In recent decades, Aboriginal political leaders, writers, and artists have come to centre stage in Canadian society. Many more Aboriginals have good jobs than a generation ago. These accomplishments have been of immense value in enhancing Aboriginals’ collective sense of self- worth. On this, few disagree.
But progress is unacceptably slow. As shown in the statistical highlights below, poverty, unsatisfactory health outcomes, family distress, and excessively high involvement with crime among Aboriginals remain the most serious social scar on Canadian society. If a new government headed by Paul Martin is to realize signifi- cant progress on what he rightly insists is a social policy priority, he must undertake a politically difficult task: rethink the premises of Canada’s Aboriginal policy inde- pendently of the premises of tribal chiefs and their organizations such as the Assembly of First Nations. One reason for the lack of progress ”” not the only reason but an important reason nonetheless ”” is certain premises of the chiefs. On this, many disagree.
In the last few years, official Ottawa has begun ”” tentatively ”” the necessary rethinking of policy. One aspect has been the ”œFirst Nations Governance Initiative,” an acknowledgement that band councils are administering very large budgets with inadequate accountability to band members. The First Nations Governance Act, intended to improve the quality of band elections and council admin- istration, was tabled in Parliament but not voted into law. The Assembly of First Nations fiercely opposes it, and Martin has promised to review the entire initiative. In its present form, the bill will die. A second aspect has been to acknowledge the importance of urban Aboriginal concerns via a modest Urban Aboriginal Strategy, directed from the Privy Council Office.
To understand why this rethinking is taking place, and why more rethinking is needed, it is necessary to take a histori- cal detour.
Early in his ministerial career, Jean Chrétien held the Indian Affairs portfolio. He was the minister when Trudeau introduced his famous 1969 White Paper proposing the elimination of reserves and the complete integra- tion of Indians. Indian chiefs rejected this option and insisted that relations between Aboriginals and non- Aboriginals be governed by treaties. Aboriginals are so culturally distinct from other Canadians, they argued, that they cannot prosper as individuals in the urban industrial mainstream of Canadian society. The most compre- hensive statement of this thesis is found in the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal People (x-xi):
Canadians need to understand that Aboriginal peoples are nations. [emphasis in origi- nal]…To this day, Aboriginal people’s sense of confidence and well-being as individuals remains tied to the strength of their nations. Only as members of restored nations can they reach their potential in the twenty-first century.
The means to restore Aboriginal nations, the chiefs argued, is to refur- bish ”œnation to nation” treaties and enable band councils to organize a par- allel set of on-reserve health, educa- tion, and welfare services independent of the federal, provincial and munici- pal programs serving other Canadians. (Ottawa now transfers to band coun- cils over $7 billion annually ”” prima- rily via Indian Affairs and the Aboriginal health branch of Health Canada ”” which represents a massive increase from less than $200 million at the time of the White Paper.) The gen- erosity of present transfers from Ottawa to bands has been sufficient over the last decade to halt further net migration away from reserves. As recently as the 1960s, only one-fifth of registered Indians lived off-reserve.
The off-reserve share grew until about 1990. Since then, it has stabilized at about one-half. (A caveat: the data on where registered Indians live are imperfect. Only Indians registered under the Indian Act are eligible to live on-reserve.)
Underlying Trudeau’s White Paper was his scepticism about government’s accommodating cultural differences ”” whether among francophone Quebecers or Aboriginals. In rejecting the White Paper in favour of the chiefs’ premises, official Ottawa and the courts implicitly accepted a dia- metrically opposite view in which cul- tural differences trump all other policy considerations.
The inadequacy of allowing cul- ture to trump all in design of policy was nicely summarized by Alan Cairns in a recent article he wrote in Inroads magazine. In it he referred to ”œan exag- gerated stress on ”˜otherness’”:
[T]he Aboriginal future is with- in Canada, for both Aboriginal peoples living in cities and those living in organized communi- ties. This…means…that Aboriginal peoples are not only Canadians, but are and should be thought of as such by others and by themselves. This was the argument of the Hawthorn survey…Citizens Plus is an attempt to revive the necessity and relevance of the citizen component which I see as threatened by a policy discourse that pays more attention to how we can be kept apart than to what will hold us together. My fear is that an exaggerated stress on ”œotherness,” on incom- mensurable solitudes, on a multinational definition of who we are, may lead us to treat each other as strangers with lit- tle moral obligation to help each other.
In Citizens Plus, Cairns has made an important contribution to the exer- cise of rethinking Canada’s Aboriginal policy. This book is, in part, an attempt to revive interest in the Hawthorn Report, a major survey of conditions among Aboriginals conducted in the 1960s. The book’s title is a term used by Hawthorn to summarize his proposed strategy. Ignored by Trudeau’s White Paper, Hawthorn was viewed favourably by early Aboriginal oppo- nents of the White Paper. Subsequently, Hawthorn has been largely forgotten. Unlike the White Paper, Hawthorn insisted on the sur- vival into an indefinite future of reserves. Unlike RCAP, he did not deni- grate the urban experience. While many more Aboriginals would become urban, he correctly predicted, some would not. For those wanting to lead a rural, communal lifestyle, reserves would continue to be home. It should be feasible for band councils to provide for them schools and other municipal services of reasonable quality.
