Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Aboriginal Peoples
Issue 14 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Wednesday, March 13, 2002
The Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples met this day at 6:07 p.m. to examine access, provision and delivery of services, policy and jurisdictional issues, employment and education, access to economic opportunities, youth participation and empowerment, and other related matters.
Senator Thelma J. Chalifoux (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Welcome, Mr. Richards. I understand you have done quite an in-depth study on urban Aboriginal issues, and I must apologize once again since I have not yet read your study.
Please proceed with your presentation.
Mr. John Richards, Professor of Business Administration, Simon Fraser University: Honourable senators, I used to be a politician and I have sympathy for your trade. Now I am a professor. For both of these professions, having the floor and talking at length is one of our sins. I should like to go on for at least 50 minutes, but I have been told that if I exceed 15 that will be too much.
[Translation]
Honourable senators, I just finished appearing before a committee of the House of Commons. Members of that committee have insisted that they be given this document which is not translated.
I can speak French relatively well but I did have time to have this document translated. I can distribute this document to you if you wish, but it is not absolutely necessary. I am an anglophone but I wanted to give this explanation in French.
[English]
As an MLA in Saskatchewan 30 years ago, I became involved in Aboriginal matters. That was my first experience. I now teach at Simon Fraser University. At this time, we are organizing an excellent public lecture series. I will provide the address for the Web site that we have organized for that series.
I also work with the CD Howe Institute. I try to maintain some social conscience for this outfit — successfully or not, I am not sure — and I convinced them that the matter of Aboriginal policy is so acute that the institute must, despite being on Bay Street, get off its collective behind and think about policy.
Therefore, the monograph to which you referred was the first of what I hope will be a series of publications. Mine dealt with urban Aboriginal policy, exclusively. I will talk for maybe five or 10 minutes about it.
The second document will deal with matters of income distribution, from the 1996 census. We took all Aboriginals on a special run of the 1996 census, looking at outcomes for those who are on-reserve and off-reserve, by education, by province and a number of dimensions. I will briefly refer to the summary results.
The third document I hope will deal with policy of Aboriginals in the justice system.
I will stress three themes: First, patterns of migration and their implications; second, the phenomenon of the formation of ghettos — to be blunt about it — in Western Canadian cities; and finally, the painful subject of social assistance.
First, the average Canadian would have no sense of the extent to which Aboriginal people have been moving to the cities. The statistics are complicated. Roughly, in the 1996 census, almost exactly one-half of the Aboriginal population lived in cities. Of those who are registered Indians under the Indian Act, according to the official data, roughly 60 per cent live on reserves and 40 per cent off reserves, but these statistics are not particularly accurate. Probably in the census, which was completed in 2001, we will find that these tendencies of movement off reserve continue to pace in the sense that over one-half the Aboriginal population will be living off the reserves.
There are some serious problems for urban Aboriginal people, but before we go any further into those, I want to stress that the situation is better off-reserve than it is on-reserve by the kind of standard social indicators. Overall, the 1996 census indicates that the average income off-reserve among Aboriginals was roughly one-third higher than it was on-reserve. This holds true even as you move through education levels and across provinces. There are some differences. We can talk about the details afterwards.
In consideration of education outcomes, I, like many people, stress the problem of high school completion. Mr. Harvey Boston helped me with this. He is a wonderful Metis senior administrator in the Manitoba government and his obsession is high school completion. Mr. Boston has also done special statistical work for the Manitoba government. In summary terms, approximately two-thirds of Manitoban non-Aboriginals have completed high school. Approximately 25 per cent of on-reserve Indians and about 35 per cent of off-reserve Indians have completed high school. Approximately 45 per cent of Metis have finished high school. These are Manitoba statistics but they are fairly consistent across the country. I have the Manitoba statistics in my head, so I tend to dwell on them.
Given that economic opportunities are in the cities, this migration pattern will continue. If we succeed in the next decade in negotiating some treaty arrangements that transfer some assets, there will be some potential to create employment. In my province, of course, there were no treaties. I put it bluntly to you, as an economist, that in the long run this migration pattern will continue. Hence, there must be much more concern about what happens in the cities. The federal government has been too oriented to concern itself with on-reserve people. In part, that is natural because Indians are federal jurisdiction.
A good part of what this document turns around is, in a sense, a critique of the provinces. They — including our Province of Saskatchewan — have been guilty of not doing nearly enough to pay attention to the urban Aboriginal phenomenon.
Second, for those of you who are Aboriginal or are from Western Canada, what is happening in our cities may seem elementary. The depth of the problem is far more acute from Winnipeg westward than it is from Winnipeg eastward. Depending on the numbers you use, Aboriginals make up 12 per cent to 15 per cent of Manitoba and Saskatchewan's population. These proportions are much higher among the young people because there is a great deal of out-migration taking place. We are aware of that today because the census results show the declining population in Saskatchewan and an essentially stagnant population in Manitoba.
