ESCAPING THE REACH OF IA
The defeat of the First Nations Ombudsman Act bill was a serious setback for people wanting to see some evidence that anybody with power and authority was willing to listen to the voices of ordinary Indians. While people like Myron Thompson were willing to listen and to act, the majority of politicians appeared more disposed to believe the assurances of Indian Affairs and its agents. The Parliament of Canada is the highest seat of democratic power for the country. If its members were unmoved by the plight of angry, desperate First Nations mothers, what hope was there for change for the better?
It was the end of the fight for Leona Freed, who said activism in Indigenous politics “got you bullets with your name on them.”1 After five years of listening to horror stories of abuses on reserves, facing threats of lawsuits from angry chiefs and comforting despairing women who wanted help that Freed had no power to provide, she couldn’t take it anymore. She was tired of banging her head against the proverbial brick wall.
“Nobody was listening to us. No one heard our cries for help. Nothing was changing.”2
Indian Affairs, seeing an opportunity to silence a very noisy critic by pulling her inside the bureaucracy, offered Freed a $65,000 contract to produce a report on election fraud on reserves. Freed knew what she was doing when she took the deal.
“As soon as I took the money, I knew I was compromised and that I would lose my credibility as a fighter for ordinary Indians. But it was an enormous relief to get out of politics.”3
Freed would, at least, “exit with voice,” just as Jack Beaver had done thirty years earlier. She held hearings across the country and submitted her report to Indian Affairs. The report she submitted, “Corrupt Elections in First Nations Communities,” was chewed up by the machinery of Indian Affairs without leaving a trace. Recall that old saying: You don’t change Indian Affairs. Indian Affairs changes you.
Despite the defeat of the Ombudsman bill, there were some small signs that indicated possibilities for change in Indigenous politics. One was Prime Minister Chrétien’s appointment of Robert Nault in 1999 as the newest IA minister. The square-jawed politician from northwestern Ontario was a good choice. He was a down-to-earth, practical man, elected an MP in 1988, and he had more than fifty First Nations communities in his riding.
Perhaps Chrétien’s confidence in Nault had something to do with the similarities between them, according to Maclean’s magazine writer John Geddes.
“Like the boss, he’s a scrapper who revels in his image as a no-nonsense pragmatist. And like Chrétien in an earlier era, he’s making a bid to solidify his big-league political credentials in one of Ottawa’s toughest jobs, minister of Indian affairs.”4
Nault claimed that he was “the only Indian Affairs minister in history who lobbied for the job,” and that his work as an MP in his riding gave him a good education on Indigenous issues.
“I came into the department knowing a lot about the policies and programs. I had lived them every time I went to a community.”5
Chrétien was well aware of the growing heap of junked policy proposals and IA research papers on eliminating or amending the Indian Act, but he was prepared to give Nault a shot at it. After nearly two years of incessant outcry in the media about corruption and election fraud on reserves, it was obvious from a political perspective that something had to be done. Unlike the harshly condemned Buffalo Jump policy from the Mulroney years that had been shrouded in secrecy, Nault would have in-depth consultations with, well, anybody who was interested. Indian Affairs set about organizing consultations across the country as part of its new First Nations Governance Initiative, with a big pot of money to pay groups to make presentations. However, not many people were interested. At some Manitoba meetings, nobody showed up but the IA employees.6 This was hardly surprising, given that First Nations people in the province were still bitter about the aborted Manitoba Framework Initiative on self-government. The extensive consultation with ordinary FN people just a few years earlier had lit a spark of hope for real self-determination, which, from an Indigenous perspective, had been so thoroughly doused with cold water by Indian Affairs that no embers remained. Why would anyone waste their time on more useless IA consultations that would end with IA again imposing its pre-determined outcome?
Nonetheless, about 500 people did eventually participate in about sixty meetings across the country,7 which allowed Nault to assert that the newly proposed First Nations Governance Act of 2002 was the result of extensive consultations. The legislation proposed major amendments to the Indian Act that would require bands to develop and adopt codes covering elections, financial accountability, and band administration. It even had a provision for several ombudsmen. It affected all FN bands except those who had already signed self-government agreements — the Nisga’a and Sechelt in British Columbia, the Cree of northern Quebec, and a number of Yukon First Nations groups.8
Nault described the act as a bridge between the status quo and self-government, which was the policy direction for IA ever since the White Paper. But, once again, conflict immediately emerged over how to define “self-government.” IA was still pushing for the same municipal-style band governance it demanded of the Manitoba Framework Initiative, which would leave reserves subordinated to the powers of the provincial and federal levels of government. For the Assembly of First Nations, bands had the inherent right to self-government and self-determination as guaranteed under the Constitution Act of 1982, and did not need any permission or buy-in from other government levels.
