A second minister is not progress

Ottawa’s Indigenous and Northern Affairs department is, by all accounts, a vast bureaucratic black hole where hope disappears into a bottomless pit of inertia.

It s wallowed Carolyn Bennett from the moment she got there. One moment she was the eager new minister of Native/Aboriginal/ Indigenous affairs, bent on demonstrating the new Liberal government’s pulsating keenness to right all the wrongs of the past 150 years. The next she was a fading memory, another victim of the file’s skill at taking ambition and squeezing the life out of it, like a giant government colon devouring good intentions and regurgitating them as waste.

Past prime ministers have struggled against it. Jean Chrétien gave in when his attempts at reform were rejected by their targets. Paul Martin tried to spend his way to success, hoping a big enough cheque would overcome the crushing power of its listlessness. Stephen Harper hoped to negotiate around it, only to have his deal, like Chrétien’s, trashed. Harper was never a fan of large bureaucracies to begin with; the stultifying swamp of INAC was just another example of the futility of big government.

Justin Trudeau has been slow to grasp the realities of the place. After campaigning on a pledge to revolutionize relations with Indigenous communities — committing to hundreds of promises, many of them impossible — he’s been forced to confront the usual crushing of dreams. The inquiry into missing and murdered women is a mess. The conversion of the UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights into law has been declared “unworkable.” The boil water advisories continue. Indigenous leaders remain disgruntled. The only thing making progress is the cost of settling claims for the horrific residential schools program, which has more than tripled to $3.1 billion. No one seems to know who made the original estimate or how it was calculated, which is pretty much standard for INAC. Nothing useful ever happens and the costs keep rising, but no one can figure out why and no one is ever responsible.

Trudeau’s remedy is to make t he ministry even bigger. On Monday he announced it will be divided in two, with two ministers where there used to be one. Jane Philpott, one of the few cabinet members with accomplishments to her name, will join Bennett, who clearly needs the help. Philpott’s title will be Minister of Indigenous Services, while Bennett will be Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs. Ballooning government always demands bigger and more grandiose titles.

Philpott’s job will be to en- sure those services available to Indigenous people will actually get delivered in a reasonably timely and effective manner. Bennett, for her sins, has been sentenced to constructing a replacement for the old “colonial” approach to relations in favour of a new, more workable and respectful approach. Bennett is being asked to “accelerate self- government and selfdetermination agreements” for First Nations and to “develop a framework to advance a recognition of rights approach that will last well beyond this government.”

If that doesn’t permanently remove her from the public’s consciousness, nothing will.

You can’t blame a guy for trying, and Trudeau is gamely trying to make something work. The long- term goal is to trash the Indian Act, an antiquated document that infantilizes the entire native population and puts Ottawa in charge of everything important. A record of consistent failure since Confederation — Canada’s 150th anniversary celebrations coincide with an equal period of Canadian mistreatment of the people who lived in this country before Europeans came along — suggests the time has come to junk the basic plan and start all over. Maybe it will work, or maybe not. Maybe in a year or two Philpott will have joined Bennett in the Never-Neverland of thwarted ambition, clutching one another in their forgotten offices as they wonder why nothing seems to work.

It’s a gamble. Seldom does a bigger bureaucracy make things better. The bureaucrats at INAC aren’t going to get smarter, more efficient or better motivated just because they now have two ministers desperate for progress instead of one. It may just mean neither Bennett nor Philpott has to shoulder the full brunt of blame when the next election arrives and nothing significant has been accomplished.

The election, as usual, is what it’s all about. Trudeau promised big changes in 2015. It’s 2017 and there’s none in sight. Thanks to last week’s announcement, he can point to the enlarged department and claim “dramatic” s t eps have been made. Look: two ministers instead of one! Progress!

Then he has to hope Canada’s 600- plus First Nations buy it. I can’t say for sure, but I doubt Trudeau held full “nation- to- nation” consultations with all 600 before settling on his decision, which suggests he’s still more about words than deeds. It’s also difficult to decipher how “colonialism” is going to end when Ottawa has all the money, and thus all the clout. It’s evidently now Bennett’s job to sort out such details and make it all work. Good luck with that. How does someone who can’t even oversee a decent inquiry tear down and rebuild the entire superstructure that brought about its need?