I think you mentioned that it takes political will to solve that. Of course, how does one control the drug problem here? I do not know. You read about it all the time. How does one manage that?
Ms. Thompson: Young people tell me they started to take crystal meth because they were afraid to fall asleep in the alley. They are homeless. They live in an alley. They will be raped, beaten or killed if they fall asleep. A $5 hit of crystal meth will keep them awake for a day and a half. It is survival.
Senator Poy: This new drug is cheap and a lot of people are getting it.
Ms. Thompson: And powerful.
The Chairman: If senators have no other questions, I want to thank both of you for coming and sharing your particular experiences through your organizations. We are centered primarily on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, so if you have any other thoughts to put forward at a later date, you can contact our clerk. I think when we talk about political will, we need to put our emphasis on trying to change the systems in place both provincially, federally, and within the communities about children. We need to look not at a needs-based solution but at a rights- based one, which is the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: what that might mean and what that might look like. I hope you continue to follow our work. Thank you for coming this morning.
Ms. Montani: We applaud your work in that regard and stand behind you.
The Chairman: Honourable senators, we will reconvene with our next panel. We have Sue Rossi from the Community Action Program for Children, and Jessica Chant, Executive Director for the Society for Children and Youth of BC. Welcome.
We continue our study on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Our focus is on the convention and its consequences and how it will be implemented in Canada. In that context, we are looking at children's issues and anything that can further our study and recommendations to the federal government, although we know many issues that touch children have a provincial aspect to them. We are pleased that you are here. If you have an opening statement, please keep it brief so we can have an exchange of questions and answers. Please proceed, Ms. Rossi.
Sue Rossi, Representative, Community Action Program for Children (CAPC): Thank you for having me here today. I appreciate the fact that you are listening to Canadians around the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I read your interim document, and I was impressed with the findings so far. Beyond that, I was excited because when Canada co-chaired the summit in 1990, they made a national and global agreement that children had the right to proper nurturing and care from parents and their caregivers. At the same time, Canada developed the Brighter Futures Initiative. From that initiative came the Community Action Program for Children, CAPC, the Canadian Prenatal Nutrition Program, CPNP, and Aboriginal Head Start program both on and off reserve, although at this point they are managed by two different ministries.
CAPC has made a national framework and delivered programs to communities for children aged zero to six and their families. CAPC is designed to reach remote and rural areas as well as urban and city centres. It sprung out of grassroots community efforts to welcome parents into a non-judgmental environment to reduce isolation, learn more about their own parenting skills and abilities, and to build on them.
CAPC is what we would call a targeted program. We collect demographic data. Primarily our target parent groups are young parents, parents with low income, parents with low education and parents who are suffering from abuse or addiction. I realize there was some conversation around inclusiveness of all parent groups across all socio-economic borders. I agree with you. However, a mixed environment in a parenting group does not always work, because some parents sometimes have insecurities or low self-esteem. We want to keep parents and their children together. We do not want children to be removed from their homes and taken into foster care. We have guiding philosophies and guiding principles in CAPC where children and families are first.
Provincial structures are in place through two initiatives, Success by 6 and Children First from the B.C. Ministry of Children and Family Development. The programs are universal access programs, and we work in partnership with those programs. I think the national fabric of CAPC is important because we can deliver messages to parents in all our provinces. We work with Ontario. We work with eastern provinces. It is a complement to our provincial counterparts who work in preventive parenting programs.
Right now CAPC has moved from Health Canada to the Public Health Agency of Canada and is under scrutiny for their long-term sustainability. I am from the Interior of British Columbia and in my own communities, our coalition is of seven member agencies, and we deliver 22 programs mostly to rural areas. Our parents have counted on our CAPC programs for the past ten years. Parents have come into our programs that are nervous about parenting and unsure of their role as a parent. Then they graduate through that program into volunteering with the program and taking on duties such as bringing the snacks or helping to clean up. By the time their children are ready for school, we have worked with the parents for a number of years, six years. We have seen some very positive results.
