‘TALK AND NOT A LOT OF ACTION’
TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION DRAWING MIXED REVIEWS
Bob Baxter told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2010 about his early memories, from before he was sent to residential school.
“You know there’s a lot of things … that are still in my thoughts of how we were loved by our parents,” he said. “They really cared for us. And it was such a good life, you know.”
Later, he spoke of being beaten up and knifed at school in Sioux Lookout, Ont., and of his loneliness. His words were recorded in the commission’s final report, released two years ago Friday.
The TRC spent five years documenting the stories of residential school survivors. Its final report is both a record of what it labelled “cultural genocide,” and a demand for action.
But two years later, despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s insistence that “no relationship is more important to Canada than the relationship with Indigenous peoples,” the federal government is getting mixed reviews on its promised implementation of the TRC’s 94 calls to action.
On Thursday, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett told reporters the government takes its commitment to the TRC “very seriously.”
“I think there is really important work, such that no one can say that this report is sitting on the shelf,” she said.
But not everyone agrees. “I would say there’s lots of good talk and not a lot of action in terms of translating those political statements into real change,” said First Nations child welfare advocate Cindy Blackstock.
She’s not alone in criticizing the Liberal government’s performance on Indigenous affairs, as it grapples with a long list of commitments and high expectations its promises helped set. “The challenge has been that the good intent and the ambition that this government has shown is very hard sometimes to translate into concrete action,” said Natan Obed, president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami.
Still, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde said it’s important to manage expectations. “Things are not going to happen overnight,” he said. “What I’m appreciative of … is that Canadians are starting to get it in terms of understanding the socioeconomic gap that exists between First Nations people and the rest of Canadian society.”
In a statement Friday, Senator Murray Sinclair, the TRC’s chief commissioner, said it will take time to come to terms with the legacy of residential schools. “Reconciliation is a process,” he said. “We must remind ourselves and each other that we need to be patient but persistent with this process.”
‘Unprecedented’ access, better relationships
Ottawa has taken some clear steps to deliver on its promises, though not all have gone over smoothly. The government launched its long-awaited national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women in September 2016, though it has been plagued by accusations of poor communication and slow progress.
Last month, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said the government would support a bill sponsored by NDP MP Romeo Saganash, which calls for the full implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), after having previously called the declaration “unworkable.”
There has been quieter progress, too. An Indigenous languages act is in the works, and the government is developing training on Indigenous history and rights for all public servants. Next year, Canada’s citizenship oath will be updated to include a pledge to respect Indigenous treaties.
And on Thursday, Bennett announced that work is underway to set up a national council for reconciliation, an oversight body that will report on the government’s progress.
“I think we’ve made some very, very important progress, but what we need is the council,” said Grand Chief Wilton Littlechild, a commissioner with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission who will lead the project. “We need the monitoring of all this good activity.”
In general, said Obed, the relationship between the government and Indigenous people has improved since the Liberals took office.
“The access that we have to the prime minister and ministers within his cabinet is unprecedented, and that is to be lauded and praised,” said Obed. “If that is the end goal of this government, they do have more relationships than they did in the past.”
‘Our kids are still in desperate need of care’
But that, presumably, is not the end goal of this government. And it’s with respect to many of the more concrete calls to action — reducing the number of Indigenous children in foster care and eliminating funding gaps in education and health care — where progress is harder to see.
“There is this real tension that we have right now … between these big-picture chunks that we need in place and the immediate, tangible crisis that continues to play out in Indigenous communities,” said Ry Moran, director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg.
“We hear from community members all the time. They say, ‘Look, there’s all this nice talk about reconciliation, but … our kids are still in desperate need of care.’”
The 18 calls to action related to health, education and child welfare now fall under the purview of Indigenous Services Minister Jane Philpott, since Trudeau announced in August that Indigenous and Northern Affairs would split into two departments.
In an interview Thursday, Philpott said there’s been “remarkable” progress on some calls to action. She pointed to the government’s efforts to implement Jordan’s Principle, which requires that necessary services be provided to First Nations children immediately, regardless of disagreements about which level of government should pay for them.
