Thank you, and a very good morning, Chair and members. I would like to recognize that this testimony is occurring on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin nation.

In 2008 the World Health Organization said inequality is killing on a grand scale. There are all kinds of inequality flowing from capitalist markets and other things, but there's also inequality that is directly sourced to the decisions that are made in this House and made in the Senate. That's the story I want to talk about today: how that inequality has killed first nations children, how it's contributing to the deaths of first nations children today, and, most importantly, what you all can do about it.

In 1907 there were headlines across the country such as “Absolute Inattention to the Bare Necessities of Health” and “Startling Death Rolls Revealed”. What were they talking about? Canada's own medical inspector for the Indian department had found that the federal government was underfunding health care for first nations children in those schools. “By how much?”, you might ask. Well, the people living here in Ottawa received three times the amount of health care funding that all “Indians” across the country did. That gross inequality, coupled with poor health practices, was resulting in death rates of 25% per year, growing to 50% over three years.

The Government of Canada accepted those statistics; they did nothing about the inequality.

Where does that inequality come from? It comes from the Indian Act, under which the federal government funds public services on reserve—everything from water to health to education to child care—and the provinces fund those for everyone else. Since Confederation, they have underfunded those services, creating a cascade of poor health outcomes for first nations children.

Now, that decision—it was a decision rather than a failure—by Canada to not remedy those inequalities created ripples that we saw, sadly, in the headlines of 2021 and 2022 about the children in unmarked graves.

In 2005 Jordan River Anderson was in the hospital in Winnipeg. At the age of two he would have gone home. His pediatrician said it was time, but he didn't go home, because he was a first nations child and there was a dispute between the Government of Canada and the Government of Manitoba about who should pay for his at-home care. Make no mistake: If he had been non-indigenous, he would have gone home. He died in the hospital because of who he was, having never spent a day in a family home.

In 2007 all members of the House of Commons—and I want to thank all members of all parties—stood in unanimous support of Jordan's principle, which is about first nations kids getting the help they need when they need it. It's something every Canadian could get behind, but it has taken now 16 years of litigation and 25 non-compliance orders to get the Government of Canada to a place where it's beginning to put a proper label on Jordan's principle. In the wake of that—in the non-compliance period—the deaths of two children have been linked to Canada's non-compliance as it refused to provide medical care for mental health to two children who later died by suicide at the age of 12. We don't know if those deaths could have been prevented, but we know that there would have been a chance to prevent those deaths of those sacred children had those children received the types of supports they could have had.

Jordan's principle is a very basic principle of Canadian health. We talk about universal health care, but actually when we get down to it, we really don't have that in Canada.

We've done some work to decide what can be fixed about Jordan's principle. What we're finding now, thankfully, due to the tribunal and the collective work of first nations leadership, is that we're now giving out about $2 million in services resulting from Jordan's principle—which is a good thing—in health, education and other social supports, but we're also finding that it's funding gaps in these other underfunded services. You see, since Confederation there hasn't been a comprehensive plan to cost out all of those inequalities and remedy them all.

We know governments are capable of doing this. In fact we, along with allies, did this in the Second World War with the Marshall Plan. We rebuilt Europe by creating a multidisciplinary plan. Surely this is something we can do here, and the Spirit Bear Plan is the way to do that. We want to put the hands of that calculation out in the public parlance and get someone like the Parliamentary Budget Officer to cost out all of these inequalities and put to bed for all time what amounts to an apartheid public service system with respect to first nations kids that contributes to their poor health outcomes.

In the case of Jordan's principle, a large majority of the requests that come in are actually for low dollar-value items. They are huge dollar-value items to that family but low dollar-value items for the government, yet a request for a 150 bucks to buy baby formula is put through the same red tape as a request for $5 million. That's not a good use of public servants' efforts.

We'd like to see that calibrated so that, like any business you might run, you have a certain dollar threshold below which it's nominally approved as long as there's a professional note saying the child needs that service. It's not without any check systems. These types of things would create vast efficiencies.

The other thing we're looking for is.... The litigation is ongoing, but we still don't have an answer for what is going to happen for Jordan's principle beyond year five. The agreement in principle is a positive thing, but we need to know that this discrimination is never going to happen again for any child in this nation.

When we all saw the children in unmarked graves and when we all wore the orange T-shirts, we were making a promise to the residential school survivors to make sure that what happened to them doesn't happen to their grandchildren. We have solutions on the books to be able to remedy this. This is not a problem without a solution. This is a solution without, so far, the political will to implement it. With all of you, I'm sure we can get that done.

Thank you.

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