SoVote

Context: House Hansard - 265 - Dec/11/23

Mr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC)

Dec/11/23 7:17:54 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Chair, I want to ask the government a bit of a broader question. The member spoke about including the voices of indigenous peoples, consultation, self-government, etc. However, I note that in many cases there is a tension between the government's stated goals with respect to climate policy and what individual indigenous nations may be asking for. There is a case now that has over 130 indigenous nations taking the government to court over its carbon tax policy. I have heard from indigenous communities, for instance in the north, that there was a complete lack of consultation before the government imposed development bans. We heard on a foreign affairs committee trip a number of years ago to the Northwest Territories that the consultation before imposing the development moratorium was a phone call 45 minutes before an announcement was made. Therefore, it seems that the government has a bit of a problem in cases where indigenous peoples are calling for policies that contradict the government's stated goals when it comes to its so-called climate policy. In instances where there is a conflict, what should win out? Should it be the government's intentions with regard to a carbon tax or blocking development; or should it be the wishes of indigenous people?

214 words

Mrs. Jenica Atwin

Dec/11/23 7:19:09 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Chair, it is important that all members of this House try not to use indigenous people as a pawn in their political games or their partisan ideology. What we are seeing playing out with this conversation right now is a misrepresentation of what is happening. Indigenous peoples are on the front line of what is happening with the climate crisis and they really want us to act. I know that, in most cases among the leadership I have spoken to, there is a consensus that pricing mechanisms can get us further on reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and indigenous peoples want to be partners with that. The conversation that is happening around Ontario chiefs is important. It is really about their wanting a more equitable stake in what is happening around our approach to the environment, so we are going to have that conversation. I really look forward to the judicial review and what comes out of that, but, again, it is important to deal in facts and it is really important to acknowledge that indigenous peoples are there with us, wanting to confront this climate crisis head-on.

190 words

Mr. Gord Johns (Courtenay—Alberni, NDP)

Dec/11/23 7:20:09 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Chair, over the last 20 years, Indigenous Services Canada has cut tribal council funding in half. This is under both the Harper Conservative government and the current government. These severe cutbacks have had a huge impact on critical services to the nations in my riding. The Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council and AFN have been asking for increases in funding via motions, letters and meetings. They have been literally begging for the government to increase funding. This is impacting children, youth and elders in our communities. When does Indigenous Services Canada intend to finally increase tribal council funding and bring it back to the level it was 20 years ago?

111 words

Mrs. Jenica Atwin

Dec/11/23 7:21:02 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Chair, we know we need stable, predictable, ongoing funding so that communities can provide the services that they need. We know that it affects children. We know that it affects operations. I know that, in general, Indigenous Services Canada's funding has increased by 156% since 2015. I would love to look specifically into this piece around the tribal council funding. Again, it is incumbent upon all of us. We have the 2024 budget ahead. I will need help in asking for this increase. It is going to take all of us to ensure that this is a priority for our government. I hear the member on this. I am also concerned. I would specifically, again, like to look into it and I will get back to the member with that information.

133 words

Mr. John Aldag (Cloverdale—Langley City, Lib.)

Dec/11/23 7:21:51 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Chair, I would like to direct the question to the parliamentary secretary related to how this work helps with reconciliation. Many Canadians follow the relationship between Canada and the indigenous peoples. We have disappointed this relationship time and time again, as the Crown. The residential school legacy that has generational impacts and the fact that many indigenous persons have not had adequate water for generations are inexcusable, but reconciliation has to start somewhere. Could my colleague reflect on how this is one small step forward in the work that needs to happen? I have heard from first nations communities in particular that our government has done more than any government, probably since Confederation, in moving forward reconciliation. How is this one more piece of that healing path that we need to be on as a Canadian society with the indigenous peoples in Canada?

144 words

Mrs. Jenica Atwin

Dec/11/23 7:22:51 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Chair, I think about water in particular as being so critical to this conversation around reconciliation. It is about the environment. It is about stewardship but water is life. My stepfather is a Wolastoq Grand Council chief and his main priority is protecting the water and that is what I have been taught to do from a young age. For me, this is huge. I had tears in my eyes this morning, in taking part in the press conference. I think we can all be proud of what was accomplished today.

