IA+, CANADA’S “SUPER-PROVINCE”
The Indigenous Affairs department didn’t start out with far-reaching powers. It didn’t even exist as a separate department until 1966. Before that, the Indian Affairs Branch was part of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, having been moved previously from the departments of the Interior and of Mines and Resources.1
When the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND) became a stand-alone department, it had three branches: Indian Affairs, Northern Administration and Parks. The Indian Affairs Branch continued with the responsibilities it had for Canada’s “Indian and Eskimo people” under the Citizenship department.2 The Northern Administration Branch was in charge of services to Northerners, including assisting with administration of the territorial governments of the Yukon and North-West Territories.3 The Parks Branch looked after National Parks and Historic Sites, the National Battlefields Commission and the Canadian Wildlife Service.4
In 1966–67, the IA Branch within DIAND had a client base of about 192,000 people: 180,000 Status Indians living on reserves,5 which accounted for about 80 percent of all Status Indians in Canada,6 and about 12,000 northern Inuit.7 Métis people were not the IA Branch’s responsibility at that time, nor were off-reserve Status Indians, non-Status Indians or southern Inuit.
The new DIAND department had a modest budget of $197.4 million,8 of which just over half ($104.7 million)9 was allocated to the IA Branch for delivering programs and services to its Indian and Inuit client base. The IA Branch also had two federal co-delivery partners for that fiscal year. The Medical Services Branch of Health and Welfare Canada covered health care for Indians and Inuit at some $25 million per year,10 and Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) was contributing about $2 million for on-reserve housing.11 That meant that IA plus its two co-delivery partners (IA+) were spending about $131.7 million in 1966–67 on delivering programs and services for 192,000 people, or about $690 per client.
Fast-forward fifty years to 2017–18. Much had changed. The Indigenous Affairs Branch had become Indigenous Affairs (IA). The responsibilities for parks and wildlife were long gone; the territorial governments were managing their own affairs. Non-Indigenous programming, which accounted for less than two percent of the department’s budget,12 was transferred to another department in 2018.
IA’s budget for 2017–18 was $10.056 billion.13 However, the number of federal co-delivery partners had jumped to thirty-three. How much were IA plus its co-delivery partners (IA+) spending on delivering Indigenous programs and services that fiscal year? That turns out to be a challenging question to answer.
Indigenous Affairs stopped identifying the department’s multiple co-delivery partners, with the last publicly available list in the IA Estimates for 2004–05.14 At that time, IA had thirteen co-delivery partners: Health Canada, Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC), CMHC, Solicitor General, Canadian Heritage, Fisheries and Oceans, Industry, Correctional Services, Natural Resources, Justice, Privy Council, National Defence and Public Safety. Spending on Indigenous programs and services for Indigenous Affairs plus thirteen co-delivery partners (IA+) totalled $8.8 billion, of which $5.8 billion came from IA and another $3 billion from the other federal departments and agencies.15
Up until 2006, which coincided with the election of the Stephen Harper government, IA provided a breakdown of how much each co-delivery partner spent on delivering Indigenous programs and services, as well as contact information for each department and agency. Perhaps there were political reasons, either in cabinet or in the IA department, to want to obscure program spending. In the thirteen years between 2004–05 and 2017–18, IA’s spending nearly doubled from $5.8 billion to more than $10 billion.16 The number of co-delivery partners had jumped from thirteen to thirty-three.
A fog of confusion over how much is being spent and by which government departments can serve as a useful shield against accountability and politically problematic questions. According to a spokesperson for IA (Indigenous Services and Crown-Indigenous Relations) in 2018, no “official” list of co-delivery partners is available.17 There must, however, have been an official list somewhere for the department to specify in 2017 that IA had thirty-three co-delivery partners.18 When I pressed for more information in 2019, the Policy and Strategic Direction Branch responded by providing a link to the government’s Main Estimates covering all 320 departments and agencies, and suggested, more or less, that I go figure it out for myself.19
It is possible, in the absence of assistance from IA officials, to arrive at a reasonable approximation of the total IA+ spending for 2017–18 by extrapolating from the known spending in 2004–05 and 2017–18. For instance, we know that IA’s budget for 2017–18 was $10.057 billion. Health Canada remained the largest co-delivery partner, spending $3.364 billion delivering Indigenous health care programs that same year. For brevity, the calculation of spending for the other thirty-two co-delivery partners, totalling about $5,680 billion, is detailed in Appendix A. The result, admittedly rudimentary, puts the total spending in 2017–18 for IA+ (IA plus Health Canada plus its thirty-two other co-delivery partners) at about $19.1 billion.
