Making policy without concrete evidence with First Nation consultation becomes the norm of government
First Nations don't count in Harper's Canada
BY DANIEL WILSON | MAY 11, 2013
One way to make a problem go away -- at least temporarily -- is to ignore it. It's also the way to make problems grow over time.
For most governments, ignoring problems away isn't easy. It requires a thick skin in the face of criticism, a disengaged electorate, a compliant media, and a lack of immediate consequences. Sadly, those four conditions exist in Canada.
In Stephen Harper's Canada, the art of wilful ignorance has reached new heights, muzzling independent voices where they can, while attacking those who dare challenge the PMO's control. But to dumb down the dialogue and maintain policy based solely on populist ideology, you have to go after the information sources.
Nowhere is this more obvious than policy toward First Nations. The simple fact is that in Canada, First Nations simply don't count -- aren't counted -- and each effort to reduce the evidentiary basis for policy choices only amplifies this situation.
Despite a legal duty to consult, insights from First Nations are neither sought nor welcome, as is evident at every Parliamentary committee hearing into the Harper government's legislative suite. Non-governmental sources of information, like the Sisters in Spirit project that brought to light numbers around missing and murdered women, have lost their funding. Last year's report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Food Security was attacked by Harper's team and two more UN visits scheduled for later this year should anticipate the same fate. Recommendations from the Auditor General have been ignored for years, while only those experts, think tanks and academics that support the government's line are ever referenced.
The government's coming effort to rewrite history is hardly needed when it comes to Indigenous peoples. Canada has never faced its past honestly and openly in this regard, as hundreds of legal victories (or the name of the Indian Act) attest. Yet the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was forced to get a court order for documents that were part of its mandate to reconstruct the history around residential schools, documents that may prove to have been destroyed illegally. And we celebrate the War of 1812 while ignoring the anniversaries of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The release of some National Household Survey data this week and details on matters such as education and employment coming in a few months time may still yield some information of value, but over time, each successive release will be built on increasingly flimsy foundations as the quality of data diminishes. After the 2006 Census release, the government made frequent reference to numbers showing that 70 per cent of Aboriginal people live off reserve, which they believed demonstrated the increasing irrelevancy of reserves. That Métis, Inuit and non-status Indians have no more reason to be found on reserves than non-Aboriginal Canadians was convenient to blurring the definitions. The majority of those people who might live on reserve - status Indians - did and still do. But the new NHS won't tell you that either, because it didn't count people on 36 reserves, including several of the largest, failing to identify what is likely more than 100,000 people.
But the most telling example of how little First Nations count was the appearance by Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt at a special Committee of the Whole this week. Question after question from opposition members was met by a shameless and shocking lack of concrete response. Apparently, the Minister doesn't know how much money is spent, except in meaningless aggregates, nor does he know what results might be achieved with whatever is provided.
The reason for this is simple enough; the department doesn't measure what matters. Spending all of its efforts on command and control form-filling and compliance coercion, Aboriginal Affairs has no idea what the per student funding is in education, how many schools and houses are needed, or which economic development initiatives produce jobs. There is no accountability for results because the Harper government cancelled the only initiative ever constructed to obtain that information in 2006, two months after coming to office.
The effort to ignore the problem, to make policy without evidence -- actually in the face of contrary evidence -- will not stop. The Harper government is committed to its ideological approach, Conservative voters either agree with the government's false premises or simply don't care, and there is little comprehension and no sustained pressure from mainstream media.
Most importantly, as far as the government is concerned, there have been no consequences to their approach. Actually, there are many, from low educational attainment to high unemployment, from floods to a lack of clean drinking water, from violence against women to suicides by children. Those are the consequences of having the wrong policy for 150 years. But the government doesn't care.
Consequences that will make Stephen Harper pay attention have been few. Demonstrations and a hunger strike this winter forced him to hold a meeting he didn't want to hold, hardly a significant breakthrough. A full season of peaceful and sustained action resulted in a budget where the imposition of an insulting workfare scheme was its principal investment.
Ignoring the problem has only made it grow. If First Nations are to count, there must be consequences, economic, political, or both, that the Prime Minister will have to heed. People will have to stand up to be counted in ways the federal government can no longer ignore.
Photo: by Kim Elliott, flickr.com/rabbleca
Daniel Wilson served 10 years as a diplomat in Canada's Foreign Service, working mainly with refugees in Africa and South-east Asia. Joining the Assembly of First Nations, he became Senior Director of Strategic Policy and Planning. Of Mi'kmaq Acadian and Irish heritage, Daniel was a founding Chair of the New Democratic Party Aboriginal Commission and manager of the 2011 Romeo Saganash campaign for leader. He now works as an independent consultant and writes about rights. Topics covered on this blog include Indigenous and other human rights as they relate to Canadian and international politics.
