Ottawa must fix massive Jordan’s Principle backlog

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/12/2024 (272 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Trudeau government is sitting on a backlog of more than 140,000 cases relating to First Nations child services, without a serious plan to fix the problem. It’s a situation that puts many of our nation’s most-vulnerable children at risk. It needs to be addressed with the seriousness it deserves and quickly be resolved.

The current state of affairs makes a mockery of a program — known as Jordan’s Principle — which is intended to ensure that all First Nations children living in Canada have access to the products, services and supports they need, when they need them.

The program is named after Jordan River Anderson, a five-year-old Norway House Cree Nation boy who died in 2005 after being caught in a two-year dispute between the Manitoba and federal governments over which level of government was obligated to pay for his care.

Under the program, when a First Nations child needs health, social or educational services, they are to receive them from the government that was approached first, with questions regarding government jurisdiction and financial responsibility worked out afterward.

That’s how the program is supposed to work, but it is falling far short of that goal. In response to complaints about delays in having Jordan’s Principle applications approved, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ordered the federal government in November to disclose the number of backlogged cases, and return to it with a detailed plan to address the problem by Dec. 10.

On that date, the government told the tribunal that there are now 140,000 backlogged requests across Canada — 25,891 of which it classifies as urgent. It said that the proposed timeline to address the backlog of cases was “not operationally feasible,” and could impact the delivery of services to First Nations children and families.

That’s a shocking position for the government to take, given that all Jordan’s Principle applications address a child’s existing need, and urgent requests are required to be processed within 24 hours.

Here in Manitoba, the number of unprocessed Jordan’s Principle applications has risen to 6,000, approximately half of which are regarded as urgent. The numbers are even worse in Saskatchewan, which has more than 33,000 outstanding applications, and in Ontario, which has more than 30,000.

In a statement issued last week, a spokesperson for Indigenous Services Canada said: “We must work together to ensure those with urgent needs are getting the care they need,” and that “We are committed to working on the best and fairest way to reach these goals, given the deadlines imposed by the (tribunal).”

That’s nothing but bureaucratic bafflegab. The government is telling the public they are “committed” to addressing the applications backlog, but they have already told the human rights tribunal that the order requiring a prompt resolution is “not operationally feasible” and will be “challenging” to implement.

There are no valid excuses for what is happening here. The federal government cannot be accused of deliberately creating this crisis, but they can blamed for failing to ensure that applications are being processed on a timely basis. They must explain why are a large number of Jordan’s Principle applications being sent for processing by Indigenous Services in Ottawa, when there is a regional office in Manitoba that was created in order to process applications.

Beyond that, the federal government must also explain why the backlog of unprocessed applications, urgent applications in particular, were allowed to swell to such a huge number that the intervention of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal became necessary. Is this a case of the government failing to ensure there were sufficient staff to process the claims, or is there is a more insidious reason for the delays?

Whatever those reasons are, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the Jordan’s Principle program was created in order to ensure that what happened to Jordan River Anderson would never happen to another Indigenous child in this country.

Contrary to that important goal, the massive backlog in Jordan’s Principle applications, combined with the federal government’s apparent lackadaisical attitude to addressing the issue, increases the risk that other children could suffer the same appalling fate as Jordan.

That cannot be allowed to happen in Canada. Some of our most-vulnerable children are caught in the middle of this crisis, through no fault of their own. They require care and, in many cases, may need it urgently.

The federal government is failing First Nations children, and putting their well-being in jeopardy. It needs to provide the leadership, commitment and resources required to fix this problem as quickly as possible, and ensure it never happens again.