Thank you very much. I've given you a document to keep on file. I want to apologize to Quebec and all French-speaking people that I didn't have it translated in time. I do sincerely apologize for that. I should have had it done, but somebody in my office didn't follow up as indicated.
Honourable Chair MaryAnn Mihychuk and members of the standing committee, good morning. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to present my perspective on Bill C-92, an act respecting first nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families.
Today I speak to you as a leader of the Métis nation, but I also want to speak to you as a parent and a grandparent. I want to speak to you as someone who has fought for decades for the children of my nation as they were ripped from their mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, their communities and their nation. For too long and despite our best efforts, the status quo for our children has been removal, foster care placements and adoption. Our nation has been depeopled one child at a time, through the sixties scoop, the residential school, the day school and our child welfare system.
Last year, in January 2018, I spoke at an emergency meeting on indigenous child and family services and addressed what was referred to at the time by Minister Philpott as a humanitarian crisis and a human rights crisis. This year I watched as the Manitoba government cut from the already underfunded budget for Métis child welfare. Right now in Manitoba, the children in the Métis nation are worth, in the funding arrangement, $1.39 a day. That's the only additional money we're getting. This is less than a Tim Hortons coffee.
Despite the current reality, at least in the province, there have been some positive changes. That has been through our own work and our own development. After the sixties scoop, when thousands of our children were taken, the Métis federation in 1982 developed its own plan through all kinds of fundraising events. We raised our own money to find our children and bring them home. We were fortunate to find close to 100 of them, I think, but many we will probably never find. We are still finding them today. We're still connecting with them and trying to reconnect them with their family. The stories you hear....
I'll just set this aside for a moment and speak to you as a leader. For those of you who may never have been to any of these meetings, I would encourage you to try to go to some of them. As a committee member, you especially have the power to make a difference in this country through legislation, through actions and through voting. I've been in politics close to 40 years now. I've won seven elections as president, and I've been president for 22 years. There are 400,000 Métis people in western Canada. I've chaired many a meeting in my time, not only in Canada but internationally. Throughout this time, I've had the toughest time in my life as a chair to oversee the discussions involving sixties scoop survivors. I don't know how many times I've cried on that podium, with them, hearing their stories of sexual and physical abuse—just abuse; animals were treated better than they were. In fact, Minister Philpott and I sat at a meeting and listened to the young people speak. They were child welfare survivors, and we heard their stories. Philpott and I cried along with the rest of them and promised them that we would fight and continue to fight for change, that change one day would come, that it would never happen again, and that this can't happen again.
I'm sad to say, however, that it's still happening because of the way the system is designed right now in Manitoba, even though we have a mandated child welfare system. We're the only Métis nation government in the prairies that has it. We got it through several inquiries, for which people had to die, and then the recommendations came from there. Now we're at a stage where we see a bill that will give us an opportunity to ensure that the key provisions that we speak of and fight for will be protected. These are culture and identity, ensuring that the family is the number one priority, and ensuring that the child stays within the community. We will have the federal protection that we don't have as the Métis nation. We will have something that ensures us that we will not, in fact, have to worry that our children will ripped away or taken out of their homes and placed in foster homes with those who aren't our people and don't protect our culture.
In fact, we lost one—no disrespect to the Filipino family—to a Filipino foster parent. The court ruled that the child was there too long. I think it was 18 months.
The child was young enough not to fully understand who his parents were. To take them from the Filipino family would have had a devastating effect on his mind. They kept him there and we lost him. We went to court and we lost based on a court decision. We can never let that happen again. I'm proud of the Jewish people, for example, who would never let that happen.. We have a Jewish Child and Family Service in Manitoba, and I applaud them for having the strength and prosperity to ensure that this does not happen to their children. But why does it happen to ours, and why do we let it happen? It can't happen anymore—this is the new millennium. This is not the 1800s, or the late 1900s. It's the time of change, and change is here.
This bill is not the perfect bill. We all know that. I heard you speak here. I heard you state again that money should be set aside. If there's anybody who should be worried about money, it should be the Métis. We don't have a system in Canada right now. The first nations offer services at different jurisdictions they're working in. In fact, two grand chiefs in Manitoba, SCO and MKO, work together with me. We're the only three that have mandated child welfare agencies in Manitoba under the auspices of the governance. Clearly, under leadership counsel we've been fighting with government trying to protect our children.
We just had meetings, the grand chiefs and I, and we're desperately moving forward on our plan to change the direction the Province of Manitoba is going in. We're left at the mercy of the province and at the whim of changes in elections. You all know what happens in elections, you guys. All of you are politicians and somehow have been involved in politics. New leaders and new ideologies come in. In my province right now, the number one issue is cutting and slaying the deficit. Everything else is secondary. With that comes cuts, and cuts came to the child welfare system. Like I said, $1.39 day is all our children will get for the next three years.
How can we change that? We're taking a system in Manitoba that used to be based on grabbing and taking possession of the child. That was the system and that's how you got funded. Now everybody is talking about prevention, including the federal government. How do you shift an entire system that was there for grab-and-take and move it to prevention, where it should have been several decades ago? Now we want to change to prevention and that's the right approach, the direct approach. Keep the child in the family, in the community. The opportunity is going to be there in this bill. I heard Cathy talk about certain things, and I know there are jurisdictional issues that come into play, but common sense should prevail. We've always had our challenges as governments, but I'm sure that if we sit together with open minds we'll come to a solution. The provinces will either opt into that solution or opt out of it.
Right now, I know the provinces don't want to pay the bill. They want the federal government to pay the bill. That's an issue we'll have to figure a balance on. When it comes to resources, I understand that there are issues around where the Métis will fit into all of this, but we trust that if we have this bill the funding will come later. We'll negotiate it. We don't know exactly what our goal or our plan will be, or how far we're going to go with it regarding prevention and expenditures. I understand there was a question posed to my president when he was here. He doesn't deliver child welfare, because he's the national president. I deliver it. There's a question of how you get notice to the community, the Métis. You have reserves, and you have a band council. We too have our political structures, and they've been around since 1967. I have one of the strongest governments in the homeland. Our system is designed to be the most democratic in the country—it ensures that we're participating. We have local leadership right across all of our villages in our urban centres, and we have offices right across the province.
There's no issue of how to get hold of the Métis and advise the people. We have one of the most robust ways of getting our people interacted and involved. That shouldn't even be a question around this table, because the system has been here for a while and it's working well.
Madam Chair, I can say to you that the Métis government in Manitoba, as well as the Métis nation, supports Bill C-92 strongly. We will stand with it and hopefully convince you...I heard you say that all of you support it. You said that. But there are some exceptions, some areas of caution. It is not the perfect bill. It's not pan-aboriginal. I'm hearing people say it's independent, and every nation has the right to choose. Everybody has the right to opt in or opt out. The options are there. From our perspective, we will support it because we know it's going to make changes that are going to save our families, save our children.
Hopefully, in the next decade or so, we'll all be proud to see that we were all involved in a massive change that took place in this country for the Métis nation, and we'll see that change actually come to where we will be able to say, “Look at the money we're saving today and at the costs that have gone down. The families are stronger because we made a decision to support Bill C-92.” You'll get that support from the Métis nation.