Trudeau’s shuffle can be taken as a nod to service

The recent federal cabinet shuffle started out from a modest enough need and response. Public Works Minister Judy Foote was retiring. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau needed a new representative from Newfoundland and Labrador. He chose his friend Seamus O’Regan, a former TV and radio host, who became the new minister of Veterans Affairs.

But Mr. Trudeau stamped the shuffle with a higher, even historic, purpose by implementing a key recommendation of the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. He began dismantling the paternalistic Department of Indigenous Affairs and Northern Development (INAC) by dividing it in two, as the Royal Commission advised.

One new ministry, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs, is being retained by INAC minister Dr. Carolyn Bennett. She will focus on reworking relations with First Nations and negotiating changes to implement self-government. This will involve agreements on land settlements, resource rights and treaties for First Nations that don’t have them. It means scrapping the Indian Act and its control over aboriginal people. This will likely be a long-haul process of creating a fairer and better balance of government levels in Canada.

The other post-INAC department, Indigenous Services, has pressing social conditions and poor services to address.

From unfit drinking water and substandard housing to underfunded child and family services, Indigenous people suffer every day because Ottawa has not lived up to INAC’s sweeping responsibilities under the Indian Act.

Dr. Jane Philpott, who did a good job working with the provinces as health minister, must now see that Ottawa finally does a proper job of funding or delivering essential services in Indigenous communities until, as the Royal Commission recommended, they are taken over entirely by Indigenous governments. There is a long way to go here. A UN committee damned Canada last week for not remedying findings by The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal that Ottawa is underfunding child and family services for Indigenous children, compared with other communities.

But there is an overdue recognition here that government is a service organization. It has a basic duty to deliver competent services to people who depend on them. It is inexcusable to let them down and leave them to suffer.

That’s true, as well, for another federal service fiasco, the Phoenix payroll system, which is still failing to pay thousands of employees on time or the right amounts. Fixing this must be an urgent priority for the new public works minister, Carla Qualtrough. The payments chaos is hurting people and undermining the credibility of government. Bad services and chaotic administration are things even a popular government ignores at its peril.