A growing distinction was emerging between three different forms of self-governance. IA was pushing municipal-style self-government. The AFN was naturally focussing on self-government that would see the political power of First Nations (and the funding that went with it) anchored in the chief and council system, from which the AFN derived its own legitimacy. The right to self-determination supported by many ordinary FN people was another kettle of fish altogether. It offered, in theory, individual and collective rights of the kind more closely resembling traditional governance, which did not include elected chiefs and councils.9 However, the Manitoba Framework Initiative’s truncated attempt to identify how traditional government might work revealed that the concept was not yet well thought-out in the modern context, and the desire for governance based on love, respect and harmony tended to sound more like the basis for a ’60s hippie commune than a workable form of governance.
Nault was inclined to be blunt rather than tactful in his dealings with Indigenous leaders, and he locked horns with the AFN more than a few times while trying to persuade the Indigenous politicians to work with him to negotiate changes to the Indian Act. Nault and the AFN worked out an agreement on how the negotiations would work, only to have a large group of chiefs at a national meeting vote, behind closed doors, to nullify the agreement. The chiefs demanded the AFN boycott consultations, rather than assist in amending the colonial act.10 Nault was obviously frustrated, and word leaked out from “senior government sources” that the AFN was now considered “irrelevant” and “dysfunctional.”11 IA officials hastily disavowed the remarks.
The Assembly of First Nations was having its own internal struggles with the chiefs it represented. The bands across the country came in all shapes and sizes, and with different priorities. Trying to shoehorn all those different voices into the “one voice” claimed by the AFN was chafing. When it came to electing the AFN executive and national chief, the chief heading a band with 20,000 members in Ontario had one vote, as did a chief in BC with 200 band members. Since the majority of the reserves were in the West, the western priorities, particularly treaties, regularly took precedence over the agendas of the eastern bands. To quell internal dissent, AFN politicians had little choice but to go along with what the majority of chiefs demanded.
The hardening of AFN’s opposition to Nault’s governance bill and the denunciations by the National Chief Matthew Coon Come were dismissed by Nault.
“He’s a lobbyist,” Nault told Maclean’s in an interview in the summer of 2002. “His role is to lobby on behalf of the chiefs, and there are a number of chiefs who prefer the status quo.”12
Nault might not have liked the intransigence of the AFN, but there was a limit on what he could do to force the AFN to the table without there being some kind of backlash from the public. Indian Affairs did, however, slash AFN’s funding nearly in half, from about $20 million in 2001 to $12 million.13 Since the public had little idea of funding arrangements with the Aboriginal Representative Organizations, there was little the AFN could do but fume. The AFN was also said to have refused $2 million from the substantial pot of money allocated to fund First Nations groups participating in IA’s consultations, which did not sit well with some chiefs who wanted access to those funds.14
The Native Women’s Association of Canada, one of the five AROs, was not as well protected. It was supposed to speak for all Indigenous women in the consultations. However, in the fall of 2001, NWAC made the mistake of publicly siding with the AFN, which IA interpreted as meaning the women’s group was boycotting the consultations, too.
Indian Affairs promptly took NWAC’s consultation allocation of $225,000 and gave it all to the newly created National Aboriginal Women’s Association (NAWA). The NAWA president, Pamela Paul, who was the former executive director of the NWAC, defended the move by saying that someone had to represent the voices of women if the Native Women’s Association of Canada would not.15
At a hearing of the parliamentary Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs on the First Nations Governance Act in March 2002, NDP MP Pat Martin challenged NAWA’s legitimacy when Paul spoke before the committee.
