Government budget for lands claims negotiations and settlement shrinking
Aboriginal land claim spending set to drop
By SUE BAILEY The Canadian Press
OTTAWA — Tensions are rising over native land disputes, but federal funds to settle them would drop under newly released spending plans.
The government’s Plans and Priorities report says the core amount budgeted to resolve land claims will be steadily cut over the next three years.
Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice says the document should be ignored, however, since he’ll move this spring to overhaul a discredited system "as soon as is practical."
Basic funding for related settlements is set at about $159 million this fiscal year, said Michel Roy, assistant deputy minister overseeing land claims at Indian Affairs.
That amount is slated to drop to just under $153 million next year and to $143.1 million in 2009-10.
The planned spending decrease is mainly due to the gradual completion of payments owed under certain major land deals, Roy said.
Yet there are no planned increases to speed a settlement process that the government itself concedes isn’t working.
An exhaustive Senate committee report earlier this year urged the Conservatives to commit at least $250 million a year. The alternative, it warned, is the flare-up of more potentially ugly clashes like the one that pitted native against non-native in Caledonia, Ont., last year over a housing development.
Frustration is once again building in the southwestern Ontario community as complex talks drag on.
Farther east, a rail blockade three weeks ago by a splinter group of Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte paralyzed passenger and freight traffic between Toronto and Montreal. The protest near Deseronto, Ont., caused chaos for a day until it was peacefully ended.
There are more than 800 unsolved claims in a growing "inventory" of cases across much of Canada, Roy says. Of those, just 120 have made it to the active negotiation stage.
It typically takes 13 years for a case to be resolved from start to finish, he says.