Counting the clients
In 1966, the IA+ client base — the Indigenous people eligible for IA+ programs and services — covered 192,000 Indian and Inuit people. In 2017–18, the number was significantly higher, partly because of population growth, an expansion of services to a wider range of Inuit and First Nations people, and the inclusion of Métis people in 1982 as one the three constitutionally recognized Aboriginal groups in Canada.
By the 2016 Census conducted by Statistics Canada, more than 1.6 million people self-identified as Aboriginal (Indigenous), or about 4.9 percent of Canada’s population.20 However, not all of them were included in the IA client base, which is the same client base as for IA+.
The numbers used by IA are more precise than Stats Canada numbers. Status (Registered) and Treaty Indians (who must also be Status to be eligible for treaty annuity payments) are all clients of IA, whether they live on or off reserves. According to IA, the Registered Indian population was 970,562 people as of December 31, 2016.21 This aligns fairly closely with the 977,230 people who self-identified as First Nations in the 2016 census.
The same census lists 65,025 Inuit in Canada, with about half living in Nunavut. However, programs and services for the Inuit living in Nunavut are provided through federal transfers to the Nunavut territorial government, not through IA. Subtracting the Nunavut Inuit population of about 32,30022 from the national Inuit population means about half of Inuit (about 32,730) remain IA clients.
Calculating the Métis client base is particularly difficult because there is considerable disagreement across the country over Métis identity. Different Métis organizations have different definitions of who qualifies as Métis.
There are five provincial Métis organizations that receive a significant portion of their funding from the provinces, with additional programs funded by IA+. If we consider participation in programs and services delivered by IA+ as a requirement for people to be considered part of its client base, we are not much farther ahead. There is no centralized, intra-provincial database or information-sharing mechanism for Métis programs and policies that can produce hard numbers.23
Many of the 587,545 Métis who self-identified in the 2016 Census may have had nothing to do with the Métis political organizations, or if they did, they might be accessing only provincially funded programs. For instance, Ontario had the largest number of self-identified Métis, at 120,585 people.24 However, the provincial Métis representative organization, the Métis Nation of Ontario, had a registry of only 20,000 Métis citizens25 who may or may not have been receiving federally funded IA+ programs and services. Similarly, according to the Census, 89,355 Manitobans identified as Métis,26 however the Manitoba Métis Federation reportedly had about 36,000 people as members.27 There could be some 50,000 Métis people in Canada who receive federal services from IA+, or maybe 150,000. It is a guess, at best.
Using the numbers from IA on First Nations people and for Inuit outside Nunavut, and a guesstimate of 150,000 Métis, we arrive at a client base for IA+ of about 1.15 million people, or about 3.1 percent of Canada’s population of 36.7 million people.28
In 1966–67, IA+ spending per client averaged about $690. In 2017–18, IA+ spending of an estimated $19.1 billion for 1.15 million people averaged about $16,609 per client.
Having arrived at an approximation of IA+ spending and the number of people eligible for Indigenous programs and services, what does it tell us — beyond the obvious fact that spending has increased significantly over the past fifty years — to help us better understand the world of Indigenous politics?
Accounting for a Canadian “super-province”
Like all federal government departments, Indigenous Affairs answers to the Prime Minister and Cabinet of the government of the day. However, it is unique in Canada in terms of its mandate and how it operates. Unlike other government departments, IA does not provide specific services to Canadians in general as do, for instance, the departments of Justice, Natural Resources or Oceans and Fisheries. Rather IA provides a wide range of services to a specific Indigenous client base, and this is where all the co-delivery partners come in.
It doesn’t really matter that IA has been divided into Indigenous Services and Crown-Indigenous Relations, or if more or fewer federal departments and agencies are co-delivery partners. Nor is it significant that 80 percent of Health Canada’s budget and its Indigenous programs were transferred to Indigenous Services for 2018–19.29 The IA departments and all the co-delivery partners still constitute the same Indigenous Affairs Plus (IA+).