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The lost long-form census means shakier insight into aboriginal issues
May. 09 2013
Canada's public policy concerning aboriginal peoples continues to be perplexed, and the country needs more rather than less significant and reliable information about their lives and circumstances; many communities are afflicted by social problems. Consequently, the loss of the mandatory long-form census is acutely felt in Statistics Canada's National Household Survey on First Nations, Métis and Inuit, which was released on Wednesday.
Several passages in the NHS allude to the difficulties of assembling solid statistics about aboriginals. The understandable ambivalence of some members of aboriginal communities about Canadian institutions can lead to a reluctance to answer census questions; a legal requirement was a real help. As Statistics Canada rightly says, "the characteristics of those who choose to participate" may - indeed probably do - differ from those who refuse, which undermines the information value of the survey as a whole.
Obstacles already existed. In 2006, 22 Indian reserves and settlements were "incompletely enumerated." That figure rose to 36 in 2011, out of a total of 863 communities. The causes vary, but in some cases a particular First Nation government does not allow the survey to proceed, or indeed to get started; in others, forest fires and other natural events get in the way. In previous censuses, participation had risen; that progress has now been reversed. Small communities differ from each other, which makes the quantity of response even more valuable. By all accounts, StatsCan makes strenuous efforts to collect this data, but the end of the long-form has made an uphill struggle steeper.
Aboriginal leaders should be eager for more data collection, to help overcome their communities' problems. John Richards of the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University rightly points out the pressing need for more statistics on aboriginal education - a matter on which the federal Conservatives are trying to achieve serious reform, notwithstanding their eccentric aversion to a more thorough census.
This year's NHS, notwithstanding its gaps, confirms some disturbing patterns, most conspicuously, the high rate of First Nations children who are in foster care. Nearly half of all the Canadian children (14 years old or less) who are in foster care are aboriginals. These and other social ills prove the need for better, fuller statistics about Canada's aboriginal peoples - not shakier numbers.
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Census replacement costs more, gets less info
By: Mia Rabson
OTTAWA -- Canadians got their first glimpse of the new National Household Survey last week.
As expected, the documents were stamped with a warning this new survey is less accurate than the old long-form census.
It sparked another round of hand-wringing and political posturing about the value of the survey and criticism of the decision by the Conservatives to scrap the mandatory long-form census.
The government was steadfast in its defence of the plan.
Although it cost as much as $29 million more to produce the survey than a long-form census, the government insisted it collects statistical data while "protecting Canadians' privacy."
"This is the principle," said Industry Minister Christian Paradis.
He went on to say the survey has data for 97 per cent of the Canadian population, that more Canadians responded to the survey than ever before and that at the national and provincial levels, the data is pretty reliable.
What Paradis left out is that in one-quarter of Canada's municipalities, not enough people responded to make the data any good at all.
One in three Manitoba municipalities will have no data published because the response rate was too low to make results statistically viable.
Wilf Falk, Manitoba's chief statistician, said while all nine cities in Manitoba have survey data published, the smaller you go, the less reliable the data gets.
So it's tougher to figure out population shifts and gaps in housing, education or health care.
He said older Canadians, new Canadians and poor Canadians are all going to be under represented in the data.
These are often demographics that government programs affect the most.
Manitoba municipal leaders fear the lack of data will affect federal and provincial funding. It shouldn't because most funding is handed out, according to population and population counts were determined using the mandatory short-form census.
Not everyone is worried about the survey.
Darrell Bricker, CEO at Ipsos Public Affairs Worldwide, said a lot of people are making a mountain out of a molehill on this one.
The long-form census wasn't perfect and marginalized groups were under represented in it as well.
But what is somewhat odd is that the Conservatives chose to eliminate the most reliable way of collecting statistics in favour of a more expensive, less-informative version, but the party itself has made collecting information on Canadians an art form.
The Liberals have Liberalist and the NDP have NDP Vote but they pale in comparison to the giant of political information databases that is the Conservatives' Constituent Information Management System (CIMS).
Every contact a Conservative MP or the party has with a voter produces information for the CIMS.
Sign a petition that you send to your MP? Answer questions on the doorstep? Send back a taxpayer-funded flyer? Call your MP to ask about something?
Your name will be there, along with tags that help determine who you're likely to vote for and what issues might turn your vote.
This information is used to target specific voters with information about specific policies or even to try to generate goodwill.
People in CIMS with Jewish-sounding names received cards for Rosh Hashanah one year. That prompted some voters to complain to the privacy commissioner. They objected to the idea they were included on a list identifying them as Jews.
CIMS is also at the heart of the Elections Canada investigation into robocalls in Guelph, Ont., as it is believed the database was used to track non-Conservative voters and target them for phone calls in which it was claimed the location of polling stations had changed.
Sure, you won't go to jail or be fined for refusing to be in CIMS, but you don't have a say in whether information about you is collected.
It seems incongruous that as political parties do everything they can to get as much information about Canadians as possible, the government has stepped up to cancel a statistical gathering tool nobody was worried about in the first place.
Rest assured, more people have complained to the government about taxpayer-funded flyers and probably even about UFOs than ever complained about the census.