I would like to wind up by reflecting on comments made by the previous panel of speakers. As another one of my hats I wear, I worked in Vernon and opened a homeless shelter about three years ago. The question came up from the Senate about how to alleviate these hardships on people. I believe it comes back to helping the children and helping the parents. So many studies now show that if children thrive from the ages of zero to six, they have a remarkable success rate in finishing school, staying away from criminal activity, building healthy relationships and becoming contributing, healthy citizens. We need to break these cycles in degenerating parental skills. I think CAPC is a light of hope to follow as far as system change goes, and maintaining the rights of the children and the commitment that Canada made at the summit in 1990.
Jessica Chant, Executive Director, Society for Children and Youth of British Columbia: I should tell you who we are before I get into the points that I wanted to raise. SCY has a prolific history. We have been around for 32 years. Our goal is to help enforce and realize the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNCRC, in government structures and also in civil society. That is no small feat, but that is what we are trying to accomplish.
We have two main programs, the Rights Awareness Program and Child and Youth Friendly Communities. The Rights Awareness Program is self-explanatory in that we try to raise awareness of the UNCRC. That also involves awareness raising, education, and monitoring of the UNCRC. In our second program, Child and Youth Friendly Communities, we have developed a set of indicators to help municipalities and communities figure out where they are in terms of child and youth friendliness. The program helps communities envision their ultimate child and youth friendly community, which is a place where children's rights can be realized. Children's rights are the base of everything we do.
I wanted to focus on three areas today. They are not small categories: awareness, education, and monitoring of children's rights. In presenting to you, after I settled down and looked at what to say, I was aware that a lot of great stuff is happening here, amazing stuff. I am honoured that you are here and that I have been called to be a witness to tell you about the amazing, radical stuff happening here. I honestly believe that this area is a hot bed of rights activity. However, that hot bed of rights activity comes in an environment where children's rights are not recognized. That is where the radicalism comes from, to acknowledge the B.C. context in those three areas. I chose those three areas because there is a lot of momentum and a lot of talk about children's rights, and those are the three areas and the three processes that we see. It is a continuum of awareness raising, then education, and then monitoring. In a lot of situations, education and monitoring happen in the same place or at the same time in one session.
I will touch briefly on awareness. SCY is partnered with the Child and Youth Officer of British Columbia and an amazing array of community and government professionals to deliver a children's rights awareness campaign over the next three years. That is the plan. We will see what actually happens.
I am happy to share with you the results of an Ipsos Reid survey we did. Based on a survey of 800 British Columbians, we asked a number of questions. The first was: "How much do you know about the rights of children and youth in B.C.?" The answers were pretty much split down the middle. Half said they knew a great deal or some, and 52 per cent said they knew nothing at all or not very much. If they were aware of rights, the main rights that they were aware of were education and safety. We developed these categories as a committee, as they apply to the convention. We could be more specific, but that is how it goes. In terms of issues that were most concerning about children and youth that they wanted to see addressed were, again, education, safety, and health care. I think the question most applicable to this committee was, "How familiar would you say you are with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child?" Are you all ready for the answer? It might shock you that 75 per cent have heard only the name or are not at all familiar with the UNCRC, and 25 per cent had heard the name or were somewhat familiar.
The Chairman: Can I intervene for clarification: 800?
Ms. Chant: General public from all over B.C.
The Chairman: All over B.C., general public and not children?
Ms. Chant: No, it was 18 and over.
The Chairman: Our definition of children is 18 and under. Was it a random sampling of B.C. people?
Ms. Chant: That is correct. We asked them which areas of the convention they would want to pay the most attention to. We asked them, too, if they thought that children's rights are being fully met in B.C. Answers were split down the middle. Half agreed and half disagreed that their rights were being met. About 86 per cent strongly or moderately agreed that there needs to be more information about the UNCRC. Finally, it was split down the middle again as to whether enough information was available. There are interesting findings there. We also asked them how information would be best disseminated to them as members of the general public and how information would be best disseminated to children and youth. We have that information for you.
I wanted to let you know about this awareness campaign, and this amazing integration of community members, representatives from different ministries of the government, and funders as well. We want to have a multimedia campaign and regionalized forums feeding into a larger provincial forum hopefully in three years' time around International Children's Day.
