My friend Russell Diabo, who is contesting the position of Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), has sent me a copy of the recent report by the Auditor-General of Canada into what it calls the “Socio-Economic Gaps on First Nations Reserves.”
This in
an innocuous-sounding title, but from beginning to end it literally made me
gasp. I think I can explain why.
Since
my first contact in 1968 with the Department of Indian Affairs as it was then
known, I have regarded it as an outfit, governed by laws deriving from the
colonialist ignorance and prejudice of the early settlers, that has always been
used by the government of Canada as a smokescreen designed to obscure the
iron-fisted control held over the daily lives of what were then called “Indians”,
and are now more properly called First Nations, Inuit or Metis. One thing one
could never expect from the Department was a straight-forward account of what
they were doing; they hid their purposes with a skilfully-erected and
masterfully managed wall of euphemism behind which they appeared to a close
observer to be woefully out of touch with their clients, whose interests they
were expected to represent and with whom they had been given a trustee relationship
that they fell scandalously short of fulfilling.
There
was a slightly sinister aspect to this: although there were no doubt some good
people in the Department, one had the
feeling that it was a phalanx of civil servants who were basically indifferent
to the condition of the country’s poorest group of people, for whose welfare
they bore the major responsibility.
My present astonishment comes from the brutal
frankness of the Auditor-General in describing the shortcomings of this Department
(now called Indigenous Services Canada). He begins by quoting the directive of
the Prime Minister to the responsible Minister “ to make real progress on issues essential
to Indigenous communities, such as housing, employment, health care, community
safety, child welfare, and education,” a remarkably clear and unmistakably
activist suggestion for immediate action. He then recalled how previous reports
from his agency in 2000, 2004 and 2011 had “criticized the federal government’s
progress in improving the lives and well-being of people on reserves,” to very
little effect, as his reort makes plain.
Then,
zeroing in on education and what had been achieved, or not achieved, the
auditor remarked
*that the Department did not adequately use the
large amount of program data provided by First Nations, nor did it
adequately use other available data and information.
*did not meaningfully engage with
First Nations to satisfactorily measure and report on whether the lives of
people on First Nations reserves were improving.
*did not adequately measure and report on the
education gap. In fact, their calculations showed that this gap had widened in
the past 15 years.
* remarked that “these findings matter because
measuring and reporting on progress in closing socio-economic gaps would help
everyone involved… to understand whether their efforts to improve lives are
working.
*If the gaps are not smaller in future years, this
would mean that the federal approach needs to change.
The Auditor then broke the inefficiencies down
into four points, accusing the Department of having “an inadequate measurement
of well-being among First Nations on reserves”, having limited data available
to tackle the job, having a system of incomplete reporting on well-being, and,
finally, as I have always suspected, “lack
of meaningful engagement,” with their Indigenous clients.
Stripped
of its bureaucratic calmness, this report more or less supports everything I had
felt about the department these 50 years.
I don't know if I am unusual, but I found these deficiencies spelled out
so clearly to be quite astonishing. Under each of the above four headings they
piled on such brutal criticism as to reveal a Department that appears to have
been completely indifferent to its mission as trustee for the welfare of its
clients. For example, they used a
Community Well-Being index, which was based on only the four components of
education, employment, housing and income. The Auditor added: “While these
are important aspects of well-being, the index did not include critical
variables such as health, environment, language, and culture.
First Nations have identified language and culture, in particular, as
critical to their well-being.” And then he added a further killer description
of Departmental indifference: “Although the Department recognized that the
index was incomplete, it did not modify the index to make it more comprehensive
or establish a more complete measure or set of measures for assessing the
well-being of on-reserve First Nations people.”
He did not stop there: on and on roll the
fundamental criticisms of the Department’s performance. Again, an example: In
2015 Canada, along with other nations adopted the UN General Assembly’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable development,
designed “to mobilize global efforts to ensure healthy lives, end poverty, and
fight climate change,” containing 17 sustainable goals, and 169 targets
for achieving economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental protection.
BUT, wrote the Auditor-General, “In our
opinion, Canada’s results against the Agenda’s 17 goals for
First Nations people would likely be significantly worse than those for
the whole Canadian population. In fact, according to
the 2011 Community Well-Being index, 98 of
the 100 lowest-scoring Canadian communities were First Nations
communities.
But not
to worry: even such a staggering shortfall in effort appears to have left the
Department indifferent. Between 2001 and
2011 (the last date on which the Department’s figures were based, in itself an
indication of how faulty the data they were using must have been), one out of
every three First Nations communities had “experienced a decline in the index
scores under the Community Well-Being index.” In other words, things are
getting worse instead of better.
On and
on it goes, a merciless account of an indifferent government Department,
apparently only half engaged, if that, in its work:
· In 2000,
Indigenous Services Canada committed to measuring and reporting on the
education gap every two years. As of December 2017, we found that the
Department had not met this commitment.
·
in 2011, the average education score for First Nations
communities was 36, while for Canadian non-Indigenous communities, it
was 53. And even that did not reflect the real gap, because of the lack of
reliable data the Department collected.
·
On comparative high school graduation
figures, they found that, while results for First Nations had improved,
the results for all Canadians had improved by a greater amount: The gap
was 30 percentage points in 2001 and 33 percentage
points in 2016. This, they believed, was a clearer way to measure and report on
education results and would help to provide a more meaningful picture of
well-being.
Concentrating
their attention on the management of First Nations education by the Department,
the Auditor reported that a huge reporting burden was thrown on to the First Nations,
which were ill-equipped to shoulder it. The many forms they had to fill in for
each student amounted to 920 datafields,
many of which had to be filled in for each of the 107,000 elementary and
secondary, and the estimated 24,000 post-secondary students supported by the Department.
Of
course, I suppose I could argue that in 1968, when I first looked at the
education figures for First Nations students, there were very few of them in
high schools, and almost none in post-secondary education, so the current figures
are far greater than they were half a century ago. (That seems to be a
meaningless fact to parade: the current most important fact is that any pretence
they have been brought up to equality of
educational opportunity with non-natïve
sudents is far from the truth.)
To
all of these criticisms, the Department had the same response: Agreed, followed by what sounds like bureaucratic
bafflegab:
“Agreed. Indigenous Services Canada is actively working
with First Nations to transform elementary and secondary education, and will be
co-developing renewed education outcomes, measurements, and a related data
strategy.
“Agreed.
Indigenous Services Canada will build on the Community Well-Being index by
co-developing, with First Nations and other partners, a broad dashboard of
well-being outcomes that will reflect mutually agreed-upon metrics in measuring
and reporting on closing socio-economic gaps.
“Agreed. The Department is working with First Nations and other
Indigenous partners to transform post-secondary education. Embedded in the
approach to renewed education will be agreement on mutual accountability and
practices promoting complete and accurate reporting.
When Russell Diabo in his
leadership campaign says the AFN has not analysed in any way the damning
information in this report, he must surely be touching a sensitive nerve.
Especially when he also charges that the AFN leadership is acting too much like
a representative of the government Department, rather than of the grassroots
indigenous people, whose lack of opportunity is reflected in all these damning
figures.
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