The movement to the cities is creating the formation of ghettos. In a statistical sense, the Americans have worried a great deal about it, given the difficulties that have occurred in Los Angeles and large northern cities of the United States. My colleague in Human Resources Development Canada, Mr. Michael Hatfield, deserves credit. He says that roughly corresponding to the U.S. experience, we can define a ``very poor'' neighbourhood as a census tract — roughly 5,000 to 7,000 people — in which the family poverty rate is more than twice the national average.
The statistics I have distributed indicate to what extent people in cities live in such neighbourhoods. In western cities, about 8 per cent of the non-Aboriginal population in the major western cities such as Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver live in neighbourhoods that are ``very poor'' by those criteria.
The distribution of the Aboriginal population is very different. Overall, roughly one-third of Aboriginals, by identity criterion, are living in such districts. Of the mixed origin population — those who are ethnically, partially Aboriginal and partially non-Aboriginal — roughly one-sixth are living in such districts. That is about twice the rate of the non-Aboriginal.
By far the highest proportion is among those who are single-origin Indian, for whom it is roughly 40 per cent. In the most extreme case of Winnipeg, two-thirds of single-origin Indians live in districts that are very poor by this criterion.
Still, the majority of the population in these very poor neighbourhoods is non-Aboriginal. However, we are seeing a great deal of migration emerge in Western Canada. People are moving back and forth between reserve and non- reserve, reserve and town. Oftentimes it is a ``devil and the deep blue sea'' experience in that life may be a bit better in the north end of Winnipeg than it is on the reserve in Northern Manitoba or in Saskatchewan, but maybe not a great deal better. Hence, after six months in Winnipeg, the family decides to go back to see if they cannot make a go of it on the reserve again.
I can also provide some data on mobility. There is a great deal of movement among people in the poor neighbourhoods and among Aboriginals in poor neighbourhoods. They are moving a great deal more than non- Aboriginals, which is presumably not good for the education of the children. One of the people testifying to the MPs this afternoon was a woman in charge of inner-city Winnipeg schools. She constantly referred to the theme of the difficulty in school completion when kids are moving about as much as they are. What do we do about that? I do not pretend to have a magic answer.
[Translation]
Those of you who speak and read French should read this book. Its contents do not specifically apply to aboriginal persons, but in a way, their problems are the same as those who migrate to Canada. What to do? How to integrate Vietnamese in Vancouver, Jamaicans in Toronto and Haitians in Montreal?
[English]
In a sense, the migration among Aboriginals is similar. The cultural differences between a northern Saskatchewan reserve and Regina are probably greater than those for a peasant moving from the Punjab to become a taxi driver in Vancouver, yet we have not done enough to make the school system friendly and accommodating.
Allan Blakeney, who taught me a great deal about Aboriginal matters, is a man who deserves much credit. Long before people began thinking comprehensively about matters of self-government or Aboriginal education, he, as premier in the early 1970s, was worrying deeply about it.
He makes the point that we in Canada are pragmatic. We are not like the French in some sense. We do not insist on a Jacobin school system that is the same in Lilles and Marseilles, where everyone studies the same lesson about Louis XIVth on October 8. We accommodate a lot of flexibility. We have French schools and English schools. Given there are times when religious differences have divided us, we have accommodated denominational public schools in the system. Whether it is a formally separate system, or experimental schools within the public system, we need far more experimentation within the cities, and schools that stress Aboriginal culture and history.
Standards are important. I do not want these schools to be exempt from taking the same boring Grade 10 algebra as all the other kids. I want schools where elders take part, where Aboriginal kids are made to feel proud of their heritage, and where a lot of attention and pride is induced. The inner city Winnipeg experiments, academies in Edmonton, my own high school where I went in Saskatoon, which has now become an inner city school with an emphasis on Aboriginal studies, are all worthy experiments. Honourable senators, you can prod the federal government to undertake more pilot projects of this nature.
There are undeniable problems. Some will object that this will divide our races more. However, historically, the school system — particularly in the west — has been a means of integrating Ukrainians, Englishmen, Icelanders and all the various settlers who came to Western Canada. It was an important thing to do. The trade-off is worth the experiment.
We must involve Aboriginal parents more in the outcomes of their kids. Until we do, these abysmal high school failure rates will persist. Albeit the cities are better than the reserves, they also have intolerable rates.
The most difficult subject to broach is the matter of social assistance. In a sense, Canada is 20 years behind the Americans. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Americans got rid of formal segregation. The civil liberties accorded to black people, along with a spate of great society programs in the early 1960s, were designed to overcome the legacy of American segregation. Canada has done something similar in the last 20 years in an attempt to make legal redress for sins of the past by eliminating residential schools and more explicitly accommodating equality and involvement of Aboriginals in many aspects of our lives.
In the United States, the painful aspect of this in the last 20 years has been coming to grips with the reality and the difficulties of inner city ghetto welfare dependency, which inevitably has a racial dimension about it in American discussion. You cannot discuss American welfare reform without dealing with race.