92 words

Mr. Gary Vidal (Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, CPC)

Dec/11/23 7:23:18 p.m.
Watch

Mr. Chair, as I begin my comments tonight on the Department of Indigenous Services, I want to take a moment to congratulate the newly elected national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Cindy Woodhouse. Also, as an MP from Saskatchewan, I would like to congratulate David Pratt on running a great campaign and on a strong second-place finish. Speaking of the AFN, last week, as chiefs from across the country gathered here in Ottawa, I had the opportunity to meet with many of these leaders. I always come away impressed with how the leadership is focused on finding ways to improve the lives of the people that they serve. More and more of these discussions revolve around trying to find ways to end the failing path that forces them to come to Ottawa to fight for programming dollars. The waste of time, energy and resources for first nations leaders, who are put in a position to compete with other first nations to see who can best fill out forms or who can hire the right lobbyists or endlessly spend money on outside consultants to make sure applications are done just right for somebody sitting at a desk in Ottawa, needs to end. It is time for first nations people to make their own decisions. What they need is less made-in-Ottawa, not more Ottawa. Unfortunately, when looking at the indigenous services department, or ISC as I will refer to it, it is clear why major change is needed. I would like to spend a few minutes talking specifically about the results of this department. ISC sets targets under its four core responsibilities. In 2022-23, ISC sought to achieve 45 results. Progress toward meeting these results was measured using 83 separate indicators. A result status is assigned to each indicator based on the measured outcome, or the actual result. Of the 83 indicators, only 14, or 17%, of them met their target; 19, or 23%, have no result available; and 37, or 45%, are to be achieved at some point in the future. To extend this out a little bit, over the last five years, there were 367 indicators and the results are actually very similar, as 17% met their target, 23% have no result available and 46% are to be achieved sometime in the future. Additionally, there is this internal services component of the department, which, according to public accounts, increased from $146 million in 2018 to $296 million in 2023. The solution now is to take a whole new approach and to implement a renewed departmental results framework for 2023-24. By the way, they did this for the 2019-20 year already. ISC will roll all four core responsibilities into one new core responsibility. Remember, this is a department that claims that it plans to meet 45% of the targets it sets for itself sometime in the future. I guess that future will never come. This department spends more time playing bureaucratic games by changing target-setting schemes than working on solving the actual challenges indigenous people face. This is a department that has increased its planned spending from about $9.3 billion in 2018-19 to $39.6 billion in 2022-23, with the same projection for 2023-24. The actual authorities that were approved for 2022-23 were $44.8 billion. Over the same period, it has increased the number of FTEs, or full-time equivalents, from 4,210 to 7,278. Those are significant increases. I am not the only one who has raised these concerns. On February 1, 2022, at the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs, I moved a motion asking the Parliamentary Budget Officer to conduct a research and comparative analysis on the estimates of CIRNAC and ISC from the years 2015-16 to 2022-23. On May 18, 2022, the Parliamentary Budget Officer released his report. Let me quote from the executive summary of that report: Financial resources allocated to providing Indigenous services has increased significantly over this period. A quantitative and qualitative approach using publicly available data was employed to evaluate how effective the organizations providing these services were in using these resources. The analysis conducted indicates that the increased spending did not result in a commensurate improvement in the ability of these organizations to achieve the goals that they had set for themselves. This was partly driven by the volatility in the departmental result indicators. Many were added or removed over the course of the period preventing results from being collected due to data collection lags. Some indicators lack target values and completion dates altogether. Based on the qualitative review the ability to achieve the targets specified has declined. These are the words of the Parliamentary Budget Officer. They are not my words. Mr. Ken Coates is a distinguished fellow and director of the indigenous affairs program at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He is also the Canada research chair in regional innovation at the University of Saskatchewan. In August 2022, he wrote an article in response to the same PBO report that I referred to. Here is what he said: Put bluntly, Canada is not getting what it is paying for—and what’s worse, the massive spending is not improving lives in Indigenous communities.... If Canada spends billions on Indigenous affairs, it must mean that we care deeply about First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples. But it does nothing of the sort. While headlines emphasize dollar amounts, the statistics that tell the actual story of Indigenous well-being—around employment, health, housing conditions, suicide rates, violence and imprisonment, language, cultural revitalization—are much more sombre. When spending vast sums fails to make a substantial difference in many communities, the federal response is too often to double down and spend even more, in the absence of understanding what actually works to improve the lives of Indigenous peoples. When Mr. Giroux, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, was at INAN to discuss his report, I asked him to comment on what Mr. Coates had said. I asked him whether these results were common to other departments or whether they were unique to CIRNAC and ISC. Mr. Giroux responded by saying: In short, [I would say] based on the performance indicators that we have analyzed in our report last year, I would tend to agree with Mr. Coates. [That] seems to be consistent....whether it's common among departments, I would say...it's not common to see a level of increase of that magnitude that is not accompanied by a significant improvement in performance indicators. Mr. Coates went on in his article to say something else: “The government can and does change up targets and metrics, making it difficult to determine actual outcomes. But given the vast expenditures, such a conclusion is tragic.” When I asked Mr. Giroux to comment on this, he said, “I agree with Mr. Coates that there seems to be an outcome problem.” I asked him further, “Do you think there's an accountability issue that's created by these moving, changing targets that aren't consistent?” He replied: I agree with you. I don't think it's done on purpose. I think public servants who come up with these indicators genuinely mean to have the best indicators. However, changing them regularly or frequently does not help for accountability and accountability purposes to track a departmental performance over time. It is a department where, in 2021-2022, 94.6% of the employees, at executive level or above, received performance pay totalling almost $3.3 million. Remember, it is a department that met 18% of its targets in that year. What is worse is that when I drilled a little deeper, I found that over the previous five years, 99.2% of executives at a level three or above received performance pay. This represents the top 33 people in the department in 2018-2019, and that number grew to 56 people by 2022-23. I asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer about the performance pay system, in response to an answer I got on an Order Paper question. The Order Paper response reads, “Individual performance pay holds executives accountable for individual results and is not related to departmental results, which measure organizational goals.” I asked Mr. Giroux whether he thought there was merit in tying performance pay to organizational achievement rather than just individual achievement. He replied: I don't see how a majority of executives can have at-risk pay and performance pay if a department only meets half of its targets. Is there merit...? I think there's more than merit. I think it would be common sense. If I can be so blunt, it does not require a great deal of management expertise to conclude that the department of indigenous services is failing. Almost every conversation I have with indigenous leaders from across Canada involves commentary around the fact that they are utterly exhausted by the inadequacy and bureaucracy of the department. A leader of a national indigenous organization told me recently that ISC is a machine that eats money. If we want to move down a path of reconciliation, we must at least begin with the truth. I think, unfortunately, that is what the Prime Minister and government fail to admit. After eight years, the government has spent more money with fewer results. It has hired more people with fewer results. It has increased bonuses with fewer results. It has shuffled targets and target-setting procedures with, yes, fewer results. It is time to accept the truth: This is not working.

