Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Over the summer, mo we're bringing you some of the highlights of our 2025-26 season, which wrapped up in mid-May.
Speaker: We're going to be back with our brand new fall season in September. Our first live radio broadcast will be on September 19th on Vancouver Cooperative Radio CFRO 100.5 FM and streaming live at coopradio.org slash red eye.
Speaker: Podcasts of interviews from that show will be posted the following week. On the podcast today, lawyer Kent Elson on a human rights case brought by Mississaugas of the Credit Nation to challenge the lack of adequate education funding for First Nations kids on reserve.
Speaker: Jordan's principle is a child-first principle named in memory of Jordan River Anderson. Jordan was a First Nations child from Norway house Cree Nation in Manitoba.
Speaker: Born with complex medical needs, Jordan spent more than two years unnecessarily in hospital while the province of Manitoba and the federal government argued over who should pay for his at-home care.
Speaker: Jordan died in the hospital at the age of five years old, never having spent a day in a family home. Jordan's principle is designed to eliminate bureaucratic hurdles and ensure that funding follows the child, regardless of which government is ultimately responsible.
Speaker: However, First Nations across the country are reporting a major loss of funding for children's programs after the federal government changed Jordan principle rules last February.
Speaker: Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation have been at a hearing at the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal since October, accusing Ottawa of systematically underfunding on-reserve schools in the province.
Speaker: I'm joined now by lawyer Kent Elson, who's representing Mississaugas of the Credit Nation in the complaint. Hello, Kent. Good afternoon. Now, this complaint relates to a cut in funding for First Nations kids in Ontario following an operational bulletin from Indigenous Services Canada. What did the bulletin say?
Speaker: Well, the case is actually broader. It's about education under funding in Ontario by the federal government. And the Jordan's principle piece is just one piece of a broader ah puzzle.
Speaker: And with respect to that piece, what has happened is that the government has changed the rules, like you said, in February, and it's resulted in a drastic reduction in the support for for First Nations kids from an education perspective.
Speaker: How big is that funding cut? For a six month period before and after the change in the rules, it dropped from about 122 million down to 1 million. So it's you know roughly a 100 fold decline, which is really huge.
Speaker: So my understanding is that services that used to be eligible are no longer eligible. Is that correct? There's a number of factors, and some of them are not actually about eligibility at all.
Speaker: It's really about putting hurdles and barriers in between kids and getting the services they need, such as requiring extensive documentation that identifies each child and has a doctor's note for each child, which is really difficult if you're a school and you're trying to get services in place for September first It really means that there will inevitably be delays and denials. But in addition to those hurdles and barriers, yes, there are, in essence, lists of items that are now presumptively ineligible.
Speaker: But if you take a step back even further, First Nations shouldn't be having to make requests for Jordan's principal funding in the first place because they should be funded according to a stable and predictable funding mechanism so that you don't have to be making application after application for services that would be funded through a regular budget that is planned many months in advance of the school year starting.
Speaker: So it's almost like Jordan's principle is addressing fundamental inequality, but on a case-by-case basis. Right. A case by case basis, a case can involve more than one child, but it's not any way to fund an education system. It's there because there are gaps. And really what should have been happening over the past number of years is more work on closing those gaps instead of trying to plug them up with Jordan's principle. Jordan's principle is hugely beneficial.
Speaker: But really, we should be looking to reduce the need for Jordan's principle funding in the first place. I just want to stay with Jordan's principle for a moment longer. It's a legal requirement that provides access to supports for First Nations children in need and ensures that the government of first contact pays for the supports without delay.
Speaker: So how could the federal government go in and make cuts in the face of this legal requirement? Well, that's a good question and a question I don't have 100% of an answer to because I don't know what's going to happen next.
Speaker: I'm sure that the cuts that have been made will be addressed in courts. And in fact, some of them already have been. And some of the decisions that have been made recently have been overturned by courts. But it's been more so on a case-by-case basis. And it may be that at some point, In front of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal or a court, there is a more, a broader attack on the changes that have been implemented.
Speaker: Now, the nation is saying that Canada's education funding model is inadequate. You've been saying that. And it's racially discriminatory. How big is the difference in funding levels between the two systems, on reserve and off reserve?