In terms of education, SCY has done a lot of research. The most recent research is on the youth and criminal justice system and whether their rights are being met. As I said before, education and monitoring happens essentially at the same time. We had a research component, a literature review focusing especially on the needs of children or youth with disabilities — hidden disabilities were included — in the criminal justice system. We have an analysis of the criminal justice system and where youth saw their rights being met and also where professionals saw their rights being met. We also did an analysis of the convention and policies in British Columbia for children and youth with disabilities. We have a large paper that I would be happy to mail to you looking at how the convention applies to B.C. policies in that area.
That takes me to monitoring. SCY has done amazing work in terms of analyzing provincial legislative compliance with the UNCRC. SCY developed a model for analyzing and rating government policies. There are two rating systems. One rates whether the policy complies with the UN convention, and the other one looks more at article 12 and whether children are included in the creation of the policy or whether the policy takes into account children's interests and allows them the space to be involved in analysis and implementation of that policy. According to the rating system, 52 per cent did very well in terms of compliance with the convention, so 52 per cent were good on a four-point scale. The third point is that the interests of the child need more looking at in terms of development of policy. Child participation needs to happen more effectively.
I was not here for the first session, but I have heard that you are looking for some systemic possibilities for more inclusion of UNCRC and policies. I wanted to share SCY's people's project which was a collaboration of community, government and funding. The project was only within the geographic boundaries of Vancouver. We developed a workshop of 22 sessions with youth mostly and with service providers, educating them about the UNCRC. If we look at awareness raising and the UNCRC as a tool, there are some difficulties in using it as a tool and making it accessible to children and youth. There is some definite work that needs to be done in terms of making the convention friendly and accessible. Work needs to be done to help children understand the implications of articles, these very abstract legal principles, for their lived experiences and in their daily lives. We tried to do that in this workshop. Think about it. For two hours, we go in there. We say, "Here is this legal document. How does it apply?" It was really effective, in that we took those articles, made them child and youth friendly, and had children and youth engage in participatory action research methodology, so community mapping, to express where their rights were violated. We gathered individual anecdotal stories, and because of the framework, we could use it as research. We also asked them where their rights were being upheld. We are in the process of creating a report that compiles all that information. Hopefully, we can take that to other municipalities and connect with other people nationally in order for that to be a mechanism for communities, government, funders and everyone to understand how children's rights are fairing.
I know I am going overboard, but I want to talk about two more things about the B.C. lived reality here. Participatory structures for children and youth are very much lacking in government structures, and next to non- existent, specifically in Vancouver with the cutting of the child and youth advocate. I think advocacy has become a dirty word, which I think is dangerous. We have officers. We do not have advocates anymore. In terms of terminology, that is upsetting. What is also upsetting is the money that is continuously cut from social services and also the hesitancy of government people to jump onto every part of any kind of rights analysis for fear that it will make government look bad or create tension.
The good things that SCY has witnessed are the collaborations that I have spoken about and the amazing ability of children's rights to bring together the funders, the government officials and the community partners. The issue is a catalyst for bringing those people together. In terms of looking at systemic structures and the creation of those structures, all those players need to be acknowledged and included in the creation and implementation of those structures. When we asked in the survey about awareness raising and who was most responsible for delivering and protecting children's rights in society, we really broke it down, but the majority of people answered all of the above. Those are my remarks to you.
The Chairman: Again for clarification, we have gone across country, not yet fully, but you seem to have embraced the convention and have these programs. How did that come about, and do you know of any counterpart organizations or groups across Canada doing the same thing?
Ms. Chant: I am relatively new to the job, but I went to a children's rights conference in July, and there are definitely similar conferences. There is the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children. Do you want to know programatically?
The Chairman: Programatically: certainly there are groups who advocate implementing the convention. Other traditional organizations, if I can use that term, are aware of it. Service oriented support organizations for children or programs have been around a long time that understand the convention and are trying to put it in. You seem to have embraced the convention in the last three years. You said your organization has been around for 32 years, but you seem to have taken on intensely the awareness campaign, the analysis, and even an Ipsos Reid poll. We have not heard this elsewhere.