She said the government has approved more than 29,000 requests received under Jordan’s Principle since 2016, thanks to an injection of $383 million in federal funding, including for physiotherapy and mental health support.
But where Philpott sees a win, others see a government dragging its feet. In January 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal found the federal government was discriminating against First Nations children by failing to provide them with the same welfare services given to children living off-reserve, and ordered the government to fully implement Jordan’s Principle, which extends to health, education and child welfare.
Since then, the tribunal has slapped the government with three non-compliance orders, most recently in May. The government initially planned to go to court over the latest compliance order, but withdrew its case last month.
Earlier this month, Philpott said more money for child welfare would be forthcoming in Budget 2018, but didn’t provide any numbers. She has also called an emergency meeting with the provinces on Indigenous child welfare in January.
“It shouldn’t take court orders to get the government to treat First Nations children fairly, in ways that keep them safely with their families,” Blackstock said. “But they didn’t take the action needed. … So that to me is very disappointing.”
The calls to action also demand that the government eliminate the funding discrepancy between students attending schools on- and off-reserve. According to Indigenous and Northern Affairs, Budget 2016 included $2.6 billion for on-reserve education over five years. But last December, Canada’s budget watchdog reported that on-reserve schools could still be underfunded by $665 million in 2016-17.
Blackstock said she hoped the government would announce a plan to close the gap after the report came out. “But no announcement has been forthcoming.”
The TRC report also calls for annual reports on the number of Indigenous children in care, the education funding gap, and health outcomes in Indigenous communities. To date, that’s largely not happening.
“I can’t sit here today and tell you with any accuracy how many First Nations children are in care, or how many children are in care in general,” said Blackstock. “Some of these basic questions that you need to inform policy, we can’t answer.”
According to Statistics Canada census data, Indigenous children under four made up 7.7 per cent of all children and 51.2 per cent of children in foster care in 2016. In 2011, there were more than 14,000 Indigenous children under 14 living in foster care.
But Philpott said the federal government has to work with Indigenous communities to figure out how to collect more precise data. “We’re not in a world where our government should be dictating to communities that have the right to self-determination what they need to be reporting and how,” she said.
There are many other calls to action that have yet to be addressed. There is, as yet, no National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, nor is there a national monument to residential schools in Ottawa. Registries of students who died at residential school and of the cemeteries where they’re buried have yet to materialize. There’s also no national research program to advance understanding of reconciliation.
Cathy McLeod, the Conservative critic for Indigenous affairs, said her major concern is that implementation of the calls to action to date has been “shrouded in secrecy,” without proper analysis or costing.
“They seem to be scattered, there doesn’t seem to be a logical process,” she said. “I think the execution and the transparency for both the Indigenous community and Canadians is quite puzzling, to be honest.”
‘Reconciliation means not saying sorry twice’
When it seeks re-election in a little less than two years, the Liberal government will have to answer for its record on the TRC calls to action. But it’s unclear how success or failure will be measured.
“People often measure progress in terms of whether boxes have been checked,” Philpott said. “But the work that we’re doing is much more than ticking off boxes.”
Still, that’s basically what the calls to action are — a list of boxes to be ticked, to help right past wrongs. And at the moment, said Obed, there aren’t a lot of check marks. “There are many things that are in flux, that have been started, but there are very few things that we can all champion together and say, ‘That was a job well done on this particular item,’” he said.
Where to go from here, then? That depends on who you ask. “We have to lobby harder every federal budget,” Bellegarde said. “That’s how you bring about policy and legislative change.”
He also said the coming Indigenous languages act is vital. “We never want to ever say that these residential schools won,” he said. “So we can still speak Mohawk and Cree and Mi’kmaq and Dene and Blackfoot and Ojibwe. We need those languages, it’s part of who we are.”
Obed said the government must come up with a concrete action plan. Moran said the national council must be set up to provide oversight. Blackstock said that, above all, the government must properly fund welfare services for Indigenous children, to prevent more children growing up without their parents.
“And the reason I’m focusing on children is that, for me, reconciliation means not saying ‘Sorry’ twice,” she said. “You cannot lament the past by perpetrating those same wrongs in the present.”
‘WE CAN’T ANSWER’ BASIC QUESTIONS.