Speaker: The gaps are very large and we can't even provide a specific number because part of the challenge is that there hasn't even been the kind of ground level work to assess what needs to happen to have equitable outcomes.
Speaker: Because we know there are pieces missing now, but we also know there are pieces that we haven't been able to identify yet. And when you start looking back into the history of reports from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, from Auditor Generals, you see this pattern of everyone saying the gap is so large and it's not shrinking. And then years and years and years pass and they say the same thing over and over and over again. So the gaps that we have certainly quantified are in terms of educational outcomes, which are academic results and graduation rates. And the gap is still far too large.
Speaker: So the gap is huge. And then this Jordan's principal cut that's been in place for a year has even cut the, I don't know if I could call it a Band-Aid approach that it represented. So it's just gotten worse.
Speaker: In terms of Jordan's principle, yes, I mean, the Jordan's principle funding, like I said, really should be a last resort. And even now that last resort has been a hundredfold.
Speaker: Can you give us some examples of how this funding disparity affects families in the nation? Well, on a broader level, it affects what's really affecting kids across the province, kids in different First Nations schools and kids attending provincial schools who live on reserve.
Speaker: And at a broader level, what it means is that kids don't have the resources that they need to reach their full potential. And that has a whole bunch of knock-on effects.
Speaker: If a child doesn't have, let's say, cultural and language and mental health supports, it could mean that they drop out of school. And it could mean leading to an unhappy life in many ways. In other cases, it can mean performance that's less than they are capable of.
Speaker: And they may end up in a job that is less fulfilling. They may end up earning you know less income. they may have less of an ability to pass on their traditions and their culture and their learning to their kids. So those are sort of the big picture impacts. And then on an individual child basis might be a kid with special needs who does not have an educational assistant but needs them. And that has impact on that kid because they can't thrive without that additional support. And it also has an impact on the classroom that that child is in because then the teacher for that classroom is not teaching the rest of the kids, but is having to manage you know a number of kids that need their own support in dealing with behavior. and So those are just some of the examples.
Speaker: What is the Canadian government arguing in answer to these charges of underfunding? Well, they're making, I guess you could say, two broad buckets of arguments. One, they argue, not surprisingly, oh, there's plenty of funding there. There's nothing to see here.
Speaker: But their second backup argument is that even if there is a problem with the funding, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal doesn't have the jurisdiction to fix it because funding is determined by parliament and parliament is supreme.
Speaker: And really what that amounts to is an argument that the federal government can underfund education for First Nations kids, and there's nothing that human rights law can do about it. And it's really an argument that, you know, I can see being made 20 years ago, but in this day and age, it's, well, really, it's shameful, I think. And I think a lot of Canadians would feel the same way.
Speaker: So even if the funding model is seen to be fundamentally discriminatory towards human rights, well, you don't have any authorization to do anything. Yes.
Speaker: What are the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation asking for in this case? Well, it's important to be clear, this isn't a class action or some kind of case seeking compensation. It's really forward looking. It's really just saying, please provide the same opportunities for First Nations kids to reach their full potential by adequately funding First Nations education. So it's very much so forward looking.
Speaker: And they hope to achieve that both by getting an order or a finding of discrimination, and then also an order that First Nations education be funded in accordance with the needs of First Nations as identified in their budgetary processes, and then an ongoing process to reform the funding model.
Speaker: The issue has a very long history, going back to at least 2016 when the tribunal confirmed that Canada was racially discriminating against First Nation kids for decades by chronically underfunding child and family services on reserves and in the Yukon.
Speaker: What's going to force the government to adequately fund education for First Nation kids? Well, I mean, what we would really hope is that the government would have done so based on the moral and economic reasons to do so, which have existed for many, many years. And when I say moral, it's obviously just the right thing to do. And when I say economic, it's because investments in education are investments. They're not costs. They're investments because they result in a more productive and happier society. And a dollar spent results in more than a dollar of of economic benefits.
Speaker: But if that doesn't work, it may be that orders and findings from the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal are what we will need to finally turn the page on this. Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today, Kent.
Speaker: It's my pleasure. I've been speaking with lawyer Kent Elson. He's representing Mississaugas of the Credit Nation in their case before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver.
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Speaker: Thanks for listening.