The conclusion to which Americans of goodwill have reached is that social assistance must be accompanied by more rigid work and training requirements. Symbolically, the most important thing was the scrapping of aid to families with dependent children in 1996 by Bill Clinton. That came after 15 years of intense experimentation by a number of states that were famous for doing this.
I will not give a message here on behalf of the Republicans, but there is an interesting phenomenon where Tommy Thompson, the Republican Governor of Wisconsin, now Secretary of the Interior, worked in conjunction with liberal academics at the University of Wisconsin and pioneered a great deal of workfare. Minnesota and California are among other states that have done it, although some have done it badly.
In Canada, we have yet to go through that lesson in any rigorous manner. On-reserve welfare dependency is very high and has not changed in the last 15 years. On average, over 40 per cent of on-reserve people depend on social assistance. In many small reserves far removed from economic opportunities that will not change in the foreseeable future. What is equally important to understand is that in western Canada, one-third to more than one-half of the non- reserve welfare caseload is Aboriginal. In Saskatchewan, the estimate from officials is 60 per cent. The number of apprehended kids is 80 per cent. Hence, welfare policy is intimately bound up with Aboriginal policy.
Alberta is the one province that has radically experimented under Michael Cardinal. Alberta has rendered access to social assistance for the young and those deemed employable far more difficult. The time-series figures by province show how dramatically Alberta has deviated from the norm.
This is a controversial subject, but it must be addressed if we are being honest. The cycles of intergenerational welfare dependency — by they inner-city black neighbourhoods in south Chicago or the north end Winnipeg — are socially destructive. What can be done about it? Part of it — to be blunt — is the conservative message of rendering access for the employable more difficult. Part of it is better training. Part of it is the programs to help people get through high school and part of it concerns the programs to make work pay.
I had a hand in programs in Saskatchewan. A nice, modest program is one that provides a major supplement to low- end wages for families with kids — which is not altogether different from the national child benefit program. This is a supplement to wages. If you make $600 working part-time at a 7-Eleven, within three weeks you will receive a 30 per cent supplement to your credit union account.
In summary, we have this major migration to the cities taking place. The federal government is guilty of having devoted too much of its policy attention to on reserve realities. This is not to say that this is unimportant. It is not to say that treaty negotiations are unimportant. However, not enough attention has been given to the urban reality.
As well, I would critique the provinces — particularly the four western provinces — that have not assumed sufficiently their responsibilities to make schools work for those Aboriginals who have chosen to come to town.
Second, given this reality, we are creating — particularly in Western Canada — ghetto-like communities with disproportionately large Aboriginal populations in them. The syndromes of these kinds of neighbourhoods are not good for kids.
Third, we are not treating the subject honestly if we lay aside and avoid the discussion of social assistance, which is a crucially painful and difficult subject to handle.
The Chairman: Thank you, that very enlightening. I was on the appeal panel when Mike Cardinal was making all the changes. It was, and still is, very painful when dealing with intergenerational issues.
Senator Pearson: It was an interesting and clear presentation — a treat.
All the issues are intertwined. I want to ask you a question regarding social assistance, which I know is a challenging issue. While the Americans appear to have gotten certain things right, they can say that their record of cases has dropped, However, there are other studies that look at the cost to the child when their mother is working two shifts, and the child is being left alone.
When we look at these issues, we have to look at empowering those who look after children. If we were prepared to put more money into daycare or things of that sort, we might find that more Aboriginal women would find jobs. If you are going to make them work, at least turn their obligation to parent into an asset instead of making them stop parenting and look after somebody else's children, which is often the case.
I do not know whether you captured any of that kind of information in your studies.
Mr. Richards: I will briefly answer that. I will not pretend that it will be a satisfactory answer.
Academics, given much money and much computer time, take panels of families maybe 25,000 families and follow them for a generation to determine what occurs. I have not done this, so am merely reporting that it is being done.
If you are interested in this, I will happily point you to some studies that I think are legitimate. One of the best institutes studying poverty is the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. Two of the academics there, Haveman and Wolfe, are famous in the United States for doing exactly this kind of intensive statistical work on outcomes of the next generation of kids as a consequence of the environment and the decisions made by the parents. It is hard to separate the two.
Many things matter: neighbourhoods, incomes, two parents. To the extent that you can measure it, quality of daycare matters. The theme coming out of this point is that work also matters. To the extent that you can get at it, even single parent under the disadvantages of, say, being in a lousy neighbourhood in Milwaukee has a greater likelihood of having her kids escape welfare dependency or teenage pregnancy.
Senator Pearson: I agree with you, but that was not the point to which I was speaking.
Mr. Richards: I realize that you are saying other things are involved.
Senator Pearson: I am saying that we should offer more jobs to these people. The study that we have done on working mothers in New Brunswick and in B.C. has shown some positive benefits.