Cities have become central to modern Aboriginal life. If we consider all those self-identifying as Aboriginal in the 2001 census ”” not only regis- tered Indians, but also non-registered Indians, Métis, and Inuit ”” there are nearly one million Aboriginal Canadians. The on-reserve share of this total is now well below half. Only three in ten live on-reserve; two in ten live in rural off-reserve communities, and five in ten live in cities.
Most Aboriginals ”” six in ten ”” live in the four Western provinces. Among the top ten cities ranked by Aboriginal population, seven are in the West. In the two eastern prairie provinces, one in seven among provin- cial residents and one in four among school children are now Aboriginal.
A part from his insistence on the legitimacy of an urban Aboriginal lifestyle, Cairns does not offer specific policy advice. In the interest of provid- ing some more precise recommenda- tions, I pose three rhetorical questions. The first is concerned with a better def- inition of the ”œcitizen” component of ”œcitizens plus”; the second with the ”œplus,” and the last with the role of affirmative action by Ottawa and the provinces.
As Canadian citizens, what aspects of citizenship should the Aboriginal minority share with the majority?
Prior to 1960, universal access to core health services was not central to the Canadian identity. Thanks to Tommy Douglas, it now is. A large majority of Canadians favour universal access, independent of income, to a set of core health services. For registered Indians, Ottawa organizes and finances a system of health insurance separate from the provincial systems serving other Canadians. The budget of the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch comprises over half Health Canada’s total budget. In general, this system is more generous than provincial equiva- lents. It insures services (such as dental care) not publicly insured for other Canadians. Given the importance of medicare to the Canadian identity, the existence of a separate Aboriginal sys- tem is symbolically inappropriate. It is also inefficient. It introduces needless administrative duplication. The chiefs may interpret more generous insured health services for Indians than for non-Indians to be a treaty benefit; many officials in Ottawa disagree and interpret the range of services covered to be a discretionary policy decision. In either case, this second tier of health insurance invites resentment among non-Aboriginals who pay taxes and yet receive fewer insured health services.
Exemption from payment of fed- eral taxes by registered Indians living on-reserve is a longstanding provision of the Indian Act (section 87). With increasing participation of Indians in market activity, it has become a major irritant. It affords numerous occasions for inefficient tax avoidance and tax arbitrage behaviour and weakens the redistributive ethos underlying the income tax system. Given limited on- reserve employment opportunities, most band members would be liable for little or no income tax. Those liable would be the few with relatively high earnings ”” primarily the band council and employees. In sum, phasing out tax exemptions is a prerequisite to improved racial relations.
The inner workings of government
Keep track of who’s doing what to get federal policy made. In The Functionary.
The Functionary
Our newsletter about the public service.
Nominated for a Digital Publishing Award.
What spending and taxation powers should band councils exercise?
Canada has a long tradition of enabling multiple publicly funded education systems based on religion and language, and the principle of band-run, on-reserve schools poses no insurmountable problems. Band councils should be able to use the school sys- tem as means to transmit culture intergenerationally.
Yet, good education is about more than transmission of culture. In a modern society, the link between edu- cation levels and good jobs has become much tighter. Since the educa- tion levels of on-reserve Aboriginals remain far below those of other Canadians, they are denied access to most well paying jobs. For those who want a rural, traditional lifestyle, this may not matter much. But many on- reserve Aboriginals legitimately aspire to the higher incomes realizable from good jobs in an industrial society.
In a recent report, the auditor gen- eral acknowledges there has been improvement in on-reserve Aboriginal education levels, but emphasizes that the rate at which the gap with non- Aboriginal levels is closing is ”œunac- ceptably slow.” Ottawa’s major concern should be that posed by the auditor general who, in reports over the years, has admonished Indian Affairs and band councils for the failure to meas- ure educational performance.
Social assistance is a particularly tough policy nettle to grasp. Prosperous industrial societies consider financial aid to the destitute as a core social program. On-reserve band members currently receive welfare benefits administered by band councils. Off-reserve registered Indians receive social assistance benefits administered by the relevant provincial government and subject to the same rules as apply to all others.
The trend over the last decade in well-managed social assistance pro- grams in North America and Europe has been to implement more meaningful work or training obligations for those seeking benefits, thus rejecting the prin- ciple of welfare as an entitlement equiv- alent to, say, universal health insurance. Underlying this trend is the thesis that long-term welfare dependency induces a ”œculture of poverty,” which has undesir- able intergenerational effects on fami- lies. Canadian social workers have been more tentative in their acceptance of this thesis than their counterparts in the US, but since the mid-1990s all provinces have turned away from the idea of welfare benefits as an entitlement and have reduced eligibility among those deemed employable. Band councils administering on-reserve wel- fare have not undergone this policy shift. As mentioned above, approxi- mately 40 percent of those living on- reserve continue to receive welfare.
