State of the Child Report 2018, November 2018. New Brunswick – Office of the Child and Youth Advocate
Specifically, this year I am calling on government and all of society to do more to provide an equal playing field to Indigenous children in our Province and also for refugee and immigrant children who are newly among us, in both francophone and anglophone communities. Norman Bossé. Child and Youth Advocate.

Recommendation One

Government should support publicly available comprehensive data on children and youth

This is essential in order to understand the challenges facing NB’s young people, and to make informed plans to address these challenges. Government should invest in improved child rights data monitoring. The Office of the Child and Youth Advocate, the NB Institute for Research, Data and Training and the NB Community College have partnered to plan an online version of the Child Rights Indicators Framework. The funding for this initiative should flow through government’s Interdepartmental Working Group on Children and Youth.

Recommendation Two

Government should act immediately in consultation with First Nations governments and other Indigenous stakeholders to preserve and promote Indigenous languages native to our Province.
An immediate plan should be in place within six months. A long-term plan should be in place within one year. Mi’kmaq and Maliseet should be the language of instruction in schools for First Nations students. It should also be available as optional-language instruction for non-Indigenous students. Mi’kmaq and Maliseet language status should be protected in New Brunswick legislation.

Recommendation Three

Government should expand the opportunities for immigrant and visible minority and refugee youth to participate meaningfully in community life.
Leadership programs and opportunities, such as Imagine NB, for development should be publicly supported on an on-going basis. Language training, including peer-to-peer mentoring, in schools for newcomer students should be much more widely available.

The 64-million-dollar question that this data raises is if we can achieve such relative success for children and youth in immigrant and official language minority contexts, why are indigenous children so seriously disadvantaged? What success stories can we take from the policy arena in regard to other minorities and develop with Mi’kmaq and Maliseet communities, in culturally safe and culturally based ways, similar programs and policy supports to level the playing field for indigenous children in our Province?

According to UNESCO there are four levels of endangerment among indigenous languages:

1. vulnerable languages
2. those that are definitely endangered
3. severely endangered or
4. critically endangered.

Mi’kmaq is considered vulnerable, but is still spoken by roughly 8,000 native speakers. The Maliseet language has been considered a definitely endangered language for several years already, but despite tremendous efforts in language documentation and preservation, the language is now in a complete crisis of survival. Statistics Canada Census data depicts the rapid decline of native speakers of this rich linguistic tradition in North America over the past four census periods. Today there are only 360 Canadians who report Maliseet as their mother tongue. Less than half the number reported 15 years earlier.