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From Winnipeg Free Press ...

Study busts myths about aboriginals - New report opens door to new policy options

Sat Mar 10 2007 - By Paul Samyn 

OTTAWA -- The Harper government has a myth-busting report that challenges a number of assumptions about the plight of Canada's aboriginal people and opens the door to new policy options to address native poverty.

The study, obtained by the Free Press, says there is no evidence to support the view that natives are increasingly fleeing reserves to seek a better life in Canada's cities.

The report, commissioned by the Human Resources Department shortly after the Tories took power last year, also finds that in some cases the economic and educational gaps between natives and non-natives are not as great as widely believed.

With the country's aboriginal leaders pressing the Tories to spend billions of dollars more on First Nations, the document may help shed light on both the thinking driving the government's approach to natives and also what may transpire in the March 19 federal budget.

"Misconceptions of aboriginal data are having an impact on policy," says the report, released under the federal Access to Information Act.

"Correcting these misconceptions by careful review of empirical data is an important part of the policy process."

The report's author is Michael Mendelson, a senior scholar at the Caledon Institute of Social Policy in Ottawa and a former Manitoba deputy minister of social services.

Among the surprising facts he uncovered about the country's roughly one million aboriginals:

• the aboriginal participation rate in the workforce is higher than expected and close to the Canadian average;
• aboriginal high school graduates are just as likely to complete post-secondary education as other high school graduates;
• aboriginal people in both Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island are more likely to complete non-university post-secondary education than the non-native population.

In his report, which cost taxpayers $22,470, Mendelson makes clear the government may need to rethink approaches to improving both the education levels of aboriginals and their economic opportunities.

Some other findings from report inlcude:

• There is no mass migration from reserves into cities. Reserves and cities alike both have rapidly increasing aboriginal populations. Population shifts cannot be used as a rationale for moving resources from reserves to cities or vice versa.
• There is no province in which the aboriginal workforce will become half or more of the total workforce, although it will play an increasingly important role in several provinces, especially Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
• The largest urban concentration of aboriginal people is in Winnipeg at a little more than 50,000 -- not Toronto as sometimes claimed.
• When it comes to native education, there is a divide between East and West. In the West, aboriginals are doing even more poorly on several indicators of educational achievement. This is ironic, since demand for workers is so high in the West.

"All the socio-economic indicators we have reviewed, with only a few exceptions, are much worse than for the Canadian population as a whole," says the study, released to Ottawa researcher Ken Rubin.

"The exceptions stand out and are important as they may provide an anchor for successful policy initiative.

"Perhaps the most surprising finding is that the participation rate of aboriginal workers is almost as high as the total population's participation rate. This is particularly surprising in view of the extremely high unemployment rate facing aboriginal workers.

"This has a clear public policy implication: Do not worry so much about incentives to get aboriginal people looking for work. Worry about how to assist aboriginal people to obtain good, well-paying jobs or the skills and knowledge that lead to well-paying jobs."

Mendelson also suggests the government's education focus should be on having aboriginal youth complete high school -- rather than focusing on post-secondary education. Almost 50 per cent of working-age aboriginals did not finish high school.

"Do not worry so much about diverting aboriginal graduates from, for example, arts into sciences or from colleges to universities. Instead concentrate on getting more aboriginal students to complete a good-quality high school education and graduate.

"In some cases this may mean providing accessible, 'second chances' for older aboriginal students that are now ready to take on this challenge. But the main challenge is to get more aboriginal students graduating with a good high school education and a certificate in the normal time that most students complete their high school."

Mendelson also treads on a potentially controversial view by suggesting that part of the problem facing aboriginals is that a larger percentage of their incomes comes from government transfers, unlike non-natives who have access to other forms of money, such as income investments or bequests.

"It may mean that employment per se is not the only solution to persistent poverty and that the accumulation of other forms of wealth and access to income needs to be considered. In other words, wealth may play a more important role."