FAILING UPWARD AT A SPECTACULAR RATE
The general public in Canada has little idea what actually goes on at IA, in part because it seems to suit the bureaucracy to shroud its operations in confusion, complexity and obscurity. While such obfuscation shields bureaucrats and politicians from uncomfortable questions, it also makes it nearly impossible for them to mount a defence against criticism and accusations that the public would understand.
Indeed, Indigenous Affairs is routinely beaten up in the media. It has been called “a vast bureaucratic black hole where hope disappears into a bottomless pit of inertia,” “a giant government colon devouring good intentions and regurgitating them as waste,” and a “stultifying swamp” where nothing gets fixed and no one is ever held responsible. And all of that was in a single 2017 Kelly McParland column in the National Post.1
There are many excellent IA staffers who are producing solid research into a range of Indigenous issues, adding to the body of knowledge needed to make sense of government policy. There are also stellar managers who run various departments within the IA purview who successfully hit the targets set by Plans and Priorities year after year, and who enjoy the respect and admiration of their staffers. They are exemplary bureaucrats, who are highly valued within the civil service. Yet their successes have little, if any, relevance to the on-the-ground suffering, abuses and hopelessness that pervade the lives of people on reserves. They seem, in fact, to operate in different realities.
Lambasting IA is a long-standing tradition in Indigenous politics. In 1969, twenty-four-year-old Alberta Cree activist Harold Cardinal launched his national political career with a scathing critique of IA and its ministers.
“Throughout the hundreds of years of the Indian-government relationship, political leaders responsible for matters relating to Indians have been outstanding in their ignorance of native people and remarkable in their insensitivity to the needs and aspirations of Indians in Canada… The question of paramount importance in the minds of successive ministers responsible for Indian Affairs appears to have been and continues to remain the defence of the gross ineptitude of their department.”2
Jack Beaver was a little kinder in his 1979 report, entitled “To have what is one’s own” but better known as the Beaver Report.
“There are some very able staff members who are genuinely committed to the search for new directions… They understand that the failure to deal with a change in the role and the function of the Department of Indian Affairs will ensure that the situation of demoralization and social disorder on reserves will not only continue but may get worse… [with] a consequent loss of faith in the institutions of the Government on the part of all Canadians for the abject failure of the Government to resolve the intransigent problems faced by Indian people.”3
Jean Allard was far harsher in his criticism of “the abject failure” of the system that has evolved over the past fifty years, including government, Indigenous Affairs and Indigenous political organizations.
“The poverty and suffering of Indians allows the system to keep leveraging money out of the public pocket, and justifies the existence of a bloated bureaucracy. The system owes its continued life to ensuring the continued suffering of the most helpless and voiceless — without end.”4
He painted an ugly picture of ordinary Indians being crushed under the weight of a bloated system, one where there was no motivation for the IA system to change.
“The whole system is against changes,” said Allard, “because it is protecting its own interests, and it needs to keep Indians as their dependents, because the day Indians are independent, there is really no purpose for a whole number of those programs provided by Indian Affairs.”5
This seemed like an appalling scenario that could not possibly exist in a country that prides itself on being one of the best places in the world to live. How could a government department, supported by taxpayers’ dollars, institute and sustain a deliberate and cruel program of oppression under the Buffalo Jump policy? Yet despite facing constant criticism and being routinely slammed in the media, the department had been failing upward at a spectacular rate.
In Canada, in the years from 1966 to 2018, IA’s client base grew six times larger, while spending on delivering Indigenous programs and services was 145 times larger, mushrooming from $131 million to more than $19 billion. Yet the issues of poverty and societal dysfunction plaguing Indigenous communities continued to sound exactly the same as in 1966, only more so.
In 2016, the country was shocked by the news that eleven children on the Attawapiskat reserve in northern Ontario had attempted suicide in one single day in April. More than 100 people in the community of about 2,000 on the west shore of James Bay had reportedly tried to commit suicide in the previous six months. The chief declared a state of emergency the following Monday when more than a dozen young people, including a nine-year-old, were overheard making a suicide pact.6
Suicide is a harsh reality in many Indigenous communities in Canada. First Nations males are ten times more likely to commit suicide than non-Indigenous males; First Nations females are twenty-one times more likely to kill themselves than non-Indigenous females.7
The response from government officials to the Attawapiskat crisis was predictable. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted that the situation was “heartbreaking,” and that the government would “continue to work to improve living conditions for all indigenous peoples.”8
The Ontario minister of Health said that the Ministry of Children and Youth Services had been contacted about “providing emergency life-promotion supports.”9 Federal Health minister Jane Philpott said she was working with the province to set up “a joint action table” to find solutions, and pointed to the need to improve socio-economic conditions in the community.10
The federal government had tried an even more extreme solution to the disastrous state of the Labrador coastal community of Davis Inlet in 1993, when video recordings went public showing children, aged eleven to fourteen, in the Inuit community openly sniffing gasoline fumes out of plastic bags and yelling that they wanted to die.11 It was scandalous and drew international condemnation, and a close examination of the appalling living conditions in the community.
