Human rights tribunal hears feds failing to meet Jordan’s Principle commitments

APTN News: The executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society says the federal government is not meeting its commitments to process tens of thousands of Jordan’s Principle requests in a timely manner.

“That means children who have requests – urgent needs sometimes – their emails are not even being opened,” said Cindy Blackstock. “Not even being determined by the department and the number of that, by the department’s own record, is about 40,000-80,000 cases across the country. The worst scenarios are in Ontario and Manitoba.”

The Society is back in front of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) in Ottawa this week for what it said is the government’s non-compliance with previous Jordan’s Principle orders.

On Tuesday morning, Society lawyer David Taylor told CHRT Adjudicator Sophie Marchildon and panel members that Indigenous Services Canada continues to have problems with how urgent requests are processed, timely reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses incurred by families, and measurement of compliance since there is no complaints mechanism.

Jordan’s Principle is supposed to ensure First Nations children can access and receive supports when they need them, regardless of where they live.

Urgent individual requests are supposed to be processed within 12 hours and all other individual requests within 48 hours.

The Society also wants to expand what constitutes an urgent request to include, for example, expenses incurred during a state of emergency or attend a family member’s funeral.

In previous hearings, the government has said it has been overwhelmed by requests since the CHRT orders came into effect in 2016 causing a major backlog.

But it is a problem Blackstock said she has little sympathy for.

“Their job is to do complicated things,” she said. “Governments, for example, they rolled out vaccines for thousands of people. They collect taxes from millions of Canadians. They do international types of work. All of these things are important. So is meeting the needs of First Nations kids. They’ve had now eight years since the order.”

The current CHRT hearing wraps up on Thursday.