1616 words

Mr. Kevin Lamoureux (Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, Lib.)

Dec/11/23 7:33:20 p.m.
Watch

Madam Chair, the member started off by acknowledging the election process of the Assembly of First Nations. I want to congratulate the national chief, Cindy Woodhouse, who is someone I know. Throughout my friendship with her, she has always been a very powerful indigenous woman and a very strong advocate. I am sure she will do exceptionally well and make many contributions in the years ahead. Even though the member has been somewhat cynical, what we have seen over the last number of years is numerous calls to action actually put into place, and many of them are actually a work in progress. I think we are at 80% or 85% where the federal government plays a role. The Government of Canada has been engaged with reconciliation virtually from the beginning, in the call for the public inquiry and in what we heard earlier today in regard to water. Could the member, at the very least, acknowledge that a big part of establishing a positive relationship is that we need to ultimately work harder on reconciliation?

176 words

Mr. Gary Vidal

Dec/11/23 7:34:48 p.m.
Watch

Madam Chair, in response to my colleague's question, the Parliamentary Budget Officer disagrees vehemently with his conclusions. After the study he did, he said that the department was failing miserably in the context of the targets it set for itself. In fact, he said that the results are actually declining in spite of the increase in spending. It is government's Parliamentary Budget Officer that is disputing the government's claim that its investments are working. He is the one who is saying that the results are not getting better and, as I said in my speech, that the conditions measured are declining. That is the sad part.

109 words

Ms. Leah Gazan (Winnipeg Centre, NDP)

Dec/11/23 7:35:47 p.m.
Watch

Madam Chair, I know that the hon. member does care a great deal about this file. Before I begin, I want to congratulate the newly elected national chief, Cindy Woodhouse from Manitoba. I am sure she will do a fantastic job. One thing we are talking about in the House today, in a take-note debate, is the failure of Indigenous Services Canada, noting that there is $7.6 billion in funding that is scheduled to sunset over the next few years. Listening to my colleague talk about how we are not getting our money's worth, I want to remind every member of the House that indigenous people have been lifted up in the international community because of constant human rights abuses, including massive underfunding. One only has to think about the latest Canadian tribunal ruling on child welfare. Let me tell the House that the Conservatives are no better. When they were elected, first of all, they unanimously voted, on several occasions, against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a minimum human rights document; cut funding to the Native Women's Association; cut funding to Aboriginal Healing Foundation; took money away from residential school survivors; and took money away from the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society, from kids in care. I am wondering, given all of that information, whether my colleague could confirm that all the cuts that I shared with him are in fact true, and whether it is also true that the Conservatives just voted against $10 million that was supposed to be allocated for indigenous people in the budget last week.

