Minister promises ‘transformation’ of Jordan’s Principle

The minister of Indigenous Services Canada says reform of Jordan’s Principle is planned once a federal budget is passed and consultation can begin.

“There’s going to be transformation in the Jordan’s Principle file to see how can we really re-establish what community wants to see coming from Jordan’s Principle,” Mandy Gull-Masty said in an interview with Cabin Radio.

Jordan’s Principle is a legal obligation requiring the federal government to ensure First Nations children have equal access to government services.

In February, Indigenous Services Canada released an operational bulletin notifying the public of updates to the way Jordan’s Principle is administered across Canada.

The update clarified that requests for non-medical supports such as clothing, child care, home renovations, international travel, sporting events and requests from schools located off-reserve would not be approved unless required by “substantive equity.”

In a statement issued on the same day, Patty Hajdu, the minister of Indigenous Services Canada at the time, said the changes were made in light of an increased volume of requests to “align with the long-term sustainability of Jordan’s Principle.”

For years, some NWT schools have relied on Jordan’s Principle to pay for some positions like educational assistants or providers of specialist support services.

Since these changes were announced, more than 200 positions in schools across the territory have been lost or jeopardized.

While ministers from all three territories lobbied the federal government to reassess these changes, the NWT’s government later announced $14 million in funding to schools boards as a stopgap measure (though schools were first required to use money from their own surpluses).

Since taking office, Gull-Masty said, Jordan’s Principle has become “one of the most pressing files.”

“We know there’s a lot of challenges in the way that it’s structured. We know that the operational bulletin was not well received,” said Gull-Masty.

“This is why we really want to redefine it with a matrix approach, so we can give our staff the tools they need to ensure they can make decisions within a very clear framework that addresses the needs of the people that are using it.”

She said Jordan’s Principle has become a “catch-all program” that needs to be refined so everyone involved is aware of its intended use and outcome.

To accomplish this, the minister said she’ll be speaking with families and community leaders.

“If you want to be sure the ideas you have when you’re trying to plan for programming really hit the mark, you have to go straight to the user themselves,” said Gull-Masty.

‘We can’t make people wait’

In August, the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa published a report considering the sustainability of Jordan’s Principle.

“The current structure, funding, and accountability around the implementation of Jordan’s Principle are concerning from a public financial management perspective. Its administration and delivery are risks to both its sustainability and the First Nations children it is intended to serve,” the report stated.

It made recommendations such as adopting an alternative administrative structure, developing a framework to measure outcomes, and gathering data to help identify systemic gaps that could be bridged more efficiently than what has largely been a request-by-request basis.

Gull-Masty said she wasn’t familiar with the report, but she was open to both western and traditional research.

Asked if reform to Jordan’s Principle would help address gaps in NWT education funding, Gull-Masty said this could be discussed further in her consultations with service users.

“What are communities expecting from their partners at the federal level? What are communities expecting from their partners at the provincial level? They have a role to play,” said Gull-Masty.

She said she’d like to move quickly on reform, the details of which she said may start to become available after a federal budget passes.

“We can’t make people wait,” said Gull-Masty.

“I really want to be clear that my commitment to do this is with ambitious deadlines, and that’s not 12 months, that’s not 24 months, that is by year end. I want something to be on the table for people.”

While she said ISC has consistently seen an increase in funding to deliver Jordan’s Principle and its sister program, the Inuit Child First Initiative, ISC is now one of several federal departments tasked with cutting costs as part of the proposed budget released last week.

Gull-Masty said in preparation for the budget, she was originally tasked with analyzing what a 15-percent cut in expenses could look like in her department.

“We brought that to government, and the prime minister was very clear that after seeing what the results looked like, this was not the direction that he wanted to go, and he chose to protect the progress that was made,” she said. “He chose to protect the progress and reconciliation the last decade of investments.”

Instead, ISC has been asked to cut expenses by two percent, the same as Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs.

“We are going to look for those things internally within ISC,” said Gull-Masty.

“Part of that is going to be addressed by innovating, by transforming, by modernizing, moving to digital where we can.

“Offering those services in a modernized context, I think, is going to create efficiencies and cost savings.”