Conservatives miss mark on Indigenous issues

As long as Conservatives fail to develop a coherent policy for dealing with Canada’s Indigenous People, panicked overreactions like federal party leader Andrew Scheer firing Sen. Lynn Beyak from the Tory caucus will rule the day.

Beyak has been in trouble with the Conservative hierarchy ever since she said residential schools did a lot of good, but Scheer removed her from caucus only in reaction to letters from ordinary Canadians supporting Beyak that she posted online, some containing racist views.

Conservatives are so intimidated by Liberals on this issue that every time Conservatives are told by Liberals to jump to prove they’re not racist, the Tory response is to ask, “How high?”

That Scheer would excommunicate Beyak merely for giving a voice to opinions, including ugly opinions, held by many Canadians deeply frustrated by billions of public dollars spent every year to improve the lives of Indigenous People, with nothing to show for it, is sad and absurd. It’s indicative of what a frightened little place our Parliament has become.

The problem with the Conservatives is that they alternate between asking forgiveness of anyone who accuses them of racism and proposing solutions that focus solely on holding Indigenous leaders to account for the lack of improvement in the lives of their people.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper’s First Nations Financial Transparency Act, demanding fiscal accountability from Indigenous leaders, which the Liberals have gutted, was a step in the right direction.

The problem is, it didn’t deal with the issue of accountability from those at greatest fault. That is the federal Indigenous Affairs bureaucracy.

It has been criticized in report after report by Canada’s independent, nonpartisan officers of Parliament, such as the auditor general and the parliamentary budget officer, for failing to ensure Canadian taxpayers receive good value for money spent attempting to improve the lives of Canada’s Indigenous People.

In late 2016, auditor general Michael Ferguson described the performance of this bureaucracy as “beyond unacceptable” in a scathing report on government incompetence.

“This is now more than a decade’s worth of audits showing that (government) programs have failed to effectively serve Canada’s Indigenous Peoples,” Ferguson wrote. “Delivering effective programming requires leadership. By leadership, I include federal, provincial, territorial, and First Nations levels — with most of the responsibility falling on the federal government ... Until a problem-solving mindset is brought to these issues to develop solutions built around people instead of defaulting to litigation, arguments about money, and process roadblocks, this country will continue to squander the potential and lives of much of its Indigenous population.”

Canadians see the results of this federal government incompetence in everything from never-ending land claims lawsuits, to hundreds of longterm boil water advisories on reserves, to the appalling living conditions on many reserves and third-rate education for many Indigenous children.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s answer to this perpetual crisis is to throw more money at a broken template and split the existing Indigenous Affairs bureaucracy into two departments while promising no one — meaning the people who screwed up — will lose their jobs.

Conservatives should focus on correcting the main source of the problem, which is not Indigenous People, but an incompetent government bureaucracy that keeps them under its thumb, because the more chaos that exists, the more power it has.