272 words

Mr. Gary Vidal

Dec/11/23 7:37:43 p.m.
Watch

Madam Chair, in my comments tonight around Indigenous Services Canada, I do not think I complained even once about the amount that was being spent. What members heard me challenge was how the money is being spent and the outcomes we are getting as a country for that investment. I and the Conservative Party are all for lifting up indigenous people and improving the quality of life of indigenous people across our country. I support that, 100%. My colleague knows that I support that. For four years, I have stood up for that in the House. My point is not the amount of spending; my point is the quality of the spending. We actually need to invest in the right things. We need to hold a failing department accountable so it actually achieves the outcomes and targets it sets for itself. There has to be some accountability. Somebody has to hold these people to account. The minister and the government are not doing that.

164 words

Mr. Eric Melillo (Kenora, CPC)

Dec/11/23 7:39:00 p.m.
Watch

Madam Chair, I thank the member for, as always, his advocacy for indigenous peoples right across the country. I want to pick up on the very last topic. The member spoke about the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report, which showed that the increase in spending that we have seen under the government has not led to a similar increase in the ability of Indigenous Services Canada to meet the targets it set for itself. Can the member speak more to his frustration with that? We have a government that seems to measure its success based on how much money it can spend. If there is an issue, it says it spent this much money on it so it is getting the job done, but clearly, if it is missing its targets and it is not getting the job done, it is not improving the lives of indigenous peoples across the country. Does the member have further comments in that regard?

160 words

Mr. Gary Vidal

Dec/11/23 7:39:51 p.m.
Watch

Madam Chair, as I said in my comments, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has made it clear that there is a lack of accountability and that the investments being made are not being made in a way that is improving the lives of indigenous people across our country. That is what we advocate for. If we go over my record in Hansard, we will see the word “outcomes” in my interventions, both at committee and in the House, probably hundreds of times. I am all about our getting outcomes. I am all about accountability. I am all about getting results. I believe that is how we are going to make the investments in indigenous people across the country that will result in an improved quality of life and improved standard of living. That is how we are going to get it done.

143 words

Mr. Blake Desjarlais (Edmonton Griesbach, NDP)

Dec/11/23 7:40:55 p.m.
Watch

Madam Chair, by the sounds of it, the member has done a great deal of learning when it comes to indigenous people. I do not have enough time to lecture the members of this place on the difference between “responsibility” and “partnership”. We have a treaty with many indigenous nations, and it requires us to fulfill that in a good way. However, when we hear language like the member spoke of in terms of the lack of results for funding, it sounds reminiscent of a quote: “Canada's aboriginals need to learn the value of hard work more than they need compensation for the abuse suffered in residential schools.” The member who said that was the member for Carleton, the leader of the Conservative Party today. Does the member condemn that statement and stand with indigenous people?

143 words

Mr. Gary Vidal

Dec/11/23 7:41:38 p.m.
Watch

Madam Chair, I am not responsible for the comments other people made 15 years ago; that is not on me. An hon. member: Oh, oh! Mr. Gary Vidal: Madam Chair, look at my record. I have advocated for indigenous people across the country consistently. I serve a riding that has 71.3% indigenous people, and I have advocated for them through COVID. I have advocated for them to have economic opportunities that will actually solve the poverty and the challenges they face in their communities, and I will continue to do that. Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

97 words

The Deputy Chair

Dec/11/23 7:42:11 p.m.
Watch

Order. If members have questions and comments, they should wait until the appropriate time. They should not be heckling the member when he is speaking. The hon. member for Edmonton Griesbach.

31 words

Mr. Blake Desjarlais

Dec/11/23 7:42:24 p.m.
Watch

Madam Chair, it is all well and good to talk about a comment someone made 15 years ago, but when the member who made the comment is the leader of a national party in our country, and the member cannot even stand to condemn it, that is truly shameful. I mean that in the sincerest way, because it is a matter of racism and condemning racism. Whether it happened 15 years ago or today, I would hope that the member would find the courage to condemn racism today and then. Does the member condemn the statements made by the member for Carleton in regard to indigenous people's needing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps?

116 words

Mr. Gary Vidal

Dec/11/23 7:43:06 p.m.
Watch

Madam Chair, if I recall, and it is very clear in the record, that member apologized for what he said 15 years ago. I would ask whether the member, in his youth, ever said anything he regretted and whether he wants to stand up and apologize for it.

48 words

Mr. Blake Desjarlais

Dec/11/23 7:43:25 p.m.
Watch

Madam Chair, on a point of order, it is important that we respect people in this place, and I spoke to a true fact that I repeated and quoted into Hansard. The member is making allegations or assumptions that there could be something in my past that I need to apologize for. I hope we can have decorum and respect when talking about facts in this place, and I would ask the member to reflect on his own statements he has made, in order to better understand how racism truly works in this place.

94 words

All Topics

The Deputy Chair

Dec/11/23 7:43:51 p.m.
Watch

I appreciate the point, but I believe it was more a point of debate. Does the hon. member have a point of order?

23 words