Mr. Richards: Allow me to be an economist and bore you silly. You are talking about the self-sufficiency project in New Brunswick and B.C. The experiment took approximately 3,000 people in each province. The study provided that if these people worked 30 hours a week minimum, they would pay a big chunk of money as a supplement to earnings. This money would be clawed back at the rate of 50-cents on the dollar for additional earnings. That is how the scheme worked.
The schemes were not identical in New Brunswick and British Columbia. In British Columbia, this supplement was exhausted by the time a person earned $35,000 per year.
The problem with the scheme as it was set up was that it was designed in the early 1990s, before the National Child Benefit Program. A single mom in British Columbia participating in this scheme and earning $20,000, as an example, might have the opportunity to earn another $100 by working overtime at the office. That person would lose more than $100. From that additional $100, the person first loses $50 from the self-sufficiency program, leaving only $50. The person must pay income tax and EI. In addition, there are claw backs from the child benefit system.
We in British Columbia enriched the Child Benefit Program; hence, the net result of earning that extra $100 is that the subject was poorer from adding together of the claw backs from the self-sufficiency program, the claw backs from the Child Benefit Program and the taxes.
Senator Pearson: Was it not adjusted as time went on?
Mr. Richards: You ask them that question. I think that this is the Achilles heel of the child benefits system, of the self-sufficiency programs and of all these programs that are heavily targeted.
The inevitable consequence of such heavy targeting on the very poor is that those who are not quite so poor face the highest effective tax rates of all Canadians. The solution to this is to either scrap the Child Benefit Program, which I do not think we are arguing, or extend those benefits into the middle class. As well, they should not have such quick claw backs. These programs should allow that a family earning $40 000 or $50,000 could have some significant child benefits. Many countries do that.
We are branching away from our subject. If you have Paul Martin's ear at some point, tell him that if he manages a further tax cut, it should be geared to middle-class families with kids so that the federal government is not clawing back that Child Benefit Program at such a ridiculously high a rate. It is expensive, of course.
Senator Pearson: My issue was concerning women — particularly the young women — who have children. I agree with the value of work and the benefit to self-image. I want to make sure that as one moves in those directions, for the sake of the children themselves and their sense of who they are, that we put in place the other supports that are needed. The children must not be abandoned to the street while the mother is working.
Mr. Richards: I could not agree more.
I have a good friend who is a senior official in the Saskatchewan social services ministry. One of his quips to me is that his first priority is to ``keep people away from us, the ministry of human misery.''
Governments are tempted to concentrate all of the programs for the truly handicapped into one ministry with everyone else ignoring those people. Let us have child supports, wage supplements and an entire host of programs to try to keep people away from the syndromes of welfare dependency.
Senator Tkachuk: Mr. Richards, I am going to start with a comment and then ask you some questions on your research.
Just over the last decade, I have witnessed what you are talking about, in Saskatoon, Prince Albert and Regina. We are getting a significantly higher Aboriginal population in the cities. They, as do new immigrants, park themselves together. Ukrainians immigrated to the West when they came to Canada. That is what people do, like the Italians in Toronto and the Chinese in Richmond. As a result, some significant programs have come about by accident.
You discussed the schools. There are schools in Saskatoon and in Regina where, even though they are not Indian schools — they have been pioneered by the Catholic School Board — 85 per cent of the kids are Aboriginal. It is not a question of a need to have an Indian school; it is a matter of the people who live there. Indian people, rather than white people, are living there.
The cultural programs you discussed have been moved into the extracurricular. They tried the other way and it did not work. Where dance once was a part of the curriculum, it is now an extracurricular project. The school's cultural programs are built around these people's heritage. Instead of dance being on at 2:00, it is scheduled after school. The parents thought that the kids would not attend; the teachers thought they would. They showed up in the same numbers at 3:30 as at 2:00, when it had been compulsory. As a result, they were able to learn their mathematics and algebra.
I will turn to the subject of the graduation of Aboriginal kids. Many of the problems that we face on an economic level are the result of people not finishing Grade 12. How do we deal with it on the reserve? We have the problem in the cities, but the federal government has direct responsibility on the reserves. They are not graduating on the reserves either.
Therefore, what can the federal government do to solve the problem on the reserves? If you had people on the reserves that had education as a top priority, one would hope that the people immigrating to the cities would have the same attitude and mindset. However, if they do not have it on the reserve and they move to the city, it is not going to get better.
I know what you mean when you say education is a provincial matter, but we also have the situation on the reserves being a federal responsibility. What can we do to improve the graduation rate at the reserve level? It is just as bad there as in the cities.
Mr. Richards: It is worse.
I can make general observations. I have the privilege of being an academic, thus I am removed from the requirement to manage. The comments I make must be taken in that spirit.
You are pointing to one of the costs of not having settled the matter of treaties and land claims. The uncertainty that permeates the air is part of the problem. That is the easy thing to say.
