Manitoba to get $177M boost to help kids on reserves

OTTAWA — Child-welfare agencies looking after kids on Manitoba First Nations will get $177-million in new federal funding over the next five years to try to help keep aboriginal kids from being taken away from their parents.

Conservative MP Shelly Glover will make the announcement on behalf of Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl Monday in Winnipeg, along with Manitoba Family Services Minister Gord Mackintosh and Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Ron Evans.

The funding — which amounts to more than $35-million a year — is the largest child-welfare deal signed by any province to date.

It comes after years of negotiations and a lot of bad blood between Manitoba and Ottawa, as the province says it has shouldered accusations of a child-welfare system in crisis, but Ottawa hasn’t shouldered its share of the cost burden to fix it.

The funding will focus on providing prevention-based child-welfare services, including boosting the number of social workers on reserves and adding new services and programs families need to address issues that lead to abuse and neglect.

In the last several years, Ottawa has been blasted repeatedly by provincial governments, aboriginal leaders, judicial inquiries and the federal auditor general over its outdated and inequitable funding of child-welfare services for kids living on reserves.

Studies have shown that for every dollar the provinces spend on child-welfare programs, Ottawa spends 78¢. But Ottawa is 100% responsible for child-welfare services to kids living on reserves, which means children who live in some of the most troubled communities get less money to help families prevent abuse or neglect with social workers and outreach programs.

It’s only when kids on reserves are taken into public care that Ottawa pays dollar for dollar what the provinces pay. That has led to a huge number of aboriginal kids being taken away from their parents because underfunded and overburdened aboriginal child welfare agencies can do little else.

The formula Ottawa currently uses in Manitoba to fund child welfare on reserves hasn’t been updated since 1993 and uses a faulty assumption that just six per cent of a reserve’s children are in care. Federal auditor general Sheila Fraser said in 2007 8% of kids living on reserve were in care — eight times the rate of non-reserve kids.

Some reserves in Manitoba have reported more than half their kids are in foster care. In 2009, there were more than 8,600 kids in care across Manitoba. Eighty-six per cent of them were aboriginal and one-third were living on reserves when taken into care.

The number of aboriginal kids in care is also growing at a far faster rate: in 2009, the number of kids in care with aboriginal child-welfare agencies in Manitoba grew more than 13%, while those in the care of non-aboriginal agencies actually went down by a little more than 1%

First Nations leaders have repeatedly called the child-welfare issue a crisis for their children and note there are now more children in foster care than there were in residential schools.

Manitoba has been on the verge of a new deal with Ottawa twice before, but both times it fell through.

The first deal was negotiated in 2005 with the former Liberal government, but it was shelved when the Conservatives came to power in early 2006.

In late 2008, Manitoba thought it was on the verge of signing a deal for $21-million more annually in federal child-welfare funding and was preparing to hire 200 new social workers. But last year, the grants — part of an initiative aimed at amending child-welfare delivery nationwide — went to Quebec and Prince Edward Island instead.

Winnipeg Free Press