Canada's Apartheid Budget for Aboriginals

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's first budget departs obscenely from his Mandate letter to Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett: "We committed to provide more direct help to those who need it... No relationship is more important to me and to Canada than the one with Indigenous Peoples." It's equally impossible to relate it to what he said to world leaders when grandstanding in Davos:

'Leadership should be focused on extending the ladder of opportunity to everyone. ... The more results we achieve for people, the more we grow the middle class, and create real chances for those working hard to join the middle class, the more people will grant you a license for further ambition."

It's also impossible to relate the commitment to Aboriginal peoples with what Immigration Minister John McCallum said when welcoming Syrian refugees to Canada:

"If one believes that a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian ... those principles must be applied universally. ... We believe that all Canadians are equal, that we do not have two classes of Canadians ..."

AFN Chief Perry Bellegarde expressed the right principle in his pre-budget submission when he called for money to close the gap between Indigenous people and other Canadians. In fact, however, the budget widens the gap by giving tax breaks to the middle class. The new commitment of $8.4 billion over five years to Aboriginal peoples might seem reasonable--until you see how little it buys. For perspective, as far back in 1974 Farley Mowat wrote of conditions for Inuit in a new preface to his book People of the Deer:

---

"[They] live clustered in modern slums--many of which are hardly better than ghettoes. ... Here they exist for the most part on welfare payments of one kind or another--no longer taking sustenance from the land and the sea. Effectively they live in unguarded concentration camps, provided with the basis requirement for mere physical survival. ... We have salved our national conscience by ensuring that they do not die any more of outright starvation, but we have resolutely denied them ... the right to function as viable human beings ... Genocide can be practiced in a variety of ways." Things are no better today. For example, Bennett's department estimated five years ago that it would take $4.7 billion over ten years just to get First Nations communities off boil-water advisory. Why over ten years? Why not in one year? Isn't that a priority of the order of delivering emergency help to refugees or earthquake victims? Alan Pope's 2006 report on the northern Ontario settlement of Kashechewan said it would take $400 million just to relocate that one community out of the flood plain. Nothing has happened in the meantime, and for each of the past four years it has been necessary to evacuate the community's fifteen hundred residents when the ice broke--at an annual cost of $20 million. The shortfall in minimally basic housing is staggering. It's insulting even to suggest that a two percent annual increase in funding is adequate when the population is increasing by more than two per cent annually. Then you have to consider the fact that at least two percent of the already inadequate and substandard housing is lost each year to fire or disintegration beyond repair. Nunavut alone, with its population of some 27,000 Inuit, could absorb the entire allocation of $550 million in the budget for Aboriginal housing. The government just spent $500 million on the Iqaluit airport.

---

Support Canada Free Press

---

There's an allocation of an additional $635 million for child welfare services for Aboriginals. But Cindy Blackstock, Fist Nations child welfare executive, says that was $170 million short of what they asked for. But few educated and skilled people of any origin holding good jobs either get into trouble or need to have their children in care. Few self-reliant people become murder victims or disappear, or become perpetrators. A symptom of Third World dysfunctionality is the tragedy in La Loche, Saskatchewan, when an (alleged) bullied and troubled teenager shot and killed two teachers and two teenage brothers. So is the recent suicide crisis in Cross Lake, Manitoba, with six suicides in three months and 140 attempts. So is the murder of an eleven-year-old girl in Garden Hill, Ontario, apparently by a fifteen-year-old boy. So is the fact there have been three times as many murders and suicides in Nunavut since 1999 as Canadian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Some Aboriginals live year-round in conditions like refugee camps in Greece. I estimate, therefore, that it would cost at least $100 billion to bring remote Aboriginal communities up to equal Canadian standards. Even then, and given that most communities have zero economic base, operating budgets would have to double to about $25 billion annually to maintain parity of service delivery of education and health care, and sports and recreation activities. And jobs? What jobs? Ironically, there is a remedy that could be cash-flow-positive for taxpayers almost immediately. It would be to invite people in remote settlements to move, voluntarily, to southern cities, and there to receive the benefits that Syrian refugees get. Success stories to replicate include the Grandview inner-city elementary school in Vancouver that demands and achieves academic success by not pandering to the bigotry of low expectations. Then there's Southeast Collegiate, the Indian residential school in Winnipeg, founded and run by Manitoba Indian leaders. Another is the ACCESS program in Vancouver that provides a full range of counselling, detoxification and job placement services for urban Indians. In sum, the budget not only falls short of the government's stated objectives for Aboriginal peoples and maintains a separate class of Canadians based on race--apartheid. It also misses the point that it's a mathematical impossibility to expand the middle class while the underclass of Aboriginal expands and lives, unwillingly, in misery. It's hard, therefore, to refrain from giving Trudeau the sobriquet Mr. Fork-Tongue, and his Indigenous Affairs Minister, Doctor Do-Little.