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| Brian Gavriloff, CanWest News Service |
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A young woman from Labrador's troubled Innu community. (FPinfomart: Allowed, Canada.com: Allowed) |
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In an ongoing series, National Post writers are being
asked a simple question: If you had the power to change a single thing about
Canada, what would it be? In today's instalment, Jonathan Kay proposes a radical
reform to our native policy.
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When it comes to what needs fixing, every problem in this country pales
beside our signature disgrace: the state of Canada's native reserves. The worst
are bastions of truly Third World-style poverty and decrepitude, infectious
disease and stomach-churning social pathologies.
In strictly numerical terms, the problem is not large. There are about
400,000 natives living on reserves -- just 1.3% of the Canadian population. It
would be a simple thing to cap this wellspring of misery if we had the right
policies in place. But that's the problem:We don't.
Every time the native file makes the news, the proposed solutions are the
same: more money and more self-government. Each year the federal government
spends over $8-billion on reserve-resident natives, or $80,000 per
reserve-resident household (a statistic I never get tired of quoting, because it
puts to rest the idea that natives are somehow being nickel-and-dimed under the
current system). We have handed over all sorts of powers to native bands, even
creating a new extra-constitutional order of government in the process.
None of this has worked, and the reason is simple: Our policy of propping up
reserves with massive government subsidies flies in the face of three
well-observed empirical truths learned the hard way in societies around the
world.
- The modern global economy is driven by cities, which serve as hubs for
high-value knowledge industries, skilled workers and transportation networks.
Rural economies have been dying since the Second World War. No government would
pay white Canadians to confine themselves to the jobless outback, hundreds of
miles from the country's universities and job centres (unless, perhaps, they
lived in Atlantic Canada, a subject for a separate "Fixing Canada" column). Yet
that is exactly what we do with our native population.
- One of the great lessons of the 20th century was that collective land
ownership is a recipe for economic disaster. Behind the Iron Curtain,
agricultural productivity exploded once people were given the right to own their
own parcels of land outright, and sell the proceeds for profit. As Peruvian
economist Hernando de Soto has definitively shown, denying land title to slum
dwellers is one of the main impediments to prosperity in poor societies.
Yet almost two decades after the Iron Curtain fell, our reserves are still
run--literally --like Marxist workers' collectives (to the extent anyone
actually works). Every once in a while a Canadian reporter wanders around a
reserve and writes shocked dispatches about the run-down quality of housing
stock. Question:Would you pay good money to take care of your house if you
couldn't sell it, couldn't use it to acquire mortgage financing and you knew
someone else would build you a new one as soon as the old one collapsed?
- Welfare destroys societies. Temporary government entitlements such as EI
are fine for helping people get back on their feet. But when they become the
permanent income source for an entire community --be it an inner-city American
ghetto or a Canadian native reserve--civic life unravels. In a welfare society,
the discipline and pride of workaday life are absent, men lose their social
function, alcoholism carries no price (the cheque arrives whether you're drunk
or sober) and people are encouraged to view government as nothing but a platform
for doling out booty.
All three of these principles have guided Western policymakers for
generations. Yet when it comes to natives, we pretend we never learned them.
Many aboriginal advocates claim that racism is the main barrier facing natives.
I would say it's the opposite: We somehow have convinced ourselves that native
societies have the collective, superhuman ability to resist the gravitational
socioeconomic forces governing every other society on Earth. Like all utopian
experiments, this one has led to disaster and heartache -- played out in
everything from water contamination to glue-sniffing to abused children.
My fix for Canada is to make life better for natives by treating them like
real human beings who are governed by the same empirically observed weaknesses
and incentives as the rest of humanity -- not Rousseauvian noble savages.
A proper native policy would be guided by the three principles listed above.
The most decrepit and remote reserves, such as Kashechewan and Natuashish, would
simply be torn down -- their inhabitants installed at government expense in
population centres of the residents' choice. The hundreds of millions of dollars
that go into running these hellholes would be used to teach job skills, detox
the drunks, educate the children and otherwise integrate the families into
mainstream Canadian life.
Those reserves that have a fighting chance at developing a self-sustaining
local economy -- either through proximity to urban centres, tourism,
agri-business or resource extraction -- would be reorganized as municipal
corporations. Land would be privatized and turned over to individuals, who would
then own it in fee simple. Natives would stay if they chose -- but only if they
could find the employment necessary to feed themselves: Aside from
treaty-mandated entitlements and regular government social programs, they would
be cut off from the dole.
Self-government would be possible, but only in the same limited way that any
Canadian city or town is self-governing. The conceit that native reserves can be
reconceived as culturally distinct "nations" would be given up in favour of a
model that promotes integration.
All this, of course, would represent a massive legal and political
undertaking -- requiring not only the destruction of the Indian Act, but also,
possibly, a rewriting of the Constitution. Even the act of parcelling out
reserve land to band members would itself be a decades-long exercise, requiring
armies of land surveyors and bureaucrats to accomplish. This is a radical fix I
am proposing, and I have no illusions about how wrenching the experience of
cultural dislocation would be for the affected communities.
That said, it is a trauma that need only be inflicted once -- as opposed to
the status quo, under which every generation of reserve-resident natives suffers
under our dysfunctional system afresh. Which, I ask, is the more inhumane?
jkay@nationalpost.com
Illustration:
• Color Photo: Brian Gavriloff,
CanWest News Service / A young woman from Labrador's troubled Innu
community.
Idnumber: 200710230063
Edition: National
Story
Type: Column; Series
Length: 1048 words
Keywords: NATIVE PEOPLES;
ABORIGINAL RIGHTS; SELF GOVERNMENT
Illustration Type: CP
PRODUCTION FIELDS
NDATE: 20071023
NUPDATE: 20071023
DOB: 20071023
POSITION: 1
