‘We won’t let Indigenous children wait any longer’: Larivee
Alberta children’s services minister attends emergency meeting in Ottawa
A two-day emergency meeting on Indigenous child and youth welfare in Ottawa has the Alberta minister “cautiously optimistic.”
While the federal Liberals have said Ottawa will make up the underfunding for Indigenous children across the country in the next budget, the province has said it, too, will step in to make up the shortfall.
“Alberta won’t wait,” Alberta Children’s Services Minister Dani- elle Larivee said in a teleconference Friday afternoon after the meeting. “And we won’t let Indigenous children wait any longer.”
Larivee said the province already is funding projects in the federal jurisdiction through the support of clean water and housing on Alberta reserves. When pressed for the dollar amount to fill in the federal gaps or for a date when assistance would be rolled out, Larivee had no specific answers.
“It’s basically going to be a community by community conversation,” she said.
More than 400 federal and provincial politicians, Indigenous leaders, social workers and former foster kids went to Ottawa for the meeting, which broke up without any specific next steps planned.
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled in 2016 that the underfunding of on-reserve Indigenous children was discrimination. Larivee said the government does not want to impose solutions on communities.
“All of this is wrong and we didn’t need another meeting to know that,” she said. “After decades of studies and recommendations and meetings and court orders, enough is enough. We came to this meeting looking for action for a firm commitment from the federal government to equitably fund on-reserve services.”
Alberta’s all-party ministerial panel on the child intervention system is expected to soon release a series of 26 recommendations, she said. The panel was created after the case of four-year-old Serenity, an Indigenous girl who died in 2014 while in care, went public.
She said an action plan will be coming out after she has seen the recommendations, which she expects to receive in the next few days.