Ms. Chant: In the B.C. context, I am talking about the timeliness of all these ventures. It is hot for a reason. When the Campbell government came in, they completely slashed social services. All of the sudden, community organizations, not to mention the ministries who were supposed to support communities were gutted. The way that request for proposals was reorganized was that all these people were put in competition with each other. The impact was that children's rights were not being met. Because the change was so dramatic and so quick in a lot of ways, and I think that is devastating, it is obvious what was happening. I think because of the obvious nature of the change there is a lot more action around it.
Senator Poy: Ms. Rossi, I would like to ask you exactly how CAPC works. You help pregnant women and parents. Do you have many groups all over British Columbia and they contact you; is that how it works?
Ms. Rossi: There were a couple of questions in there. In British Columbia we see 3,500 children a month in our CAPC programs.
Senator Poy: How many locations do you have?
Ms. Rossi: There are 168 places within the province. Our structure is through coalitions. Our agencies meet as a coalition. From there the coalition members deliver programs and services within their catchment area. CAPC is not always called CAPC. It is typically called Mom and Tot Drop In, Mom's Morning Out or Dad's Night Out. We have not done a lot of social marketing around CAPC. We are starting to raise the awareness of those small programs in the community through the products I brought today. Most CAPC programs run only one or two days a week mostly because of our limited funding. As well, we try to work in conjunction with other programs and services, particularly in small communities, so we are not overlapping on the same day. For example, 90 new babies are born in Revelstoke every year. There are so many parents that we want to make sure they have access to all types of programming. CAPC focuses on parent skill and development. Parents find CAPC usually through referrals, through a public health nurse or other young moms in the community. We have built a lot of our CAPC program on partnerships. We rely on that communication amongst professionals and non-professionals. We provide an avenue for early screening, early intervention and early detection as well because once the health nurse visits are over and the parents are coming to a CAPC program, we can link those parents back to health care professionals where a trust might not be built through either having them drop into our programs or having the CAPC worker go with the mom to the professional services. Those frameworks are built in every province across Canada. That is significant. I have the figures. Without looking, I think we have about 1,700 sites across Canada. We are a pretty good framework that has been in place for a number of years.
Senator Poy: I am wondering about reaching pregnant women. Do you work with maternity wards? Do you work with obstetricians who tell the pregnant mothers to contact you?
Ms. Rossi: Because conception and even pre-conception is a big part of healthy child development, it is our Canadian Prenatal Nutrition Programs, CPNP, that see women from pre-pregnancy hopefully, right through to three years old. Their time fame is a little shorter whereas our CAPC time frame is conception to age six. Prenatal works a lot more with the high risk parents, and their referral system is more through the hospitals and doctors whereas ours is more through public health once babies are born than through other early intervention specialists. As well, provincial structures are set up around Success by 6 and Children First. They have created early childhood development, ECD, committees in 110 communities in our province. Our CAPC people sit on those provincial committees and link with them. There is a good cross-referral system set up through those committees as well.
Senator Poy: Your work is mainly prevention of problems that might develop, instead of solving problems for parents, right?
Ms. Rossi: I think our work includes both although I do not think we solve problems for parents. I think parents voluntarily come to our program. Our programs have increased. We have collected data for years now, and our data has become streamlined and probably a little more useful at government levels. Parents are invited to come at any stage of their parental skill development. Our CAPC are not required to have a standardized level of education. A lot of our CAPC workers are previous CAPC moms. The cornerstone of CAPC is that ability to connect with parents and to build the trust where parents are able to share the problems they are having at home raising their children with other parents in a safe, supportive environment. A lot of our program includes referral. We are not specialists ourselves. We are not counsellors. I think there is a magical ingredient when somebody cares about somebody else. That is how you can build on hope and trust again and allow people to move through the difficulties they may be experiencing at their own rate. That is how our programs work.
The Chairman: You are centered on parents, but a lot of the parents that I used to deal with would not attend programs. They had their own problems, and those children were even more at risk. How do you handle that element where they have not stopped using drugs or alcohol but they have a child and that child needs resources and that child is with the parent but the parent will not come to a meeting?