“You can’t blame people,” said Martin, “for assuming you were created, you were manufactured, just to collaborate with the minister on this initiative… How can you blame people for thinking you were set up as some sort of a puppet organization?”16
It was, said Martin, as if the government was saying that if this organization won’t co-operate with us, we’ll find one that will.17
The conflict between Nault and the political organizations was laying bare the legitimacy question that had simmered under the surface of Indigenous politics since first raised by Jack Beaver in 1973.18 At that time, Beaver had identified the two key conditions for measuring the legitimacy of an organization as the voice for the constituency it claimed to speak for. First, people in that constituency required a means to withdraw their support. Second, legitimacy could not be based on the government funding a group and then designating it as the sole voice for a particular constituency.
Under the “Beaver Legitimacy Test,” band chiefs could certainly withdraw their support from the AFN, and often threatened to. The AFN, however, claimed to be the sole voice, not just of the chiefs, but of all First Nations people in Canada. However, only band chiefs could withdraw their support; the rest of the FN population had no means to do so. Thus, AFN failed the legitimacy test. As for the women’s organizations, the mere fact that Indian Affairs could pull the funding for the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), hand it to the newly created National Aboriginal Women’s Association (NAWA) and declare it the new “sole voice” meant the two women’s groups failed the legitimacy test as well.
Ordinary FN people might appreciate the valuable work done by groups like the AFN to raise awareness of Indigenous issues in government and in the public, but they generally held a jaundiced view of the organization and considered it little more than a chiefs’ lobby group.
Cree writer Jordan Wheeler said at the time, “The AFN has lost its ability to make any direct impact on the lives of your average native. They’ve never been a real government anyway — just a fancy office to give career politicians a place to go beyond the band office.”19
Besides that, Wheeler added, the AFN seemed to conveniently forget that chiefs were never part of the traditional system of governance but rather a creation of Indian Affairs.20
As had always been the case in whichever new policy was put forward by Indian Affairs, whether in Trudeau’s White Paper, Mulroney’s Buffalo Jump, or Jane Stewart’s more recent Gathering Strength, Nault’s new governance act did not address self-determination. There was no mechanism available for bands that wanted to return to a more traditional form of governance. As a result, there was no consideration given to restoring the power balance on reserves, either by empowering individuals through modernized annuity payments or by empowering band families to reject inept or corrupt band governments by “voting with their feet” to find a band more to their liking.
“Change is in the air,” promised Nault. “Change that encompasses an integrated set of priorities to build communities and economies. Change that puts the tools for an improved quality of life into the hands of the communities.”21
But Nault’s “change” was looking remarkably similar, in the end, to the policy changes that had been proposed before. It was clearly pushing First Nations communities into municipal-style governance structures, and Nault confirmed that the department had no intention of revisiting its policy requiring bands to sign away their peoples’ Aboriginal title and rights.22 At the same time, Nault’s new governance act formalized the long-standing power of the Indian Affairs minister to intrude into band affairs and elections at will. Maybe such ministerial power was intended to provide a check on the kinds of excesses that band governments had proved themselves only too willing to indulge in, but it also further reinforced the fact that band governments were accountable to Indian Affairs, not to ordinary band members.
The First Nations Governance Act was being touted in the media as Chrétien’s legacy legislation, especially with his retirement now a sure thing.23 However, Parliament recessed for the summer in June 2003 with a multitude of amendments to the bill yet to be addressed ahead of second reading.
Jean Allard’s push for modernizing treaty annuities as a means of empowering ordinary First Nations people had been attracting some significant interest from politicians and Indigenous activists who saw the idea as a revolutionary approach. It focussed on redirecting a portion of the money the Canadian public was already allocating to Indian Affairs into the hands of individual FN people to spend as they chose — buying a home, going to university, starting a business, paying membership dues to their own advocacy organizations to legitimately speak for them, or however they wanted. And it was readily justifiable, since it was nothing more than increasing the five-dollar annuity that Indian Affairs was still paying every year to Treaty people who showed up at Treaty Days events across the country to collect it. And Allard was wisely pitching it as revenue-neutral. He figured it didn’t need to cost Canadians any more than they were already paying to support Indian Affairs.
Professionals who were directly concerned with the poverty of Indigenous people, whether on or off the reserve, were paying attention because it was a very long time since anyone had brought such an innovative idea to the table. Among them was Wayne Helgason, the executive director of the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg. The Planning Council, with its roots in the infamous Winnipeg General Strike in 1919,24 was first and foremost a powerful voice for identifying community needs, especially those of the destitute, impoverished and imprisoned.
