Letter Example/Template
My name is _____ and I live in ______. I am writing to you today to ask that the government stops discriminating against First Nations children and families. Canada is discriminating against First Nations children, families, and people by providing them inadequate and bad services, including education, Jordan's Principle and child and family services, and underfunding youth organizations. Canada must do what is necessary to safeguard the rights of First Nations children and families.
First of all, Canada is taking many First Nations children from their loving families and putting them in foster care and other out of home care. This creates incredible lifelong trauma for children and families and is a grave human rights violation. The reason these children are being taken is not because they're being abused but because they are poor, they or their caregivers have mental or physical health needs that aren't being met, because they or their caregivers have a disability, and other such things out of families' control.
Child and family services on reserves do not have the funding to help families with what they really need. Instead of being able to provide the families with real help, they often end up having to separate children from their families. Off reserve, child and family service agencies are better funded, but are still not funded enough to meet the higher level of need in First Nations communities, and are not culturally relevant.
The Loving Justice National Plan is a plan made in consultation and partnership with First Nations communities all over Canada, elders, youth, people with experience being in foster care, and experts. It is the best reform plan we have right now. If it was implemented, that would really help a lot of children and families to have their needs met and be together. First Nations in the North West Territories and the Dene Nation are left out of this Plan currently, but they need to also be included in this Plan. In addition to incorporating the Loving Justice National Plan, child and family service agencies led and run by First Nations communities on reserves need the funding and support to also provide services to members of their communities and nations that live off reserve. Taking these steps is necessary to create an equal and just situation for children and families.
The Chiefs of Ontario and Nishnawbe Aski Nation are negotiating with Canada to make an Ontario Final Agreement about child and family services, which will govern how First Nations child and family services in Ontario are funded and managed. The draft Ontario Final Agreement was made without consulting all the different communities though, and many communities were left out. In addition, it does not include adequate measures to ensure that Canada's discriminatory conduct stops and doesn't restart. Therefore, negotiations for the Ontario Final Agreement must be restarted, this time with effective participation from all affected communities. Canada must stop withholding funds in an attempt to pressure the draft Ontario Final Agreement to be approved.
A legal principle that has a lot of promise for First Nations children is Jordan's Principle. It is named in honour of Jordan River Anderson, a child with complex medical needs who died while the federal and provincial governments fought about who should give him care. Jordan's Principle says that Indigenous children who need help or a service should get it. Because of Jordan's Principle, many families have gotten healthcare, disability supports, financial supports, and many other needs.
However, the Canadian government has always applied Jordan's Principle in an overly narrow way, leaving out many children who need support. This problem has only been made worse due to the recent bulletin that further restricts services. Additionally, there are long gaps before requests for services are approved, and there is a backlog of 140 000 requests as of October 2025. On top of that, it is often difficult, overburdening, and confusing trying to navigate the system to make your request.
Jordan's Principle provision can be greatly improved. Indigenous communities, Jordan's Principle experts, elders, youth, the Jordan's Principle Operations Committee, and regional experts should be involved in making a new agreement for Jordan's Principle service provision. The new system needs to be transparent and accountable, with an effective dispute resolution mechanism. The funding needs to be as much as is necessary to give people what they need, and must be predictable, stable, sustainable, needs based, unconditional, culturally appropriate, and able to deliver equal outcomes compared to non-Indigenous children. Good timeframes for determining requests must be followed. All federal-provincial/territorial agreements involved with service provision should be made public and potentially renegotiated by communities.
Most of all, Indigenous communities and youth need to be the ultimate authority in the Jordan's Principle provision system, and the unique needs and perspectives of each community must be included.
Part of the reason why Jordan's Principle is necessary is that First Nations people do not receive adequate social services, especially compared to non-Indigenous people. These services include healthcare, education, housing, water, financial aid, and many other things. Services on reserves are incredibly underfunded, bad quality, and difficult to navigate. Services off-reserve are also not enough since First Nations communities generally have higher and more complex needs than non-Indigenous communities. There is also a problem of services not being culturally appropriate.
The Spirit Bear Plan is a good way to fix social services on reserves, and it should be implemented. Off-reserve services and many on-reserve services should also be more culturally appropriate. Services both on and off reserve need to help people who need longer term support, help entire families who are struggling and not just specific members, and services and dignity should be increased for people with disabilities.
Indigenous Services Canada is the government department responsible for social services on reserves and other social services to Indigenous people. The department is paternalistic, authoritarian, badly organized, and discriminatory. The Expert Advisory committee is trying to reform the department, but Indigenous Services Canada isn't cooperating with them. They are also operating on a crisis-based model that doesn't do adequate preventative measures to stop crises from happening in the first place.
Indigenous communities, youth, and elders need to play a key role in the process to reform Indigenous Services Canada. Indigenous people and communities should be the ones leading and managing the services their communities get. There should be Indigenous joint-governance for Indigenous Services Canada and third party evaluations done by Indigenous groups. Non discrimination training for employees should be greatly improved. And there should be effective accountability measures for employees and for the system.
Education is a very vital service that everyone has a right to. And in order to give children a good education, schools need to be well-funded. They need supplies, staff, equipment, infrastructure, and other things. Schools on reserves get much less funding per student than schools off reserve, which means they cannot give an equal quality of education. Also, schools on reserves don't have the funding they need to give an adequate quality of education, leading to many students not being able to reach their full potential. This travesty needs to end, and schools on reserves need enough funding and enough support to deliver a good quality education to their students.
First Nations youth empowerment and advocacy organizations are doing great work helping youth speak truth to power and lobby for greater inclusion in decision making. They are also providing many services to struggling young people. However, they are not receiving nearly enough funding, and the funding system is difficult, confusing, and overburdening. Grassroots First Nations youth organizations need guaranteed core funding and stable, predictable, easy to access multi-year funding for doing the work they do.
Children, families, and young people deserve to have their physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual needs met, to have equality, and to be with their families. They deserve to be given honour and love by all of us. That is why I am writing this letter to ask you to improve Canada's behaviour, so that First Nations children can have their human rights.
I have shared many informational and educational resources talking about these problems and their solutions. Those resources go into much more depth about the problems and solutions I have listed here.
Thank you for reading my letter and I urge you to please act.
Sincerely,
Send your letter to:
Prime Minister Mark Carney
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada
K1A 0A6
[email protected]
Rebecca Alty
Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada
K1A 0A6
[email protected]
Mandy Gull-Masty
Minister of Indigenous Services
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada
K1A 0A6
[email protected]
Anna Gainey
Secretary of State (Children and Youth)
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada
K1A 0A6
[email protected]
And your own Member of Parliament (if you live in Canada): https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en
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