As well, I believe the Assembly of First Nations is trying to maintain too many people on reserves. Aboriginals are diverse people, just as non-Aboriginals are diverse people. Some Aboriginal people very much want to maintain a traditional style of life — which is rural — linked to the land, linked to traditional ways, and want to avoid to the maximum extent possible the urban individualist lifestyle that we have.
Other Aboriginals are at the other extreme. There are many Aboriginal people, who we tend not to talk about, who have succeeded, who are computer programmers, professionals, plumbers, teachers, good people succeeding.
Unfortunately, there is a large group in the middle that is unsettled. Even for this group that has succeeded, they want cultural survival. I am not saying that they are indifferent to matters of culture and identity.
I do not see how we are ever going to make a real dent in the on-reserve school problem unless and until we accommodate more people in the cities. I do not want to imply this is social engineering; this is for Aboriginal people themselves to choose. I do not see how, on isolated reserves, you are going to be able to achieve the kind of educational outcomes for which we hope. There have to be more kids going into off-reserve schools. I come out of the CCF-NDP tradition in Saskatchewan — one of my early mentors was Woodrow Lloyd, who was premier back in the 1960s and the minister of education for much of his career. He came from small-town Saskatchewan. Woodrow Lloyd obliged non-Aboriginals to envision larger centralized high schools with bussing of kids perhaps an hour a day. There was strong resistance to it and a desire to preserve smaller local village schools.
This is not easy. You doubtless read, as did I, John Stackhouse's series in The Globe and Mail in December. One article profiled an Interlake Aboriginal community with two families. In one family, the kids had gone to the off- reserve high school, in the other family the on-reserve high school. Life is not perfect off-reserve, but my interpretation of that article — you may want to correct me — is that was probably the better solution for that Interlake community.
Senator Tkachuk: Is it cultural? I believe everything is culture in a way. I remember when we were discussing the Nisga'a agreement. I never heard a chief say, ``I want the kids on the reserve to become doctors or lawyers.'' I never heard it said once in testimony in eight years. I often think how different that was when I grew up. With the Nisga'a agreement, they talked about what it was going to be like on that reserve. I was thinking, there are all those people having kids. What if they do not want to be there? They want to be a computer person and live in Toronto, Vancouver, Hong Kong or New York. I sometimes get the feeling that this is cultural.
Mr. Richards: Historically, as a non-Aboriginal population, we are guilty of the assumption that once the Aboriginal person learned to be a farmer — or learned to be a computer programmer a hundred years on — he or she would no longer be interested in identifying as an Aboriginal. He or she would become a good British subject.
One of my friends and colleagues, Alan Cairns, a distinguished political scientist, wrote a book, Citizens Plus. He started his career in the 1960s working on the ``Hawthorne Report'' and continued to be interested in this subject until his retirement. I am plugging Simon Fraser University — last Thursday we invited him to deliver a lecture in a series I organized on Aboriginal policy.
Do Aboriginal people need to lose identity when they leave and become doctors, computer processers, teachers, or plumbers? They should not have to do that.
Senator Tkachuk: I agree.
Mr. Richards: This problem would be somewhat relieved if we made the school system in the cities more amenable. Partly, it is an inner-city phenomenon because the results are the worst there. There are also suburban chunks of Regina or Winnipeg where there are significant Aboriginal folk and, if they want their kids to have this kind of experience that is good. This somewhat relieves the problem because then you have individual Aboriginals saying, ``I can go to Vancouver and still preserve identity. I do not need to abandon it.''
We still have painful subjects. In my opinion, federal policy gears too many of its financial benefits to on-reserve people relative to off-reserve people. There is a case to be made that some of these benefits due to treaty Indians ought to be to individual Indians that they could take wherever they think appropriate.
Senator Christensen: You have stated that Aboriginal people residing in poor neighbourhoods have lower education and employment levels than those Aboriginals in better neighbourhoods. How do Aboriginals differ from other people living in those poor neighbourhoods and in the better neighbourhoods? Is it not just a fact that anybody living in those poorer areas are lower educated and have poorer employment rates? When you were looking at it, was there something specific about Aboriginal people that differentiated them from the others in those two situations?
Mr. Richards: If you have that package of material that I distributed, you will see figure 5 — it is from the CD Howe Institute commentary — pertaining to eight cities: Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal. Winnipeg is in many ways the heart of the problem. This graph provides a cumulative distribution for different groups of people if we look at how much education each of these groups has. The solid dotted line is Aboriginals in poor neighbourhoods. In Winnipeg, approximately two-thirds of Aboriginals have incomplete high school. They have not finished.
By definition, you have either a university degree or less. That is the maximum you can have. Even within the poor neighbourhoods — the black solid line is the non-Aboriginals living in poor neighbourhoods — while they do less well than those in ordinary neighbourhoods, they do considerably better than Aboriginals in these very poor neighbourhoods.