Given that Winnipeg was a city with the largest per capita population of First Nations people calling it home,25 Helgason could immediately see the benefit of a modernized annuity.
“Just look at what would happen in Winnipeg,” said Helagason. “Nearly 80 percent of kids living in poverty in this city are from Aboriginal families. In one fell swoop, we could lift almost all of them out of poverty and welfare dependency. This would have an amazing effect, not just on the Aboriginal community, but for the whole of Winnipeg.”26
The impact on western cities like Regina, Saskatoon and Edmonton would be much the same. But what about eastern urban centres like Brantford, Montreal and Halifax?
Indian Affairs was paying its piddling $4 or $5 annuity only to the members of the bands whose chiefs had signed treaties between 1850 and 1923. Bands in southern Ontario and to the east either did not sign treaties or their treaties did not contain an annuity provision. Would the annuity be modernized to include all Status Indians? Who would be eligible? How would the annuity be delivered? What programs or services from Indian Affairs would have to be cut to pay for the increased annuity?
There were a great many questions but few answers. That’s when the Treaty Annuity Working Group (TAWG) was born, created by Helgason and Allard as a special committee of the Social Planning Council. The small committee included a number of former politicians from across the political spectrum, including former Conservative Finance minister Clayton Manness and NDP Agriculture minister Sam Uskiw, and former Winnipeg city councillor and president of L’Union national métisse Saint-Joseph du Manitoba Guy Savoie.
Helgason was himself a Status Indian with Liberal leanings, the son of an Icelandic father and Saulteaux mother. He had studied psychology, attended Harvard University and lectured at the University of Toronto on policy issues. And he was a three-term president of the National Friendship Centres. He was also president of the Aboriginal Council of Winnipeg, which had taken over the grand, old Canadian Pacific Railroad station in the city’s downtown and turned its marble floors and soaring columns into a community campus where kids from reserves could upgrade their education and prepare for university or college.
A big, amiable man, Helgason worked for a time early in his career as a social worker for the Children’s Aid Society in Winnipeg. It provided him with some hard lessons about extreme poverty, its impact on families, and the obstinacy of a bureaucracy serving its own interests. He figured a modernized annuity would help keep Aboriginal people from becoming entangled in the “helping” bureaucracy.
“Child welfare is about economics. Neglect is economics. If you don’t have enough money, if you don’t have the ability to hire a babysitter, and there’s not enough money for food, the outcomes are frustration, maybe inappropriate arrangements for supervision. About 70 percent of kids are taken into care because of economic constraints. That’s where treaty money could make a big difference.”27
Helgason said that the child welfare industry had been built on the need to incarcerate children. The system made it far easier to apprehend children than to help a household through a troubled night. He could get $200 for an initial clothing allowance within an hour if he seized a kid, but if what the family really needed was a homemaker so the kids could stay in their home for the night, it would mean filling out lots of forms, and a three-day wait. Sometimes, it just made more sense to keep the family intact and the kids out of the system, but that option was often not available.
“Actually,” Helgason admitted, “one time I apprehended a Cabbage Patch doll. There was a birth certificate. I swear to God I put the name of the Cabbage Patch doll on the form, took the address, and got this doll an initial clothing cheque for $200. What the family really needed was groceries. No one ever knew. I just cancelled the apprehension afterwards and said ‘returned home.’ The Cabbage Patch doll is doing just fine.”28
What Helgason recognized was a perverse system that was supposed to be helping children in need but was instead using those same children to justify the need for the system’s institutions and the jobs that went with them. He could see the similarities to the institutional needs of Indian Affairs.
The Treaty Annuity Working Group was a decidedly eclectic group, but it had big ideas. The committee met in the fall of 2002 to figure out how best to examine all the questions surrounding a modernized treaty annuity and set priorities.29
The first priority was making sure that the modernized annuity was on Jean Chrétien’s radar. The prime minister was the one person who had the clout to institute such a revolutionary change at Indian Affairs. But the group felt he would need to be sold on what the change in treaty annuities would mean, and assurance that it would have the kind of positive impact Allard and others hoped for — the kind that would provide Chrétien with the legacy he wanted. However, getting Chrétien’s attention was not easy, in part because he had already given Nault a long leash on instituting reform through the new governance act, and it was still working its way through the legislative process.
