The federal government should renew the Aboriginal Healing Foundation so it can keep supporting programs across Canada that help residential school survivors heal, according to a House of Commons committee.
In its report, released Thursday, the House of Commons standing committee on aboriginal affairs and northern development says the Aboriginal Healing Foundation should receive three more years of federal funding.
In turn, the committee said the foundation should continue supporting 134 community-based programs across Canada that provide counselling and healing services to those who have been affected by physical, emotional and sexual abuse from their Indian residential school experiences.
"The committee supports the very real need to continue to provide the appropriate and meaningful supports to all those who have suffered, and continue to suffer, from the immeasurable harms of the residential schools system," the report states.
The Aboriginal Healing Foundation was established in 1998 with an original federal grant of $350 million and a mandate to run for just 10 years. It received additional allocations totalling about $50 million in the last two years.
But this year's federal budget did not allocate any more funds for the Ottawa-based non-profit foundation, and it expired at the end of March.
Since then, groups that were previously funded by the foundation have been scrambling to find other funding sources so they can keep their doors open.
The government did commit $65.9 million over two years for Health Canada to administer mental health and emotional support services for former residential school students and their families.
The standing committee's report notes that while Health Canada has been trying to work out agreements with some of the groups that were funded by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, some other groups may not be eligible for Health Canada funding.
"This may leave several communities without healing supports, at least for a time, with potentially serious and disruptive effects in communities and on those who had been actively participating in treatment," the report states.
The report calls on Health Canada to work closely with the Aboriginal Healing Foundation to ensure the federal Indian residential schools health support program's mandate includes the community-based healing programs that have been funded by the foundation.
More than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were placed in more than 130 residential schools across Canada from the late 1870s until the last school closed in 1996.
Many students were forbidden to speak their native language or practise their culture at the schools, most of which were run by churches. Many were also physically, sexually and psychologically abused.
The schools were government-funded and meant to prevent parents from being involved in the "intellectual, cultural and spiritual development of aboriginal children," according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is hearing from former students at a national event in Winnipeg this week. Six more events will be held in different regions of the country.
In its report, the standing committee noted that some aboriginal groups wanted the Aboriginal Healing Foundation to continue running until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission finished its work.
"We believe this would have been considerably less disruptive to affected communities at such a critical juncture in the reconciliation process," the report states.