bad ideas are like vampires

Just when it seemed safe to assume that Paul Martin was boarding a slow Canadian Lines Steamship to Barbados, he struck out from his political grave to festoon the legislative agenda with the flotsam of his mercifully short tenure as Prime Minister. I speak of Martin's private member's bill (C-292) which would compel the Government of Canada to allocate $5.1 billion to the big basket of priorities that Martin, the Premiers and Canada's Aboriginal leadership sketched out in November 2005. While Martin's commitment to improving the clearly intolerable condition of Canada's Aboriginals is noble, the spending promised under Kelowna will do little if nothing to improve these conditions and his private member's bill will join Pablo Rodriguez's C-288 fantasy in the realm of political pose over policy.

On the surface, the Kelowna Accord looks to many like a sunshine and daisies news story. I mean who could be against $1.2 billion in primary and secondary educational spending? But, take a look at the breakdown:

$1.05 billion over the next 5 years to promote education innovation on-reserve, including assistance to establish a network of First Nations school systems, with regional school authorities administered under First Nations jurisdictions and enhancements for First Nations basic education services; and,

$150 million over the next 5 years for off-reserve initiatives within the public school system, including $50 million to improve education in the North.

Of the 1,319,890 Aboriginal people in Canada, 610,000 are considered First Nations Peoples, and only 50 per cent of this sub-set actually live on-reserve. Also, these figures are from the 2001 census and migration patterns have only accelerated away from the reserves since. So, why are 87.5 per cent of the Kelowna education dollars being spent on only 23 per cent of the Aboriginal population? Isn't this distribution just slightly skewed away from the evolving reality of modern Aboriginal life in Canada? One sees a similar pattern in the 1.6 billion allocated to housing, where 62.5 per cent of the money will move in the opposite direction from where the people are walking. Ultimately, the Kelowna accord is fatally skewed towards Reserve interests, the one part of the system which under the suffocating embrace of Indian Affairs has consistently failed Canada's Aboriginals.

Clear thinking about the Kelowna Accord appeared Monday in, of all places, the Toronto Star where Carol Goar writes:

But there is a more fundamental problem. For a growing segment of the aboriginal population, the Kelowna Accord reflects an outdated reality.

Mark Podlasly, a dynamic young native leader with a Harvard degree and a global business, speaks for that group. He headed the Liberal Renewal Commission's aboriginal task force.

His generation, Podlasly says, wants to break out of the stultifying hierarchy of governments and native organizations enshrined in Martin's plan. Despite the loss of social benefits and the high risk of poverty, aboriginal young people are heading for urban centres. They'd rather take their chances than wait for Ottawa and their own leaders to deliver on their promises.

Podlasly, who belongs to the N'laka'pmx First Nation in British Columbia, and his team of indigenous writers have drafted a thought-provoking report urging the Liberal party to circumvent, rather than buttress, the structures that are holding aboriginal people back.

Podlasly gets the issue in a way the Martin did not, and judging by his subsequent actions, never will. His Kelowna Accord serves only to reinforce failure and, for all of his stultifying bluster about being a transformative leader, harbours practically no big ideas. I could understand a large transfer to Chiefs and Band Councils if it was intended to be some sort of transitional fund, or even an out and out sweetener, and tied to some sort of radical transformation of the status quo. Where in the Kelowna Accord is a promise to begin funding individual on-reserve Natives instead of bulk transfers Band Councils? Imagine, a leadership that must just justify its expenditures to its constituency instead of some guy at a desk in faraway Ottawa. There are vague noises in the release about supporting "market-based approaches" to housing on-reserve, but where is the enshrinement of property rights that would allow home owners to build equity and provide tangible incentives to maintaining property? The fundamental question is, what changes are there in the Kelowna Accord that will create prosperity in places where it is chronically in short supply. I can find none.

Is it just all about money posing as morality? We do have a political culture which equates the depth of the government's compassion with cash contributions. But, Kelowna falls short even by this sad yardstick. It is also interesting to note, that using the AFN's own numbers, the funds promised under the Kelowna Accord would only take per capita spending on Aboriginal Canadians back to where it was in 1996-1997. The AFN believes that $1 billion in catch-up funding alone is required, plus annual budget increases of about $500 million a pop. Using these figures, five years of Kelowna funding will nudge total Federal spending on First Nations just past the 1996-1997 baseline, which is of course remembered as a time of unbridled prosperity on the reserve.

Nevertheless, the idea of doing something, anything — even if it will accomplish less than nothing and further entrench existing problems — has its disciples. Throughout Canada's blogosphere, one can find numerous supporters of Bill C-292 and the Kelowna Accord itself. Unfortunately, I did not find much in the way of arguments as to why Kelowna would work. But that's okay, we all intuitively know that the true path to prosperity is paved by big government paydays.

Of course, if the premise were true, 50 years of federal transfer payments would have made Atlantic Canada wealthy. If government spending could truly buy prosperity, the $2.1 trillion dollars spend on official development aid to the developing world over the past half-century would have generated some sort of recognizable success. But none of these things have happened; instead these transfers have become institutionalized and have spawned a remora-like cottage industry dedicated to advancing the idea that just one more big push (read: big cheque) will somehow solve the problem.

That's not to say that some febrile Bill C-292 supporters did not manage to stand out for the crowd. The one and only Big City Lib made his 'contributions' on his own site and then took his roadshow over to the Prairie Wrangler, where Olaf wrote an insightful post about whether Bill C-292 is even valid. But of course, BCL didn't read Olaf's entry, he even said so. He didn't advance even one reason as to why the Kelowna Accord would improve the lives of Aboriginal Canadians in any of his comments on Olaf's post nor on his own on the same subject, which is his ostensible reason for supporting the Accord, right? His sole contribution to the issue was to tar anyone who may deign to oppose Bill C-292 as "anti-first-nations," "fucking over the Indians" or of "racism" in general. If there was any doubt that Big City Lib is indeed the crown prince asshat of the Liberal blogosphere he sure set the record straight with just a few short keystrokes.

There is much good that our government can do to improve the lives of Aboriginal Canadians. Sadly, very little of it found its way into the Kelowna Accord nor Paul Martin's latest attempt to scrub the barnacles off the shipwreck of his Prime Ministership.