An addictions counsellor called to the scene that night said in an interview with Time Magazine that 95 percent of the adult population of Davis Inlet suffered from alcoholism and that a quarter of the community’s population had attempted suicide over the past year.12
The Inuit community had been moved to Davis Inlet in the 1960s, and the federal government decided to move it again in 2002, this time to a brand new $159 million town built from scratch. The new community of Natuashish got 133 new homes, a $13 million school, a health centre, an airport, a fire hall and a concrete wharf.13 It was supposed to be a fresh start, but not much really changed. The community of about 1,000 people was back in the news again in 2017 when two boys, aged eleven and seventeen, were seriously injured in a house fire where, according to police, they were sniffing gas. Community leaders said they were fighting yet another solvent-abuse epidemic, and were looking to the provincial government to provide a full-time mental health therapist.14
Inasmuch as officials called for improved mental health services and improved economic opportunities in Natuashish and in Attawapiskat, Caroline Tait, a Métis professor of psychiatry at the University of Saskatchewan, pointed out in 2016 how little had changed in the two decades since the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People.
“What do you find 20 years ago? The same conversations we are having now about suicide. The same conversation we are having now about the lack of mental health [services]. The same conversations that we are having around socio-economic development.”15
If Indigenous people seem bitter and angry, Tait said, “it’s because people have gone to the table over and over again.”16
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, 17 and expecting a different outcome, it is certainly demonstrated by the tragic stories of Attawapiskat and Natuashish crises. If the root cause of societal breakdown in Indigenous communities is the pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness, would it not make sense to address that issue head-on? Instead, what happened in both communities were calls for treating the symptoms — improved living conditions, emergency life-promotion supports, improved socio-economic conditions, more mental health services. However well-intentioned such ideas might be, it really amounted to announcing that things would continue on, just as they had for the past fifty years.
How could a federal government department have managed to fail so badly and not be called to task for it? All ministers in charge of government departments are accountable to cabinet and can be removed from their posting if they fail to deliver on behalf of the government of the day. Naturally, Indigenous Affairs is different.
The failures of IA have not been an impediment to the careers of IA ministers. For most IA ministers, the position was their first cabinet portfolio and a harbinger of political successes to come — in a different portfolio. Failure in IA was normal and expected. Success would have been unusual.
With the exception of Jean Chrétien and his seven-year tenure from 1968–1974, IA ministers rotated in and out of the department so quickly that a new minister barely had time to get on a first-name basis with the limo driver before dancing out the door on the way to a better posting. Ministers rarely stayed with the IA department more than a year or two. Recall that in 1965, Indian Affairs saw three different ministers in and out the door in the space of twelve months, and Jean Chrétien was the seventh minister in seven years when he was appointed.
The situation continued. Over thirty-eight months beginning in November 2015, there were three major changes in the ministerial appointments for the Indigenous portfolio, which included the splitting of the IA department into two separate entities.18
Deputy ministers are actually much more important for continuity and stability in any government department than ministers who come and go depending on the whim of the prime minister or the mood of the public on Election Day. Again, Indigenous Affairs is different.
IA deputy ministers tend to roll in and out of the department at just about the same pace as the ministers do. Ambitious civil servants typically put in two years at lesser government departments like IA to signal they’ve paid their dues, bureaucratically speaking, before moving to a more prestigious department. A recent exception was Michael Wernick, who put in eight years as DM from 2006 to 2014 before heading up the entire federal civil service as Clerk of the Privy Council Office. According to his colleagues, he insisted on staying on because he felt it was the only way he could make a real difference on seemingly intractable Indigenous issues. How much success did he have? It’s hard to tell.
Without a firm hand at the top, the senior IA bureaucrats who have actually been running the show have been spectacularly successful at what every good bureaucracy does: it grows. More programs. More services.
It is the responsibility of Indigenous Affairs and its co-delivery partners to deliver and manage the many programs and services funded by its roughly $19 billion budget.19 The vast role it plays in nearly every aspect of the lives of its client base would seem to be a recipe for failure. However, if you look beyond all the negative media stories, books and research papers written about how disastrous the department has been, you will find a remarkable success story. It’s just not the success story you might be expecting.