Chrétien had also been distracted for some time by the power plays going on behind the scenes in the Liberal party, with Finance minister Paul Martin nipping impatiently at his heels in his desire to take over the leadership of the party, and hence, the prime ministership. Their feuding had been going on for more than a decade, and it finally exploded into the open in June when Chrétien abruptly dropped Martin from his cabinet. It did not go down well with Martin’s supporters, and the normally supportive media started to use terms like “dead man walking” to describe Chrétien.30 The media also started quoting Chretien verbatim in print, rather than smoothing out his sometimes mangled English so that his comments would sound better. It was a small cruelty on the part of the media, but it also signalled that Chretien had lost a certain level of respect in political circles. Martin was suddenly a backbencher, but his demotion gave him the time to campaign for a party leadership review with the objective of forcing Chrétien out.
As the Treaty Annuity Working Group was being set up, NDP MLA Sam Uskiw had already taken the initiative of sending letters to both Chrétien and Nault in the summer of 2002, urging them to consider the proposal for updating treaties as a mechanism for individual empowerment of First Nations/Treaty people. Chrétien didn’t answer but Nault replied in September. His response was not really surprising. He stated that the department supported increasing economic self-reliance of First Nations but that Indian Affairs was prioritizing strengthening band governance through Bill C-61, the first version of the First Nations Governance Act that later became Bill C-7.
Uskiw responded to Nault. “If, as you say, you and I share the same goals as those spelled out in Bill C-61, then the Allard proposal must be seen as being worthy of close analysis and evaluation. To ignore its positive features and fail to act would be doubly counter-productive; it would constitute a missed opportunity to correct a century-old problem of inequality, and doom the Indian people to more of the same in the future. On the other hand, an updated annuity would, in my opinion, restore pride in the treaty itself. It would remove the sense of grievance that plagues Indian/non-Indian relationships and return to the native people control over their lives.”31
What Uskiw was talking about was a potential basis for reconciliation.
TAWG also wanted to get people talking about treaty annuities. A national workshop that would bring together “stakeholders” would help publicize the issue. The C.D. Howe Institute had already proposed a round-table discussion for early 2003 that would be hosted by president Jack Mintz, with a number of policy people leading the discussion on the fiscal reforms necessary to pay for the annuity. It was not, however, the kind of crowd that Allard thought should be initially involved in sorting out the treaty annuity issues, so he turned it down.
The TAWG board figured its own two-day national workshop in June 2003 was the best route to go, but how would it be paid for? Since the Social Planning Council had charitable status, it was eligible for funding from various philanthropic organizations. The workshop was pulled together in short order, with the modest but welcome sum of $16,000 in combined funding from the Winnipeg Foundation, the Sill Foundation, Ed Schreyer’s Canadian Shield Foundation, and a few small personal donations. It wasn’t a lot of money, but as Leona Freed had shown, a few committed people could accomplish a great deal with just a few dollars.
The people invited to the workshop, called Modernizing Treaty Annuities: Implications and Consequences, included policy wonks like Gordon Gibson and academic John Richards, but mainly it was Indigenous people involved in gang prevention activities, social workers, university students, a former Indian Affairs manager and a news editor from the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network. TAWG made an explicit decision not to invite the leaders of Indigenous political groups or chiefs and councils. This was an opportunity to listen to the voices of the people who rarely got to speak and be heard.
As the final planning got underway in May 2003 for the workshop scheduled for later in June, Allard got a surprise invitation. Kevin Lynch, the Deputy Minister of Finance, wanted to talk to him about treaty annuities. This was great news. A busy person like Lynch wouldn’t take time for such a meeting unless he already thought the annuity idea had something of value. John Richards, who had been working behind the scenes to promote modernized annuities since the excerpt from Allard’s “Big Bear’s Treaty” was published in Inroads, had gotten some senior people in Finance interested. As one official close to Paul Martin when he was still Finance minister noted, Martin was very focussed on First Nations issues and both he and Lynch were looking at fundamental reforms.
TAWG had no expectation, based on the earlier response from Nault, that Indian Affairs was suddenly going to leap on the idea of modernizing annuities, but maybe the chances of actually implementing change were better coming from a government department not directly threatened by the shift in power that the annuity change was designed to bring about. A department such as Finance. Was this a way to work around the legendary immutability of Indian Affairs?