IA+ provides a vast range of birth-to-death services for its Indigenous client base, from infant care30 to settlement of estates for the deceased.31 It delivers education, health care and social services, which are typically provincial responsibilities. Given that more than 80 percent of its spending in First Nations communities is for “basic, province-type services,”32 IA+ is more like a federally run “province.”
This idea is worth examining. If all the federal Indigenous programs and services were gathered together and administered by the “province” of IA+, how would it stack up against Canada’s real provinces and territories?
In 2017–18, the Canadian government paid out $72.9 billion in annual federal transfers to provinces and territories for health transfers, equalization payments and more.33 If we go with the $19.1 billion figure as the equivalent of a federal transfer to IA+, it would sit just behind Ontario ($21.1 billion) and Quebec ($22.7 billion) in federal transfers,34 and way ahead of fourth place British Columbia at $6.7 billion.35 In other words, if IA+ were a province, it would be the third-largest province in Canada in terms of federal spending.36
The per capita spending for IA+ of $16,609 might sound high, but consider that the per capita federal transfers in 2017–18 to the Yukon ($25,229), North West Territories ($29,044) and Nunavut ($41,745) were significantly higher.37 These numbers reflect the high cost of delivering territorial governance, programs and services to a small population spread out over the vast regions of the North.
It is not unreasonable to question the soundness of the $19.1 billion figure for IA+ spending when it is not backed by hard numbers provided by the federal government. However, consider that Indigenous Affairs and Health Canada together accounted for $13.4 billion38 in Indigenous spending in 2017–18. Those are hard numbers. And that still leaves spending by thirty-two more co-delivery partners to account for.
An estimate of spending by IA+ of about $19.1 billion could be a bit less or a bit more. That number does not, for instance, include new spending announced in the spring of 2018 of $4.8 billion for IA+ over five years.39 Nor does it include another $1.7 billion over ten years for Indigenous Early Learning and Child Care Framework announced in the fall of 2018.40
The Trudeau government was promising more “investment” in Indigenous programs and services, over and above what had already been announced. It was setting up a scenario where, over the next few years, IA+ could surpass Quebec to become Canada’s largest “province.”
With jurisdictional reach over almost all of Canada and spending rivalling Quebec and Ontario, IA+ can indeed be considered a uniquely powerful “super-province.” But it is one whose citizens are uniquely powerless.
“Citizens” who don’t count
Even though IA+ holds inordinate power over the lives of people in First Nations and Inuit communities from birth to death, the “citizens” of IA+ have no say in how it operates. Not a single person in the IA+ administration is elected by ordinary Indigenous people to represent their interests. Not one.
Indigenous people cannot express their dissatisfaction with the IA+ administration by throwing it out and electing one more to their liking. There are no structural mechanisms built into the federally run “province” of IA+ whereby its “citizens” can demand their voices be heard or hold the administration accountable to them. They are voiceless and powerless.
It would be as if citizens of, say, New Brunswick or Saskatchewan were governed by a bureaucracy in Ottawa, without any elected officials chosen by the people to represent them. Such a situation would justifiably be considered an outrageous affront to democracy.
From the time of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and the imposition of the Indian Act of 1867, the federal government has treated Indigenous people as wards of the state deemed incapable of making informed decisions for themselves. Policy was imposed from the top down. It still is.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was right when he told the UN leaders in 2017 that there was “a rare and precious opportunity to act” on reconciliation.41 However, reconciliation as envisioned in the fine words of the Trudeau government and its ministers may not be the long-awaited and much-discussed road to reconciliation. It is entirely possible that negotiations over self-governance and Indigenous nation-building — one that currently excludes the very people who will be governed by the new system — will have the opposite effect. Instead, we may well be seeing the ground laid for a future prime minister to stand in the House of Commons and apologize, yet again, for the harm done to Canada’s Indigenous people for what, as was the case with Indian Residential Schools, the federal government thought seemed like a good idea at the time.
The modern history of Indigenous politics in Canada is only a half-century deep. Once we walk through the rocky political landscape of the past fifty years, we will have a better understanding of how ordinary Indigenous people lost their political voice and their power…and how they can get it back.