Poverty not a good reason to take Indigenous kids from parents: Bennett
Exactly two years after the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal said Canada is discriminating against Indigenous kids with chronic underfunding of child welfare services on reserve, the federal government says it’s not going to happen anymore on its watch.
Indigenous Services Minister Jane Philpott says there will be new money in the coming budget to prevent kids from being taken from their families. Carolyn Bennett, the minister responsible for Crown-Indigenous relations, insists poverty is going to stop being used as an excuse to rip families apart.
They’re saying all the right things and seem sincere, chiefs and child welfare experts say.
But Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society — which brought that complaint more than a decade ago — is only skeptically hopeful.
“These meetings, they can be positive but they can also be an official procedure to mask action,’’ she said. “What I’m really looking for is real change on the level of kids.’’
As the two-day emergency meeting on Indigenous child welfare drew to a close in Ottawa on Friday, 400 federal and provincial politicians, Indigenous leaders, social workers and former foster kids scattered back across the nation without any specific next steps planned.
They return to places like Manitoba, where First Nations babies are routinely apprehended at birth by child welfare workers who deem the baby’s mother unfit to parent. They return to Alberta, where three in every four children in care are Indigenous, seven times their representation in the population.
“Our children have become an industry,’’ said Wilton Littlechild, former commissioner on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.