Ms. Rossi: Isolation is strongly connected to health determinants because in isolation parents stop reaching out and asking for help. They start to internalize their problems, and they become lost in the systems. We do a lot of training with our staff around how to reach hard-to-reach families. We consider ourselves very successful in that area: more successful than any other program I have seen in the years I have worked in early childhood development. Some parents require one-to-one support before they will come into a group. I think maybe we have all experienced some point in our life where it is hard to walk into a room where we are not sure how we will be accepted or how others will see us. CAPC came from the population and public health branch of Health Canada, which did not allow our staff to do one-on-one support. That support really comes back to being a counsellor's role because things could come up in those conversations that we are not really skilled enough to deal with. Our role then is to work closely with the counsellors working with the families. A program called Nobody's Perfect works with small groups of parents that are in intense situations. Nobody's Perfect refers to CAPC as well.
Something I would like to bring to the attention of the senators here today is that in B.C., the majority of our population lives in rural and remote areas. The city centre does not necessarily reflect areas and regions of the North, the East and West Kootenays, or where we live. We run across moms at the grocery store and we see moms around town, and so it is easy for us, as CAPC worker, to introduce ourselves. We have come up with innovative ways of getting to know somebody in a grocery line or having somebody who is already in a CAPC program help a mom that we know is not coming to programs. We do our best.
Senator Nancy Ruth: If this committee recommended a national early childhood education program in its report, would that program help facilitate the rights of children, and if so, why?
Ms. Chant: Yes, it would be good because I think any recommendation, making that public recommendation, is a good idea: Having the recommendation be a topic of conversation, but also realizing that if children are brought up knowing their rights from early childhood, then that information has ramifications in their entire life. Also, any support to parents and families, any recognition of that issue, I think is also huge.
Ms. Rossi: Can you repeat the question, please?
Senator Nancy Ruth: If this committee recommended a national early childhood learning program, say from three to six, would that recommendation facilitate children having their rights and knowing about them? I am not talking about day care. I am talking about early childhood learning.
Ms. Rossi: That is a good question because I do not know if any stand-alone program can address a national early childhood learning structure. If it was me, I think a recommendation that I would take back to the federal government is to keep the structures that are in place already and use the frameworks for delivering the messages that are government priorities around the rights of the child.
Earlier, we talked about some figures. Across Canada 394 CAPC projects provide 1,775 local programs. In partnership there is also the CPNP and Aboriginal Head Start. Those structures have been in place for long enough that if the federal government has priorities to deliver to families in communities across Canada, then I would recommend we keep the structure in place and evaluate the material and resources that are fed into that structure. I believe, though, we still need to work with individual provinces and community members, too. There needs to be a full circle of families' input into the plan as well as having the plan roll back into the community. We need to use what we have in place and somehow use that avenue of feedback from the parents to make sure what we put in place works. There has to be some sort of mechanism to do that.
Ms. Chant: I wonder how we can have a recommendation for a learning program without addressing day care. To me, we need day care, child care spaces. We need some kind of program for day care before we can even talk about having a learning program because if we have a learning program, who accesses it if we do not even have a national system of day care? To me, that seems like jumping the gun a little bit. It should be implicit in the recommendation for an early childhood learning program, that it would be implemented while building on a national child care program. I wonder where that learning program will happen, if not in these child care spaces. Who will access them if there are not the child care spaces in the first place for the early childhood learning program? I fundamentally agree with the learning program, yes, but I think there are lots of barriers that need to be addressed before talking about that.
Senator Nancy Ruth: I grew up in an environment where the judge would say if they got you before age seven, they have got you. It seems to me we hear lots of testimony that if a child before age six is in a healthy learning environment where there is food, safety and so on, that child has a better chance of self-esteem and dealing with life later on. Where would it happen? I have no idea, but my assumption is that the schools would add on, so people who have access to schools would have access to early childhood learning. That may be a problem in rural areas, but that also leaves day care for kids one to two if both parents work.
Ms. Chant: One more thing about the B.C. context too, and I am sure you have heard it — I hope you have heard it in your sessions — is that we have the highest child poverty rate in Canada — one in three children — so the barriers and accessibility issues are huge. They need to be addressed in talking about learning programs.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Do not say "before:" "Along with" will perhaps get us further.