In other words, there is an accumulation of things going on. Being in a poor neighbourhood itself is a handicap. You are less likely to live in an environment that encourages you to study hard. Your peers are probably not as oriented towards a professional life whether you are Ukrainian, English or Aboriginal. However, being Aboriginal often brings additional problems. There may be intergenerational dysfunctional family problems; there may be a culture from the reserve; there may be a lot of the going back and forth between reserve and city — hence the problems are compounded.
I am not saying the bad neighbourhood is the only variable that matters. Obviously, other things do too, but it is one of the things that matter. We should be concerned about what is happening on the west side of Saskatoon, the north end of Regina or the north end of Winnipeg, et cetera.
Senator Christensen: You also mentioned creating separate urban school systems specifically for Aboriginal children. What has been the response of the Aboriginal community to that based on the experience of residential schools?
Mr. Richards: Clearly, we want to have nothing to do with compulsion when we are talking about what was the miserable experience of residential schools.
The woman in charge of the inner city Winnipeg school system said it very well:
I am not per se interested in a formally separate school system but I am very keen on there being specific schools in the public system which are very much identified as being friendly, accommodating and encouraging Aboriginal student attendance.
She cited a couple of schools in inner city Winnipeg. I know some schools in Vancouver, the academy in Edmonton and my own high school. These are halfway houses and honourable experiments. They violate the idea of one school system for everyone, which is an idea that many people hold dear to their hearts. I think it is worthwhile as an experiment, provided it is open to choice.
Senator Christensen: You are saying that it would not necessarily be an Aboriginal school but it would be a school in the inner city system that offered Aboriginal-oriented kinds of curricula that would better suit the Aboriginal children. Other children would be going there as well, but Aboriginal children would be more encouraged to go to those schools.
Mr. Richards: Yes, and these schools should not solely exist in the inner city. You may have one or two in a regular middle-class suburb. The theme that justifies this is, first, Aboriginal cultural presentation. Aboriginal people must feel confident that when they leave Nisga'a, lands in the North, and they go to Vancouver or Prince George, if they want to maintain Aboriginal culture and identity, they can.
Point two is my interpretation — this is a fuzzy bunch of literature that I do not pretend to know well among school administrators — that you want parental involvement because it helps. The more you can get parents interested in the outcomes of their kids at school, the better chances that the kids will get through Grade 12. If the school is amenable to involving elders and involving Aboriginals in a variety of ways, it is more likely that the kids will get through.
The present system is so awful in terms of the outcomes. I would be more worried about the problems of a separate system were the present system delivering. Given how poorly it is performing — both on reserve and in cities — I think you have to set aside some of the prior assumptions which we have as Canadians about the value of one single system, and experiment like crazy.
Senator Christensen: I am sure you have had the opportunity of reading The Other Side of Eden, the book by Hugh Brody.
Mr. Richards: I know of it but I have not read it. You say I should.
Senator Christensen: I recommended it to several other people who read it and almost had an epiphany as a result. From a cultural standpoint, it highlighted strongly the problems that we are having between the hunter-gatherer culture and the agricultural culture.
While the hunter-gatherers have always been seen as the nomadic people who were not rooted and were drifters and the agriculturalists were seen as a settled people, it is the other way around. It is the hunter-gatherers who are settled and very happy to stay in those areas. Conversely, the agriculturalists are conquering new lands, digging up and creating farms, proliferating and overtaking other people. I was interested to know what your assessment was.
Mr. Richards: It is cruel that it has happened. The agricultural folk came in and took the land in the last 500 years and they are not going home. Often when students come to me saying they are interested in things Aboriginal, I tell them first to go and see some good films like Pow Wow Highway or Smoke Signals or to read a book by Thomas King so that they get a feel for the sense that there is this phenomenon and reality of identity that is different.
[Translation]
Senator Gill: Mr. Richards, my question relates to welfare, to which you referred. Until the fifties or the sixties, welfare was non-existent.
Mr. Richards: You are right.
Senator Gill: You seem to suggest that in order to alleviate the welfare problem, we should be thinking of training programs, employment programs, so as to reduce the number of welfare recipients.
I sometimes get the impression that Aboriginal people may perhaps be trapped in a one-way street ever since the fifties. Obviously, we tried some solutions but we have also created a lot of problems for the Aboriginals. First there was welfare and education, because children have to go to school, and those who were hunting stopped hunting and became sedentary.
Therefore, I get the impression that since then we are headed down a one-way street, with no exit, and that we are still trying to cure the illness without looking at the symptoms.
Mr. Richards: And what do you think are the symptoms?
Senator Gill: The Indian Act is more than 100 years old. The band councils were created by the Indian Act. The band councils are perhaps not in the best interest of aboriginal nations. I get the impression that we are now on that one-way street and that there is no way out. What to do then? We are trying to find solutions to problems that are escalating.
I also sometimes have the impression that in Canada there are two groups. At first, Aboriginal people were not taken into account and people did not try to learn to live with aboriginal culture. It is true that Aboriginal culture is being promoted, but it does not go as far as promoting it with non-Aboriginals. That leads me to think that there are solitudes in our country, and to try to fix the problem, we use band-aids.
