Ottawa to hand over child welfare services to Indigenous governments
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Indigenous Services Minister Jane Philpott, standing alongside First Nations, Inuit and Métis national leaders, announced Friday that the federal government is prepared to hand over control of child welfare services to Indigenous governments, in an effort to drive down the massive number of children in foster care.
Philpott said forthcoming federal legislation, co-developed with Indigenous leaders, will devolve authority to First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples to care for their own children in need of care. This is a departure from how the current system is structured, which results in most Indigenous kids being housed in provincially governed child welfare systems that critics say are inattentive to their unique needs.
While just 7.7 per cent of all children under 14 are Indigenous, they account for 52.2 per cent of all children in foster care — astonishing numbers that demand some sort of response, Philpott said.
There is a fear that the current system — which regularly seizes children from their families and communities and places them with foster parents — replicates the mistakes of the Indian residential school system and the Sixties Scoop, as it alienates kids from their traditional language, culture and support networks.
“It started with residential schools, it continued with the Sixties Scoop and still today, children are being taken from their families, and this legislation marks a turning point,” Philpott said Friday.
Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde said the child welfare system should instead focus on preventing family problems in the first place.
“First Nations are ready to reform child and family services in ways that respect our rights, cultures and family structures. First Nations have been held back for years by outdated laws, and we continue to experience the trauma and loss when children and families are broken apart,” Bellegarde said.
Philpott said Ottawa is already working to reduce the financial incentives for agencies to apprehend children, moving away from a funding model that was tied to the number of kids in care.
Philpott has previously vowed to end the “perverse” system that turns Indigenous children into “commodities.”
Those pushing for reform want more money directed at programs for teen parents, rehabilitative family services, substance abuse treatment, warnings about fetal alcohol syndrome and other education campaigns, to make apprehension a last resort.
Kinship care, or placing children with family members like grandmothers, are other models Indigenous communities want to explore.
The specifics of how exactly Ottawa would go about facilitating such a jurisdictional transfer were not detailed on Friday. The legislation will be introduced in the House of Commons in early 2019, Philpott said. Indigenous leaders expressed hope that the bill would be passed in to law before the next federal election in the fall of that year.
Article source: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/kenya-rerun-elections-171027052625931.html
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