Ms. Rossi: Can I add one more comment as well for the B.C. context? I am not sure if you are aware of Dr. Clyde Hertzman's work. Clyde Hertzman works on a project called the Human Early Learning Project, and it is through our University of British Columbia. Over the past three years, every single kindergarten student in British Columbia has been part of a study. From that, the study looked at a scale of nine vulnerabilities around social, emotional, cognitive and intellectual developments. Researchers have created a B.C. child atlas that basically lays out all the neighbourhoods of vulnerable children in B.C. They have come up with a figure that one in four children in B.C. is not ready for school. From that study in B.C., they looked at developing what they call hub models, and the hub models would include the ministries of education, health, and children and family development to build centres of early learning for children zero to six, even if the centres are satellite locations. That idea ties in maybe with some of the ideas that you might take back to the federal government. Within B.C. there are some movements towards creating these hubs, but again, you cannot rely on one source for all parent needs because we still need to look at all things. I think I mentioned that federal governments working in orchestration with provincial governments and community levels is how we will get it done. A lot of work is happening in B.C. Recently, even our Ministry of Education has now hired a manager of early learning, which is new for us. Typically, we have worked with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Children and Family Development around children aged zero to six, so we have a new partner now. In our interior region, we are building an interior regional childhood development network. Our interior region is a fifth of the province. We are working with the three ministries to develop regional service plan deliveries. That is my other hat. With CAPC I see how that will work with the families that might not be able to enter immediately into these hub model systems because they are universal programming. They are not specific for parents who maybe face many barriers.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: Do you have a hotline for these single parents to call in case there is a slight emergency, such as "What do I do? I just look crystal meth. Can somebody come and help me?"
Ms. Rossi: Right now we have crisis lines in British Columbia. Parents can phone a crisis line and receive referrals. At the same time, the United Ways have partnered. I am not sure who they have partnered with. United Ways are all across Canada. They are creating a 211 number to follow 911 and 411. It is a hotline for all community-based services across Canada. It is a huge initiative, but it is almost ready to be launched. It will be launched within the next year. That database is being collected right now, and parents will be able to use that. Your example might be more of the crisis line call, but they can access something that is a little less crisis driven, such as where a parenting program is in town that is free and that sort of thing.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: How do you reach the remote communities, and if you do reach them, how do they come to your program? Is there easy access to come to your programs if they are in remote areas?
Ms. Rossi: There are some very remote areas in the North. My region does not go as far as the North. Different strategies are used within the province. In the North, it is impossible to drive territories between villages in the length of a work day to go to a program. Small programs operate in the villages of remote B.C. In those cases sometimes CPNP works with CAPC. They put their money together so they can run their program. As I say, most of our programs are once a week for two hours or drop-in type programs, so they do not cost a lot of money to run. We rely on connecting with other services to do those types of continuum programs for parents.
For example, in our area we have a little town called Golden which is close to the Alberta border. It is beautiful there. Golden has outlying areas of Blaeberry and Parson, very tiny communities. They have only started doing outreach programs in those communities in the last year. They have done by partnering their CAPC money with provincial money through Success by 6. It is not who the initiative belongs to or what is its name. We are getting to parents that live in small, isolated areas. At the community level, agencies are working together, and there is less competition amongst agencies to own contracts. Out of that is coming something really good, too. They are streamlining our data collection. Now the provincial and federal government with CAPC and the Ministry of Children and Family Development are making a streamlined logic model. Our staff will not be burdened with reporting to different people all over the place. The groups are coming together. We are starting to really see that this is the essence of our work. It is about the parents and the children. As far as the structures go and the frameworks around them, we need to keep those in place, support them and get the money to the families through the programming. We are working closer together so that we can reach into every community and make sure at least one program is available for parents.
The Chairman: No one has mentioned the Aboriginal community. That is large here, complex, and of varying structures. How do you touch the Aboriginal community in either one of your programs?
Ms. Chant: We work with the Aboriginal community in every project. Aboriginal people need to be at the table because in terms of rights, rights violations and systemic rights violations, Aboriginal people definitely face more than non-native British Columbians. We just work with them in every project.
The Chairman: You work with them in all the areas you point out. How do you approach the reserves or their organizations, or do you work at a grassroots level to find them?
Ms. Chant: All of the above. We take care to work within their settings and their traditions. We go to where they are, work with them to adapt models to their cultural specifications and are guided by their practices. I see why Aboriginal communities who adapt some of our models to specific Aboriginal communities is working, such as the child and youth friendly communities model.