Some will tell you that we have a $7 billion budget but that it needs to be increased because it is insufficient. I would like you to react to that. There is good will on the part of everybody and everybody is trying to find solutions. We hear suggestions like work instead of welfare, education as well. However, the problem remains, judging by the increasing number of people on welfare and by the suicide rate going up.
Mr. Richards: Yes, you are right.
Senator Gill: Should we carry on doing what we did before or should we go through a fundamental change in policies? How do you see it?
Mr. Richards: I am not Aboriginal. I was born in England. I am 100 per cent English. All I said can only be considered a qualification. Let me start by quoting Mike Cardinal, whom you may know.
[English]
Prior to the 1950s, Aboriginal communities in northern Alberta were independent from government and completely self-sufficient. Everybody worked, there was no welfare, we had our own health system, alcoholism was limited, family breakdown was limited, people practised culture and lived off the land. We changed that with good intentions, but within 20 years, by 1970, a very high percentage of members in those communities had moved on to the welfare system.
[Translation]
And then there is this historical phenomenon. After the Second World War, it was decided that all Canadians should be provided the same benefits, whether they were Quebec francophones, anglophones or Aboriginals. So the reserves began to receive social assistance, old age pensions, and all the other benefits provided by a welfare state.
This resulted in the disappearance of traditional activities such as hunting and fishing. You are probably more familiar with this phenomenon than I am. I can remember travelling in northern Saskatchewan in my youth; the elders there were very proud to tell us about fishing in Orange Lake in the month of January when the temperature was 20 or 30 below. That is not something I would like to do to earn my living. Welfare is a much more attractive alternative but in the long run it proved to be a social disaster, particularly for the men.
In this respect I think that men have a more developed societal sense than women. Women can always raise their children whereas men have lost, to some extent, their reason for existence with the disappearance of the traditional activities that used to give them some sort of prestige and self-confidence.
I am an academic and if I were unable to practice my profession, then I think it would be at great psychological cost.
What can be done? First of all we can observe the problem. And Mr. Brody may talk about it in somewhat romantic terms, but insofar as I am advocating something concrete for reserves, I would say that Aboriginals should be given more benefits on an individual basis and the amounts transferred to the band councils should be decreased.
It is hard. It would mean conflicts in the bands but I think that we non-natives owe them major compensation in view of what we have done to their collective and economic life over the past 400 years.
The white paper was seen as a question of survival. We decided to go against the original provisions, namely providing the chiefs and band councils with money. In many cases they live where there is no economic basis in the reserves, they distribute this money as social assistance and this results in nepotism, and a loss of confidence among those who do not belong to the elite families.
In the long run, I do not see how we can increase accountability, and that is the key word, in reserves as long as most of the money, essentially in the form of transfers, is directed to the chiefs and bands.
It is sometimes said facetiously that there is ``no democracy without taxation'' and as Allan Blaikley used to say when I was young: ``When you step back and take a look at politics, at least half of the political debates revolve around the question: how much is to be spent and who should pay the taxes?'' That is the sort of thing that gives rise to lots of different opinions.
Should we tax more, spend more? Tax less, spend less? I will pay less, you will pay more.
This is part of a healthy community. Until Aboriginal persons in the reserves have individual access to money, they will not be able to exercise these functions in the community in a sound manner.
Senator Gill: But what do we do then? You say that there is no democracy without taxation; no democracy if people are unable to express their views about their leaders. If the people do not have the opportunity to elect their leaders, how can there be democracy in the community? I have already been a chief myself. So you realize that something is not working.
Mr. Richards: Let me return the question to you, Senator Gill.
Senator Gill: It is true that in the community there may be a lack of institutions allowing people to exercise certain controls. I agree on that point. It is necessary to create institutions on the basis of nations rather than on the basis of a community. I already mentioned to you that the reserves were set up by the Indian Act. The Indian bands did not exist before.
Mr. Richards: Yes.
Senator Gill: So if there were Indian nations in the country, if we began to set them up again — but it is starting to get late and we might perhaps have this discussion at another time. There is a problem. Because we are not satisfied with a leader or a certain type of leadership, we attempt to get around the problem. I do not think that is the way of settling the difficulty. We can discuss this later on.
Mr. Richards: I think you have raised a very deep question.
[English]
Senator Léger: You mentioned pride and how to create that. I agree that the family must be present, as you said. When I was a teacher, we had to teach children how to go to work. They had never seen their father or mother work. That goes to the pride you were talking about.
You mentioned creating a single system in education. We already have that among non-Aboriginals in the sense of private schools. It would be normal to extend it.
You cited figures in regard to the proportion of non-reserve residents receiving social assistance from 1992 to 1997. I am from the east and I almost dropped over when I saw where the Atlantic Provinces placed. We thought the problems were in the west. We will study the east another time.
The Chairman: Would you like to comment on that, Mr. Richards? That is interesting. Everyone talks about the west, but there are issues in the east, in the Maritimes. Would you comment on your findings in regard to the proportion of on-reserve residents receiving social assistance?