Here are two key factors to consider about the department:
· IA is a very, very good department, based on Chrétien’s assertion when he was IA minister that a department’s success is based on how creative bureaucrats are in extracting money from the system for their projects, and the more projects, the better.20
· The IA official policy priority is to shrink the bureaucracy by devolving many of its responsibilities onto band and provincial governments, while entrenching federal control of First Nations lands through “self-government” agreements.
These two factors are antithetical. The department cannot deliver on both at the same time. Consider, however, that there are two faces to any government department — the public face seen in the media or at public hearings, and the “inside the bubble” face that is focussed on plans and priorities, budgets, deliverables and jurisdictional disputes, all of which are largely divorced from anything happening in the outside world.
From inside the Ottawa bubble, the IA department is a spectacular success. From outside the bubble, the department is viewed by many as a catastrophic failure.
It is perfectly legitimate for IA to be both a great success and a great failure at the same time, based on two different frames of reference. What IA cannot legitimately do is continue to grow at the same time it is attempting to deliver the department’s devolution mandate to shrink itself. A bureaucracy cannot serve two mutually exclusive goals. However, it does help explain why the institution that is IA is so frustratingly difficult to understand.
The Indian Affairs department started down this path in the aftermath of the 1969 White Paper. IA bureaucrats had no idea that advisers in the Prime Minister’s Office were plotting to kill off the department. The “great thunderclap” of ’69 awoke Indian politicians to the planned elimination of Indian rights, and it stunned bureaucrats with the news that their department had five years left to live. When the backlash from the White Paper forced the Trudeau government to back off, the IA department was given a reprieve. It makes sense, after such a close brush with death, that IA staffers would do their darnedest to turn IA into the best possible department it could be. And they had Chrétien cheering them on as he leveraged more and more money for them to spend.
To grow in the 1970s, IA already had a needy client base on reserves. Based on a stereotype of Indians that suited their purposes, bureaucrats could justify expanding services to fill ever more needs. In 1969 in The Unjust Society, Harold Cardinal denounced the willingness of IA bureaucrats to believe their own propaganda.
“They have fostered an image of Indians as helpless people, an incompetent people and an apathetic people in order to increase their own importance and to stress the need for their own continued presence.”21
Cardinal did not attribute their motives to malice but rather to naïveté and the genuine belief that their solutions were necessary to the survival of Indians.
“For the most part they are not evil men. They have evolved no vicious plots intentionally to subjugate the Indian people. The situation for the Indian people, as bad as it is, has resulted largely from good intentions, however perverted, of civil servants within the Department of Indian Affairs.”22
There is, of course, an old saying about good intentions.
Paradoxically, the devolution of programs to band councils offered IA a new vehicle for growth. As more and more chiefs and councils took over program delivery — what Dave Courchene called in 1974 “administering the suffering of our own people”23 — there was much work to do managing the band governments delivering those programs. The continued failure of most programs could easily be explained away as band governments needing time to learn how to be little municipal governments. And those failures effectively reinforced the foundational premise of IA — that Indians were not capable of managing their own affairs. Successful programs would interfere with IA’s growth. So would noisy Indian political activists.
After some initial resistance in the 1970s, Aboriginal Representative Organizations became accustomed to the financial largesse of IA’s core funding and program money, and IA bureaucrats had the important role of managing the band councils that were running IA programs. Everyone was happy. IA was growing. The AROs had money to hire staff and researchers. Chiefs and councillors had good-paying jobs, useful work, and lots of side benefits because IA wasn’t too worried about what they were doing with the money for programs. The department had little incentive to insist that the chiefs and councils produce good results. Failure was fine.
As long as chiefs and councils were suitably compliant in enacting IA’s agenda, it didn’t really matter all that much if band funds were spent on Caribbean cruises or high-stakes gambling in Las Vegas. The only time it became a problem was when such excesses turned into a public scandal and embarrassed the minister, who would then be forced to “do something.”
In the same way that there was no incentive for IA to enforce accountability, neither was there any necessity for free and fair elections. How chiefs and councils were elected was of little significance. Those who were not suitably compliant could be unilaterally removed by the minister on advice from bureaucrats, and replaced with more pliable officials.
As a good department, IA was also advancing its policy priority of devolution. It was slow going, but bands were advancing inevitably towards municipal-style governance where Indians wouldn’t need to worry about such amorphous concepts as inherent rights. They wouldn’t have any.