Ms. Rossi: One mandates of CAPC is that we serve 25 per cent Aboriginal people in British Columbia. We do that through our participant card data collection. Aboriginal Head Start off reserve is service delivery for Aboriginal families in urban settings. Aboriginal Head Start for on reserve is a little trickier because that goes back to Health Canada. Again, I would like to speak to children as a whole in our province because a number of initiatives are going on for Aboriginal governance and self-determination for cultural programming. I am thrilled that there is. We have 29 different nations in B.C., which is the highest number in Canada within our provinces of diversity within nations. Then we have our friendship centres or urban centres.
In British Columbia, a study was done in 2005 on Aboriginal engagement for early childhood development. It was done through the B.C. Aboriginal Child Care Society. The report is being shared with Success by 6. Success by 6 is now engaging communities individually into creating tables or committees of Aboriginal people from different nations, if they are in the same geography. This concept is new for us: including urban centres with a vision of supporting their children. As well, the Ministry of Children and Family Development is extrapolating programs and services that were typically delivered through mainstream positions such as supported child care, infant development programs, and early childhood development programs, and is creating a parallel structure for Aboriginal families. Again, we have to work in synchronicity with these initiatives. Aboriginal Head Start and CAPC can be the leaders within the change, not only by supporting families, but by supporting the provincial people that have been designated in these positions and roles. It will be challenging to make those definitions around who can access programs or who will have the funding for the parents that attend the program.
It is new. It is coming along. Within the last three months, positions have been created for Aboriginal leadership in early childhood development. Again, I think we need to look at our long-term federal government commitment to keeping sustainable programming even if the province goes through some changes and reorganization. We need to support that change to make it happen. I am really pleased because I have worked with Aboriginal families in our area for some time.
The Chairman: You gave me one statistic that you started three months ago incorporating staffing from Aboriginal people. How long have you been running that program?
Ms. Rossi: The Aboriginal Head Start program has been operating in B.C. or across Canada for 12 years. Our B.C. Ministry of Children and Family Development has put new positions in place for Aboriginal infant development.
The Chairman: Three months ago?
Ms. Rossi: Yes: That is pretty new. They are coming to this notion of recognizing the cultural differences that belong to Aboriginal people in their own programming for children.
The Chairman: What about the new immigrants?
Ms. Rossi: We also collect data on families that have been in Canada for less than 10 years. All our materials are translated into six or seven languages, particularly in the Lower Mainland area, so that families can access parenting tips or parenting skills. I am not from the multicultural districts, so I cannot be exact in the number of languages.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: You have mentioned that you service 25 per cent of Native communities. Is this mandate in order to get funding?
Ms. Rossi: That is part of our grants and contribution agreement. Twenty-five per cent of the participants accessing programs have to be self-identified as Aboriginal, so that is Metis, First Nations or Inuit. That requirement is in our contribution agreement.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: I am a First Nations person. I did not ask this question because I know the funding that goes on in First Nations, and I know for a fact that they do not get enough funding for their child care, et cetera.
The Chairman: If there are no other questions, I think we have come to the end of this session. We thank you for coming and giving us your perspectives here from British Columbia.
Ms. Chant, this is the first time that we have received that much information of someone tracking rights and the convention, which is reassuring. We may have to go back and see if there are counterparts like yours, but they certainly have not come forward, so we are pleased that you initiated it.
Senator Nancy Ruth: Can you ask who was brought here who initiated this conference?
The Chairman: We know about that conference. Senator Pearson was added, so we have that information. That was helpful. Thank you for explaining the Head Start program because it has come up in many ways and we have tried to get this information from the Department of Health, what Social Services do and how we actually access resources. Ms. Rossi, you have given us a little more of the full picture of British Columbia because we have been Vancouver-centered, so you have broadened our base. Thank you for coming. If you have any other materials, please forward them to us. We filed our interim report, and we have asked for reactions to that report, so please continue to feed in on that. We will work toward our final report before the end of Christmas.
Thank you as well to members of the committee for having endured a rather grueling week, and to the staff of the Senate and the interpreters. They have been in good humour and good professional readiness.
The committee adjourned.