Some of the reasons First Nations education is still failing students, families and communities
Press Release
Strahl Throwing Bonuses to Bureaucrats as First Nation School Building Budgets Raided
2008-06-18
Charlie Angus wants to know why Indian Affairs bureaucrats have been given a massive boost in bonuses, while monies meant for school building projects are being raided to pay for a whole array of non-related items. The dramatic jump in bonuses (54% in the Ontario region) comes at a time as federal bureaucrats are raiding the school building budget of $109 million. The monies have been spent on everything from lawyers, government press functions and management costs.
Angus, who has been fighting for a school in Attawapiskat wants to know why, given their dismal record on education, Chuck Strahl is paying out bonuses.
“I have children in Attawapiskat who have to wear winter coats in their makeshift classrooms in January. And yet, the bureaucrats overseeing these schools are getting paid massive bonuses. Why is Chuck Strahl paying these bonuses? Are the bureaucrats being paid because they are squeezing money out of desperately poor communities like Attawapiskat?”
Earlier this week, the NDP revealed that $579 million that had been taken from the capital budgets for building schools over the last 8 years. The monies have been spent on items that have nothing to do with infrastructure or building.
Angus says the pillaging of school building resources has dramatically increased under Strahl’s watch.
“When the children of Attawapiskat took the extraordinary step to come to Ottawa to beg Chuck Strahl for a school, he had the gall to tell them that building a proper school wasn’t a priority. And yet, he didn’t tell them the money that should be building their school is being spent on INAC spin doctors and litigation lawyers.”
Angus says that, given the growing education and infrastructure crisis on northern reserves, it is simply unconscionable that civil servants are being treated to fat bonuses.
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$579 million shuffled from native projects
Richard Brennan - Jun 18, 2008
OTTAWA–In less than a decade, the Indian Affairs department diverted more than $500 million earmarked for native schools and other projects and spent the money on public relations and other things, according to information obtained by the New Democrats.
The information, requested of Parliament by MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay), shows Liberal and Conservative governments from 1999 to 2007 took $579 million out of the capital facilities and maintenance program fund meant for building or repairing schools, medical clinics, and other structures on reserves.
"There is a clear pattern that the money which builds schools was where they went to cover off whatever else they needed under the sun ... including paying for spin doctors. They are plundering the basic budgets for communities without schools," Angus told the Star.
Some $72 million a year has been stripped away for legal services, public affairs, education programs including teacher salaries, asset management services, and human resources and supply chain management, among other things.
Indian and Northern Affairs Canada spokesperson Margot Geduld explained the department moves money where needed.
"(It) actively monitors resource pressures to ensure that resources are aligned with priorities. That would include demographic growth pressures and provincially set price increases in education and social development and other key areas as well," she said.
Angus has been fighting a very public campaign to force Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl to approve funding for a new elementary school in the northern Ontario native community of Attawapiskat, in Angus's riding.
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The worst choice, except for all the others - Schools on first nations reserves weren't up to the task then, and they may not be now
TOM FLANAGAN - June 18, 2008
Wherever they went in Canada, Christian missionaries set up voluntary boarding schools and day schools for aboriginal children. The Canadian government began to involve itself at the end of the 1870s, when the end of the buffalo destroyed the economy of the Plains Indians and Métis. Famine loomed in the short term; in the longer term, it seemed necessary to help the native population convert from hunting to agriculture as a way of life.
What happened on the Prairies in the 1870s occurred everywhere in Canada at one time or another as the expansion of white settlement undercut the viability of the aboriginal economy. One can talk glibly about preserving native culture, but cultures don't exist in a vacuum. Culture is a way of making a living; when the means of survival undergo a fundamental shift, people will perish unless their culture is also transformed.
Once settlement extended from sea to sea, the future was clear: No one had any prospects in Canada without being able to read and write English or French, to acquire skills other people would pay for, to work according to the standardized calendar of an industrial society and to deal freely with others outside the kin group. That meant a massive cultural transformation for native people, and formal education had to be part of it.
It would have been truly genocidal for Canada, having destroyed native people's livelihood, to refuse assistance in educating their children to survive in the new world of industrial civilization. Native leaders were well aware of the challenge and begged for help. But how to deliver it?
Then, as now, three major alternatives existed for Indian children: to mingle with other children in off-reserve public schools, to attend day schools on the reserve or to be sent to residential schools. All three options were widely used; indeed, historian Jim Miller estimates that, even at the residential schools' peak, they never enrolled more than one-third of Indian and Inuit children.
Residential schools were mainly established in the West and North, where distances were great and native populations were still attached to whatever was left of the hunting and fishing economy. Under those conditions, children's attendance at day schools was often erratic or impossible, as their families would be away for long periods each year.
Now, we have turned against residential schools and decry the hardships they imposed on children and their families. But do we really know how much, or even whether, residential schools were worse than the other alternatives feasible at the time? The Department of Indian Affairs should commission some systematic research into the life outcomes of the graduates of the three forms of native education. Which group achieved greater material success, suffered fewer social pathologies and raised more successful children and grandchildren? Researchers in the department could answer those questions if they were given the assignment.
Such research is not just a matter of antiquarian curiosity. We badly need reliable information on the history of aboriginal education, because we (and "we" includes aboriginal leaders) are not doing so well in the present. Fifty years from now, we may be apologizing again for having failed aboriginal youth after the residential schools were phased out.
Investigative reporter Daphne Bramham reports that 27,000 aboriginal children are now in government care, compared to 9,000 children in residential schools at their apex in the 1940s. Much child protection is now carried out by aboriginal agencies, so this cannot be just a matter of overzealous white social workers scooping up culturally different native children. These are children suffering abuse or severe neglect.
What about educational achievement? In 2001, 41 per cent of Indians on reserves over the age of 15 had completed high school, compared to 69 per cent of all Canadians. (Statistics Canada did not collect comparable information in 2006.) In 2006, 4 per cent of Indians on reserves aged 25 to 64 had university degrees, compared to 23 per cent of all Canadians. Some first nations people have made inspiring progress in acquiring educational credentials, but the rate of advance seems to be levelling off. It is now little greater than the rate of advance in the general population. While there are heartening stories of individual success, the overall statistical picture is not so encouraging. Day schools on reserves have come in for considerable criticism.
The Office of the Auditor-General studied the education program of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada in 2000 and again in 2004. Both times, it came to the same conclusion: "The Department does not know whether funding to First Nations is sufficient to meet the education standards it has set and whether results achieved are in line with resources provided." Aboriginal leaders may be right that financial support for reserve schools is inadequate, but more than money is involved. Michael Mendelson of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy points out that self-government for first nations has led to "a standalone village-school model of education - a model that was outdated in the rest of Canada before the Second World War." And anecdotal evidence from reserve schoolteachers points to a distressing lack of family and community support for regular attendance, homework and other aspects of academic achievement.
The value of governmental apologies for past policies has been hotly debated. In any event, maybe we all can agree that apologies for residential schools should be accompanied by a hard-headed look at the current problems of aboriginal education.
Tom Flanagan, a former top aide to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is now a professor of political science at the University of Calgary, and author of First Nations? Second Thoughts