Mr. Richards: This is the manner in which the Department of Indian Affairs presents the statistics. They do not disaggregate the four Atlantic Provinces; they present them this way.
Atlantic Canada is the poorest of Canadian regions. In a number of instances, the conflicts are more acute because access to particular resources — such as in the Burnt Church matter — simultaneously mean access to the resource itself and access to contingent transfers such as Employment Insurance. One cannot separate one from the other.
There is a lower employment rate among non-Aboriginals in Atlantic Canada and a higher welfare dependency rate in Atlantic Canada than the Canadian average. As I recall, in Newfoundland, it is in the order of 11 per cent, whereas the national average is 7 per cent.
Proportionately, the problems of non-work and reliance on transfers are more complex and woven into much of the Atlantic Canadian community. In a sense, they are at their most extreme with the Aboriginal population.
Having said that Atlantic Canada is in the order of 80 per cent, I am equally horrified at the tendency in my former province of Saskatchewan to see that their figure is now well over 60 per cent.
The Chairman: Do you equate the downturn in Saskatchewan with the economic boom in Alberta?
Mr. Richards: I do not make that comparison. However, when I spoke about the problems of poor neighbourhoods rendering it hard to finish school, I do not wish to say that other variables are irrelevant. There is much happening here.
Alberta has clearly done much better than the other two Prairie Provinces. The reforms are part of it. The employment rate among Aboriginals in poor neighbourhoods is an interesting statistic. What percentage of Aboriginal people living in poor neighbourhoods in Edmonton and Calgary are working, relative to Aboriginal people who are in Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg in similarly poor neighbourhoods? There are significantly more Aboriginal people working in Albert cities. To what extent is that due to Alberta prospering and to what extent is it because of rendering access among the employable more difficult?
I conducted a simple bit of statistical analysis using the Alberta experience and unemployment rates across these eight cities. If it were primarily a function of the strength of the local economy, one would expect that the employment in a poor neighbourhood by both Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals would go up if the unemployment rate in the city were lower.
If you try that experiment, there is not much to be said. The relative unemployment rate in Montreal, Toronto, et cetera, does not help to explain much about the difference in employment rates elsewhere. Clearly, Alberta sticks out. This may not be because of the reforms. There are many other things going on; however, the reforms are part of it.
The situation in Alberta is primarily due to the Cardinal reforms. There are many people involved, I am just attaching his name to what was a series of things. Though I think that the reforms were the be-all and end-all of the matter.
The Chairman: In 1985, former Senator Gitter conducted a study on racism in Alberta. In that study, it was found that the Aboriginal people were the most discriminated race of people in all of Alberta.
Mr. Richards: How did they measure that?
The Chairman: I cannot quite remember how the study was conducted, but that was the result of the report. We are facing more and more latent discrimination in this country. I know, because of my children, grandchildren and great- grandchildren. I know because of the trends and issues that I face within my own community and the work that I do.
When you stated that even in the poorer neighbourhoods, the Aboriginal people were still in a higher unemployment bracket than other poor people, do you think that racism plays a part in that?
Mr. Richards: Yes, I do. In the document I have distributed, you will see figure 3A, which shows medians of income for Aboriginal people by location and education. These data were taken from the 1996 Census.
You have to look at this in groups of three. The bottom three says that for all of those Canadians who did not complete Grade 9, if you look at their average income and set that at 100, on-reserve Aboriginals earned about 60 per cent of that, and it is about 70 per cent for the off-reserve.
Fortunately, as you go through to higher levels of education, you see the gap declines somewhat. For people with some university or university degrees, the gap is smaller between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals with the same educational level. However, there is still a gap, if you like, and obviously part of that is racism.
The Chairman: If there are no other questions or comments, I thank you very much. This has been most enlightening. I appreciate your taking the time to come here to inform us of this type of thing. We have been working on this action plan for change for well over two years, because we have seen the need for something like this. We have finally got started on it.
Mr. Richards: There is a lot more to be said than what we talked about tonight.
The Chairman: Yes, certainly.
Senator Christensen: I found the use of the word ``migration'' interesting. Migration is a term that is not used frequently when talking about Aboriginal people. It is the people immigrating from one place to another.
Mr. Richards: One of the statistics I did not give you, and I will happily give this to you, was the breakdown of the migration statistics looking at these eight cities. Again, this is looking at urban people. One thing that stands out immediately is that in these inner-city neighbourhoods, the mobility among Aboriginal people is twice that of non- Aboriginal people. This cannot be good for kids completing school. There is a lot of churning back and forth.
The Chairman: This is what we have been saying. We have talked so much about the migration of people within our own country, with no support services to help them adjust.
Mr. Richards: We talk all the time about the problems of Vietnamese settling in Vancouver, but we do not do think about this.
The Chairman: Thank you. I hope if our time allows that we can have you back again.
The committee adjourned.