Arguably, the rules governing access to social assistance should be equal among all, independent of race. To achieve this, social assistance could be integrated with provincial social assistance programs, just as, I suggest, should occur with health care. To do this would generate intense conflict. It would entail professional social workers, most of them non-Aboriginal, determining eligibility for on-reserve social assistance. In many isolated reserves there are few jobs other than those linked to the band council. To be denied social assistance is a powerful fiscal incentive to migrate off-reserve.
The policy nettle to grasp is whether Aboriginal access to on- reserve welfare solely on the basis of financial need is a treaty entitlement. Currently, band councils believe it is. They spend over $1 billion of funds transferred from Indian Affairs on social assistance, more than they spend on education. As with the creation of a separate Aboriginal health insurance system, many officials in Ottawa quiet- ly disagree and consider it a discre- tionary administrative decision.
A compromise would be to with- draw from individual bands the author- ity to distribute welfare and entrust the function, and accompanying budget, to an intertribal social assistance agency for each province. Such an agency could avoid instances where band councils use discretion over access to welfare as an instrument of political patronage. Each agency would be large enough to hire professional social workers. The agency would face pressure to continue accommodating very high on-reserve welfare use. But it might also make disbursement of welfare more professional and engage Aboriginal leaders in broader debates over the best use of available revenues.
”œUpdated treaty money” is a reform championed by Jean Allard, who was a member of Premier Ed Schreyer’s government. The so-called numbered treaties, covering bands from western Ontario to the northern territo- ries, provide for annual payments to individual Indians. At the time these treaties were negotiated in the 19th cen- tury, these amounts were small but nontrivial. Allard wants to ”œupdate” these benefits with significant increases in the amount paid. If, for example, Indian Affairs disbursed $2,500 annual- ly to every adult registered Indian, that would cost about $1.4 billion. Reducing transfers to bands by the amount paid to on-reserve Indians would lower the cost by about half. (Other cuts might be made in Indian Affairs budget to render the reform neutral in terms of overall departmental spending.)
Such a reform poses complex administrative problems, but the bene- fits it would confer make it attractive. To maintain spending levels, bands could tax back some portion of treaty money from on-band members. This would introduce a measure of own-source tax- ation to reserves, which would probably improve the quality of band governance as band members debated the appropri- ate rate of taxation. Second, it would lower the locational bias of present Indian Affairs transfers. Indians could more readily migrate off-reserve in search of better jobs and better educa- tional opportunities for their children.
How much responsibility does the majority have to undertake affirmative action on behalf of members of the Aboriginal minority living off-reserve?
The answer to this question is, ”œa great deal.” While social indicators are generally better off- than on-reserve, they are far from satisfactory. The key to improving off-reserve indicators is provincial education policies with ambi- tious goals for increasing Aboriginal high school completion rates, and social assis- tance policies that place less emphasis on passive income transfer and more emphasis ”” for Aboriginals and non- Aboriginals alike ”” on work and train- ing. None of this will be possible without the provinces’ active participation.
African and Hispanic Americans have faced problems similar to those faced by Aboriginals, on a much larger scale. Their rural-to-urban migration resulted in ethnically segregated urban neighbourhoods in major American cities. Since the 1960s, federal, state and municipal officials have struggled to improve the performance of schools in such neighbourhoods, many of which are poor, and to increase local employ- ment rates. In a forthcoming publication, Aidan Vining and I survey what we con- sider best practices in Canadian and US school systems with large cohorts of stu- dents from formerly marginalized ethnic minorities. For provincial school districts with large numbers of Aboriginal stu- dents, we recommend a combination of policies: enhancing Aboriginal cultural content in school curricula, setting up magnet schools with an emphasis on Aboriginal culture within the school dis- trict, and instituting some measure of parental choice whereby Aboriginal par- ents can withdraw their children from poorly performing neighbourhood schools and opt instead for better performing schools elsewhere in the district.
At first ministers’ meetings Paul Martin can ”” and should ”” prod his provincial counterparts into setting ambi- tious targets for high-school completion and employment rates. Additional money for pilot projects would help.
Just as important as new projects, the new prime minister should take this opportunity to use the bully pulpit of his office and insist that Aboriginal problems cannot be solved by ”œan exaggerated stress on ”˜otherness’.” Lawyers will continue to negotiate new treaties and litigate the often ambiguous language of existing treaties. Such time- consuming activities are no substitute for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal politi- cians delivering better social policy. Fundamentally, Aboriginals do not need more legal victories: they need and they deserve better social policy from band councils, from local and provincial governments, and from Ottawa.
