Hon. Sharon Carstairs:

Honourable senators, today being National Aboriginal Day, it seems appropriate that I should bring to the attention of the Senate Aboriginal children in my home province.

As of March 31, 2010, one year ago — I cannot get the statistics for this year yet because they are not available — there were 9,120 children in care in my province, by far the largest number in care, percentage wise, in any province in Canada. I am told that as of this year — and, unfortunately, the numbers are just anecdotal at this point — there are even more children in care. It is estimated that 70 per cent of these children are status, non-status or Metis — in other words, Aboriginal children; yet Aboriginal people make up only 15.5 per cent of the population of my province. A comparison with neighbouring Saskatchewan, for example, would indicate that there are fewer than 50 per cent of their children of Aboriginal nature in care in that province.

The question that must be asked is this: Why are so many Aboriginal children in care in the Province of Manitoba? Why are so many of them being removed from their communities and placed primarily in Winnipeg when the vast majority of them do not live in Winnipeg? Why are so many of them being placed in non-Aboriginal families?

Honourable senators, I think it is important to give you some perspective and therefore some history of Aboriginal child welfare in the Province of Manitoba.

Pre-contact with Europeans tells us that Aboriginals had a very defined and complex social and legal structure. If a child lost his or her parents, then the community became responsible for that child. Therefore, the child continued to have access to kinship and a set of values and expectations for behaviour.

After contact with Europeans, it became clear that Europeans showed a lack of confidence in Aboriginal ways of raising their children. This resulted in legislation developing in my province beginning in 1887 and continuing to 2002 with the Child and Family Services Act.

Federally, the Indian Act does not specifically address the issue of children and child welfare, but was amended in 1955 to allow "provincial laws of general application and child welfare laws were considered laws of general application." However, the provinces were reluctant — not just the Province of Manitoba, all provinces — to fund services on reserves. Therefore, little or no services were provided to these vulnerable children.

In 1966, the Hawthorne report decried the lack of services on reserve and commented on the inhumane conditions that children on reserve lived in throughout this nation.

Manitoba and Canada entered into an agreement with no consultation or agreement with these First Nations. This, unfortunately, has become the habit of both levels of government: little or no discussion and/or agreement with the very people to be affected.

Honourable senators, we are all well aware of the damages inflicted upon our First Nations people by the residential schools. Much of the focus of this very failed experiment has been on those children who were physically and sexually assaulted.

I would suggest to you, honourable senators, that this tells only part of the story. These children were taken from their families. They were denied access to their culture, to their customs and to their language — their sense of self. We are still seeing the impact of this betrayal of their values in our communities today.

In Manitoba, we went a step further. In my province it was decided that the Indian child welfare problem could be solved by the systemic and mass removal of children from reserves and adopting them to families in Canada, the United States and Europe. From 1971 to 1980, over 3,400 Aboriginal children were taken from their families. In Justice Kimelman's report of 1982, he exposed what he called the "Sixties Scoop," and the province agreed to end out-of-province placements and adoption of Aboriginal children.

Meanwhile, the First Nations communities, dismayed by what was happening, began to hire their own on-reserve social workers and to try to work with both Manitoba and Canada to find a way of ensuring the protection of their children.

The federal government, unfortunately, seemed all too willing, despite their fiduciary responsibility to First Nations people, to cede jurisdiction to the province. The federal government cannot simply ignore their responsibilities to First Nations children. They must be engaged in what is happening to these children. The following questions need answers: Why are so many of these children in care? Why are so many of them being taken from their communities? Why are so many of them being placed with non-Aboriginal families?

I am not suggesting that the issue is a simple one to solve. What I am asking is this: Have we learned nothing from the residential schools experiment? Are we not making the same mistakes once again? Why are we failing to engage our First Nations people about what is in their best interest? Are we still convinced that Whites know better what Aboriginal children need?

I am no expert on our Aboriginal people, but I do believe that children need to be with parents as long as that is possible. When the decision is made that staying with their parents is not in the child's best interest, then they should be with extended family members and/or members of their community. Only under extreme circumstances should they be removed from their community, and yet all too often in my province this seems to be the norm.

Honourable senators, I implore our Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples to undertake a study on this matter. Let us not go down the same path as residential schools. Let us learn from our mistakes. Let us keep children in their communities whenever possible, close to those who love and care for them, close to their culture and their language.

There are problems in many of our communities. However, I do not believe we will solve these problems by moving children en masse to a new and often hostile environment. We need to do better.

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