That changed in 1982 when Aboriginal and treaty rights were enshrined in the Constitution. The government could no longer just extinguish Indigenous rights when and where it suited. That threw a monkey wrench into the machinery of devolution, because devolution negotiators were now constitutionally required to get bands to give up their rights voluntarily.
However tattered the reputations of some Indigenous political leaders might have become, they deserved full credit for acting swiftly to make sure the rights of their people had the best protection possible — written right into Canada’s constitution.
IA’s growing budget was, at this point, starting to become an issue within the federal government. A number of Supreme Court of Canada cases were also causing consternation in cabinet due to repeated rulings in favour of Indigenous rights.24 The need to push harder on devolution and the ultimate goal of “self-government” became more urgent for the federal cabinet. The 1985 Nielsen Task Force review of IA (along with other departments) recommended cutting funding for a variety of IA programs, including the plan for training band governments to become municipal-style administrators. That task, noted the review authors, was largely completed. What was needed was “encouragement” for band governments to recognize the benefits of self-governance, and if a few could be herded in that direction, more would quickly follow and they could all be pushed off the rights cliff into the arms of provincial responsibility.
The review had been conducted behind a dense wall of suspicious secrecy, so when the “Buffalo Jump” memorandum was leaked by the media, it caused a great public furor. That is also when IA bureaucrats found out it contained another White Paper-style death sentence. According to the leaked memo, IA itself had become a problem because it was encouraging Indian dependence by offering them expensive social programs.25 IA was going to be dismantled because it had become too successful! Once again, blowback from the leaked memo ended up giving IA a reprieve. However, if the powers-that-be wanted bands herded into self-government, IA would step up and do its part, once again proving itself to be a good department.
It was most helpful that the self-government process was shaping up to offer a whole new vista for growth. There would be negotiating tables with discussions and debates that could go on for as long as there was money in the form of government loans to keep band negotiators hooked into the process. Decades, even.
Modern treaties negotiated after 1975, which cover 40 percent of Canada’s land mass, were much simpler to negotiate when it came to surrendering rights. They were explicitly negotiated so that it was clear that everyone at the table knew what was being surrendered, and in exchange for which concessions. When the Inuit treaties were signed, they specifically ceded “all their aboriginal claims, rights, titles and interests”26 to lands and waters within Canada. The other modern treaties did the same, and all have surrendered their land rights. The only holdout was Nunavut, which, in 2019, still didn’t have a final devolution agreement on land and resource management.27
The bands that signed historic treaties prior to 1975, an area covering half of Canada’s landscape, have proved to be more difficult for IA to herd towards self-government. People who viewed the treaties as their protection were not going to give them up easily. Even though most of the Robinson and Numbered Treaties contained land-surrender language, the courts have made it clear that even explicit surrender language is subject to interpretation and must be considered in its cultural and historical context.28 The duty to consult has also increased uncertainty for governments and industries with an eye on land development. The IA imperative to push chiefs and councils into negotiating “self-government” grew stronger as court cases muddied the waters over rights.
From the 1970s onward, the poverty and suffering of Indians on reserves had a larger political utility than just bolstering IA’s client base. If the lives of people on those reserves didn’t get any better or, say, actually got worse, would that not help band politicians to see the light and the necessity of sitting down at the negotiating table? It would be for their own good, wouldn’t it?
There may not have been any confirmed official federal government policy that explicitly stated that dialling up the level of suffering on reserves was an approved tactic. But the evidence on the ground — the continuing problems of boil-water orders on reserves, rotting houses and children killing themselves — was much the same as if it were official policy.
It’s about jobs
And still IA grew and grew, and so did the number of federal co-delivery partners. Based on estimates and extrapolations (in the absence of the IA being able or willing to provide data about its co-delivery partners), by 2017–18, Indigenous Affairs Plus could well have been employing roughly 12,000 federal civil servants delivering Indigenous programs and services.29 That may seem like a significant number of federal employees, but it was a small fraction of the civil service in 2018 of about 280,000 people (not including the RCMP and Armed Forces members).30
The Aboriginal Representative Organizations (AROs), their seventy-some regional, provincial and territorial counterparts31 were serving as the Indigenous co-delivery partners for IA+. There were 100 people employed in the Assembly of First Nations Secretariat and National Chief’s Office in 2017,32 but accurate employment numbers for the ARO national and regional operations were not readily available.
