GOLDSTEIN: Reconciliation Starts With Spending Your Tax Dollars Effectively

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While reconciliation with indigenous peoples has to occur on many fronts, a good start would be to ensure that the $ 24.5 billion federal taxpayers spend on indigenous affairs this year actually help the people they are intended to help.

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This is in contrast to what is happening now, where much of the money disappears down a black hole to feed a bloated federal Indian affairs bureaucracy, whose employees have a paid day off on Thursday, Canada’s first National Truth Day. and reconciliation.

All modern-day federal auditors general who have reviewed books on this topic have identified this as a major problem.

The late Michael Ferguson described it as an “incomprehensible failure” in a series of scathing reports from 2016 to 2018.

Ferguson concluded that the federal Indian affairs bureaucracy does not monitor the results of its spending to see if the money is doing what it is supposed to.

Instead, programs “are managed to accommodate the people who run them rather than the people who receive services … the focus is on measuring what public officials are doing rather than how well they are being served. to Canadians …

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“We don’t even see that they know how to measure those gaps,” concluded Ferguson, and until we do, Canada “will continue to waste the potential and life of much of its indigenous population.”

The auditors general have repeatedly concluded the Federal Indigenous the bureaucracy misleads Parliament by selectively submitting data to make problems appear less serious than they are and achievements greater than actually occurs.

Ensuring Canadian taxpayers get value for money on Indigenous issues is overdue, as the Trudeau government, when it came to power in 2015, removed the 2% annual increase in funding for Indigenous programs on established reservations by then Prime Minister Jean Chretien in 1995.

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This year, Ottawa will spend $ 24.5 billion on Indigenous programs, 87% more than funding would have been under the previous 2% annual increase policy.

Liberals say they have done this every year since they came to power, spending $ 12.9 billion, or 8.4% more than the previous 2% cap in 2016-17 on indigenous issues; $ 15.4 billion or 27% more in 2017-18; $ 17 billion or 38% more in 2018-19; $ 20.5 billion or 63% more in 2019-20 and $ 22.7 billion or 77% more in 2020-21.

Some of this money is working well.

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau broke his 2015 election promise to end all long-term boil water warnings on the reserves by March 31, liberals are doing more on this issue than previous liberal and conservative governments. .

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That said, a February 2021 report from Auditor General Karen Hogan concluded: “Indigenous Services Canada did not provide adequate support to First Nations communities to access safe drinking water.”

Similar problems exist on other issues, ranging from overcrowded and unsafe housing on many reservations to the poor quality of education that many indigenous children receive.

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In reporting on indigenous issues, Ferguson said that while most of the blame for these failures rests with the federal government, indigenous leaders also bear some responsibility.

So it was foolish for Trudeau to scrap Stephen Harper’s fiscal responsibility law, which allowed Ottawa to withhold funds from gangs that did not publish audited financial statements, including the amount paid to band chiefs and advisers. .

The only people who helped were the minority of indigenous leaders and gangs who abuse public money, as opposed to the majority who do not.

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Reference-torontosun.com

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