Allard met with Lynch in Winnipeg in early June. The Finance deputy minister liked what he heard enough that he flew Allard to Ottawa to speak with other government bureaucrats. But that’s where it ended. It could have been that modernizing treaty annuities was too revolutionary, or maybe the annuity idea just got lost in the maelstrom of Ottawa politics. Chrétien announced he was going to retire, setting off a race for the party leadership. Finance minister John Manley, Martin’s replacement at Finance, threw his hat in the ring. Inside the bubble of Ottawa politics, the party was largely consumed by an anticipated purge of Chrétien loyalists if Martin became leader, which was considered highly likely as he had a huge lead over any other contenders. The drama in Ottawa left little time for issues like treaty annuities.
Meanwhile, the treaty annuity workshop proceeded as planned at the Aboriginal Centre in Winnipeg, with delegates hashing out the benefits and complications that a modernized annuity might bring to Indians living on reserves and off reserves, and the impacts it could have on communities, provinces and the country as a whole.
A big question was how it would be paid for. The price tag for a $5,000 modernized annuity would be substantial. If it were paid only to Treaty Indians (about 400,000 in 2002), it would mean reallocating about $2 billion from the Indian Affairs budget to pay for it. If a policy decision was made to include all Status Indians (about 600,000 in 2002), it would be about $3 billion. The general consensus at the end of discussions was that there was considerable value to ordinary Indian people in being freed from welfare dependency, with the annuity strengthening the family because all its members — children included — contributed to the family’s well-being. Those benefits outweighed the complexity of sorting out questions of what would be re-allocated from the Indian Affairs budget.
It was obvious that the idea of modernizing annuities needed far more research and study. It was a new idea that needed to be explored, and so far, all that had been spent on it were the donations to fund the TAWG workshop and Allard’s grant from Canadian Heritage to write “Big Bear’s Treaty,” totalling all of $40,000.
As the TAWG report, Modernizing Treaty Annuities: Implications and Consequences,32 pointed out, modernizing treaty annuities did not rest solely on there being a political climate suitable for instituting such a significant change. It was justiciable, which meant there were grounds for a court challenge, where a judge, or perhaps the Supreme Court of Canada, would decide whether there were legal grounds for the annuity to be increased, and how much that increase would be.
The challenge for TAWG was persuading politicians that putting their support behind a government policy change served their interests more than leaving it to the courts to decide for them.
When parliament resumed in September 2003, the First Nations Governance Act seemed to have disappeared. Had Nault given up in the face of considerable public opposition fuelled, in part, by the AFN boycott? He had. The requirement for band codes to run fair elections, requirements for accountability to band members, ombudsmen to address grievances — all disappeared under yet another IA policy failure. The possibility of a Chrétien legacy based on significantly changing First Nations governance was gone, too.
The TAWG committee wasn’t sure if the opportunity to influence Chretien was now lost, or whether a lame-duck prime minister might be more amenable to hearing about treaty annuities. He was essentially being forced out by Martin’s people in December when the Liberal Party held its leadership vote, but perhaps he, too, might want to “exit with voice.” And what a roar it would be if he chose to upend Indian Affair’s monopoly with a bold and provocative last-minute policy change. Sure, a Martin administration could reverse anything Chrétien announced in his waning days, but once a modernized annuity was offered to Treaty people, it would be very difficult to rescind. TAWG decided to take the chance, and sent the outgoing prime minister a draft of the final report of the workshop, along with a pitch to modernize annuities.
Their timing was off. Paul Martin won the leadership of the Liberal Party by a landslide and became Prime Minister on December 12, 2003. The purge of Chrétien supporters happened quickly, just as feared. In the time lag, the TAWG report ended up on Martin’s desk instead of Chrétien’s. Martin forwarded TAWG’s letter to his new Indian Affairs minister, Andy Mitchell, who had replaced Nault in the December purge. Mitchell replied to TAWG in March 2004.
“I recognize the hope that an increase in annuities to individuals would reform the system, redistribute power and wealth, and empower individuals to achieve their economic independence. However, I believe enhancing treaty annuities would not result in a meaningful or sustained positive economic or political change for individual community members.”33 Mitchell curiously went on to say, “Treaty annuities are not viewed as part of a general livelihood right but rather as a fulfilment of a specific obligation identified in the treaty relationship. In addition, there are no provisions in the treaties for an increase in the amount of the treaties.”34
The new minister was quite mistaken.