Canada can’t afford to fail at Indigenous reconciliation
If governments need another reason to settle with Indigenous communities and figure out once and for all who controls what land, they need only look at their own books.
Thursday’s shutdown of rail service for passengers across Canada and for cargo in half the country is only a sliver of the cost of conflict between the federal government and Indigenous communities.
Ottawa has socked away at least $15 billion to deal with legal challenges from Indigenous communities, according to the 2019 public accounts.
That’s the amount Ottawa expects to pay out sooner or later for comprehensive and specific land claims, and it’s an amount that materially affects the government’s bottom line.
In other words, the federal debt includes $15 billion for land claims that haven’t been resolved but that the government anticipates having to pay.
Accounting within the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations puts the cost of conflict much higher. It has put $20.8 billion on the books to cover off claims as well as pending and threatened litigation. Then there’s another $4.7 billion that it didn’t put on the books because it’s not sure how those lawsuits will work out.
We could probably add the $10-billion lawsuit launched this week by the Assembly of First Nations against the federal government over child welfare support.
And the department says its estimates are most likely too low — an understatement, according to some experts close to the file.
“Given the recent judicial decisions, it is not unreasonable to assume that future mandating values could exceed estimated contingent liabilities,” states the department’s financial statements for the year ending in March 2018, the most recent accounting published.
As authorities and the public wrestle with how to contain the costs of blockades and standoffs with the Wet’suwet’en chiefs and their sympathizers, and businesses ramp up their outcry over the disruption of their supply chains, the numbers show there’s a far broader and ongoing cost to the country at large for opting for superficial solutions to deep problems.
For sure, the blockade that has brought a halt in rail traffic in southern Ontario over the past week has left thousands of passengers scrambling to find other ways to travel and stalled the transport of grains, fuel, construction materials and perishable foods within central and Eastern Canada.
But that’s only a fraction of the cost to all of us for leaving so many disputes unresolved, as the government’s contingent liability figures suggest.
The liabilities have mounted sharply in the past few years, and while officials are silent on why, there’s actually a glimmer of hope in the fact that the bill has climbed.
Just over a year ago now, then-justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould issued a directive to government lawyers spelling out some guidelines on how to deal with Indigenous legal claims. The list of 20 instructions steered the government toward more negotiation with Indigenous communities and less conflict-inducing, brass-knuckle litigation.
The department had already been heading in that direction for a while and the directive formalized and codified the government’s belief that prolonging friction with communities over their land or their rights or their benefits was not really serving anyone well.
From a fiscal standpoint, the push toward negotiation and settlement instead of litigation has meant more money going out the door — with an eye toward a more settled relationship between the Crown and Indigenous communities over the long run.
But the growing contingent liabilities squeeze the federal government at a time when it’s already blown way past earlier fiscal targets and is flirting with missing its most recent target of maintaining a declining debt-to-GDP ratio.
Wilson-Raybould, sources say, argued that the cost was well worth it, and she won the day. Reconciliation doesn’t come for free.
And while none of the federal directives or settlement funds would do much to resolve today’s conflict or get rid of the blockades, the conflict is a discomfiting message about the high cost of letting things fester.
The protesters’ signs may have proclaimed reconciliation to be dead. But the national pain caused by unresolved conflict makes it obvious that none of us can afford the death of reconciliation; in fact, it’s never been more urgent.