Another source of Indigenous employment courtesy of IA+ were the approximately 4,000 arts, culture and sports groups funded by Canadian Heritage and Indigenous Affairs programs,33 with support for executive directors, artists, Indigenous women and many more positions. Again, data on employment numbers is fragmented.
The really big employment numbers based on IA+ funding are in First Nations communities themselves, and there are data to back them up.
In early 2019, the Brandon University Rural Development Institute and two regional chiefs’ organizations produced an unusual report. This exercise, called Indigenous Contributions to the Manitoba Economy,34 reversed the usual practice of studying how much Indigenous people cost the economy. Instead, the report quantified spending by Indigenous and First Nations people in Manitoba in order to calculate their contributions to the province’s economy. The analysis, paid for by Indigenous Services and the Manitoba government, showed the province’s Indigenous people contribute about 3.9 percent of Manitoba’s gross domestic product for 2016, a bit less than agriculture and a bit more than manufacturing. It also addressed a common misconception that FN people do not pay taxes: Manitoba Indigenous people paid about $231 million in federal, provincial, corporate and sales taxes in 2016.35
Inside the report were also details on employment in First Nations communities and tribal councils. According to the report, Manitoba’s sixty-three FN governments and eight tribal councils provided 19,821 jobs in 2016, with 96.5 percent of those jobs (19,130) in the government sector.36 In other words, nearly all the employment by band governments and tribal councils was in government administration and the delivery of programs and services. This is not surprising, since band governments are governments and tribal councils are cooperative organizations made up of band governments with shared interests.
How would the numbers translate at a national level? If we assume a similar employment level for the 632 First Nations band governments and eighty tribal councils across Canada as in Manitoba, the number of IA+ funded jobs for First Nations people would approach 200,000.37 While a handful of First Nations communities have own-source revenues from their businesses and other ventures that are profitable enough to contribute to governance costs, the vast majority are dependent on IA+ for funding their governance, as well as the programs and services delivered to band members. On small, remote reserves, band government jobs are sometimes the only jobs.
Given that about 373,500 FN people lived on reserves in 2016,38 Indigenous governance employment of 200,000 across Canada would mean about 54 percent of people on reserves were employed in the governance sector. It would appear that FN band governments and tribal councils had collectively become the largest co-delivery partner for IA+, at least in terms of jobs numbers.
Recall that at the federal level, power and money flows downward from the Indigenous Affairs department to the band and tribal council level, with some of that power and money channelled down through the AROs to the regional counterparts to the band level. The downward flow of power ends at the band council level, where FN government officials allocate resources (and jobs) to the band membership as they choose.
IA+ is a significant employer of Canada’s Indigenous people, either directly or indirectly through the band governments and organizations it funds. It might not be too big a leap to suggest that some 250,000 people in Canada — mostly Indigenous — owe their employment to IA+. It helps to explain where some of its substantial spending is going: jobs for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. It also clarifies the challenge facing Indigenous leaders who see economic independence as the means of freedom from IA controls. It will take a great deal of economic progress to replace IA+ funding when half of the people living on reserves are, for all intents and purposes, in the employ of IA+.
The end game
Despite repeated pronouncements over the past fifty years that the Indian Affairs department was going to be shut down as programs and services were devolved to band governments, it was not going to happen, and staffers knew it.
As one senior manager put it, “All knew that even if [IA] was abolished, a new bureaucracy would be required to transfer resources to and support new Indian governments, and to perform the many land and resources management functions that had nothing to do with aboriginal peoples as such. Thus a disparate, committed and high-spirited group of people were consistently being told by their political masters what all knew to be a pack of self-serving lies.”39
Wayne Helgason, the co-founder of the Treaty Annuity Working Group, was equally doubtful of IA disappearing any time soon.
“There’s a little bit of a joke,” said the Ojibway activist. “If you got rid of all of the Indians, it would still take Indian Affairs about a hundred years to wind down.”40
Based on past history, every time the Indigenous Affairs department was handed down a death sentence, it just grew bigger. That’s what happened in 2017 after the Trudeau government split the Indigenous Affairs into two departments, with the new Indigenous Services department immediately slated for termination. Some day. Thereafter, Indigenous people in Canada had two federal departments and two ministers closely managing just about every aspect of their lives. As per the growth trend, in 2018 and 2019, the government added nearly $10 billion in new spending over six years to IA and its federal co-delivery partners, bumping its annual spending for 2019–20 to an estimated $21 billion.41 The Indigenous Services department might have been slated for eventual termination, but the new Crown-Indigenous Relations department, assigned the responsibility of overseeing “self-government” was not going anywhere.42 In fact, there were big plans in the works.