September 1/1998
This report addresses the problem of determining a sound system of arrangements and rules in New Zealand relating to accidents that involve bodily injury. The problem divides naturally into two parts.
Lawrence Solomon
The Next City
September 1, 1998
In the 1960s and 1970s, homelessness was virtually unknown in North America, the term not even in public parlance. In 1964, Columbia University researchers scoured four Manhattan parks to count those sleeping there: They found one man. Likewise, in Chicago, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Montreal, and other major cities, homelessness was the exception and not the rule. In the 1960s, big city newspapers rarely ran stories on the homeless, unlike the last decade when they averaged one homeless story every two days. Until the 1980s, the homeless were not part of a widespread phenomenon; they were exceptional hard-luck cases.
Then these exceptions became the rule. Not because poverty suddenly increased — it didn’t. Not because welfare was drastically reduced — generally welfare became more generous. Not much because mental institutions suddenly released their patients — the deinstitutionalization of mental patients that took place in the 1960s and early 1970s explains a small fraction, perhaps one-tenth or one-twentieth, of the torrent of homelessness that engulfed our major cities in the 1980s.
One factor, and one factor alone — changes in housing policy — accounts for the immense rise of homelessness: Governments outlawed much of what was then the bottom end of the housing market — the derelict apartment buildings, seedy hotels, and rooming houses — while legalizing vagrancy. In this way, and with only the best of intentions, governments replaced a vast supply of substandard, but low-cost housing with a much vaster, much more substandard, and much lower-cost supply of housing in the form of our streets, back alleys, and parks.
Before the government inadvertently converted our public spaces into sleeping quarters, poor people — including alcoholics and the mentally ill — lived in low-rent districts, muddling along as best they could. Those poorer still doubled up with them, or sublet rooms in exchange for cash or household services, typically babysitting for women, odd jobs for men. There was nothing particularly noble about most of these arrangements: The poor who put up still needier relatives on their living room couches would have preferred the space for themselves; those put up often felt dependent and unwelcome, and, had they the wherewithal, many would have left their position of servitude. Nevertheless they made do, keeping up appearances and maintaining relations, however poorly. Relatively few people relied on shelters.
Then came urban renewal, a euphemism for slum clearance that levelled much of the low-quality housing stock across the continent. Newark and New York City lost almost half of their low-rent housing between 1970 and 1990; New York City’s Bowery, with 10,000 beds in 1965, had but 3,000 in 1980. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chicago lost 20 per cent of its low-rent housing; of the 10,000 spaces in the Loop area’s cubicle hotels, 600 remained. By the early 1980s, Toronto lost virtually all of its 500 flophouse beds; by the end of the decade, it had lost one-third of its rooming houses. Between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s, the number of unsubsidized low-cost units fell 54 per cent in the typical large U.S. metropolitan area. Public housing — once a shining hope — failed utterly in housing the very poor.
While the stock of low-cost housing declined, the cost and difficulty of living on the cheap increased. Welfare recipients who doubled up with family members faced benefit reductions, giving them and their families reasons to drift apart. Rent control legislation, which stopped apartment building construction, backfired on the poor. While it kept rents low, a surplus of apartment seekers gave landlords the luxury of picking and choosing tenants: In competition with stable tenants able to pay rent on time and unlikely to damage property, the down-and-out had no chance. The housing shortage and rising land prices also spurred gentrification of old neighborhoods that housed the destitute, leading to their eviction. Even tenant rights legislation backfired. Because it prevented landlords from evicting the prostitutes, drug dealers, and rowdy tenants who caused good tenants to leave, they stopped renting to anyone with the potential to be troublesome. When governments extended rent control and tenant rights to rooming houses and single-room occupancy hotels, and tightened housing regulations to force landlords to better maintain the dwindling stock of decaying housing, the landlords themselves vacated. Much of the low-income housing was lost to fires, often arson was suspected.
With so much low-rent housing demolished, and so much of the balance reserved for respectable tenants, the poorest of the poor had no place to go but the streets, newly freed up through the repeal of vagrancy laws. To those with addictions, this dark cloud had a silver lining: Without accommodation costs, they could devote more of their meagre income to their habit.
Those we call homeless are not a homogeneous lot and, often, not even homeless. In many cities, the majority of panhandlers, squeegee kids, and other street people that we come across have fairly conventional abodes. Meanwhile, the majority of the truly homeless escape our view: In a 1989 study of Chicago’s homeless, interviewers found most to be “neat and clean” and only 20 per cent to panhandle or take handouts. Most homeless do not make a career of it: They find themselves on the street following some unmanageable stress — the death or illness of a loved one, the breakup of a relationship, debt, and legal problems top the list — and then they pull out of it. Yet most remain deeply disturbed. According to a recent study of Toronto’s homeless by the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, two-thirds have a lifetime diagnosis of mental illness, and two-thirds suffer from alcohol and substance abuse. Only one homeless person in seven in this highly vulnerable population suffers from neither.
Although most are mentally ill, few are seriously so. Only about 10 per cent of the homeless population has suffered from some severe mental illness, most often not the schizophrenia we associate with the homeless but a dark depression. While most of the severely ill lack proper treatment, few belong in institutions. The vast majority of mentally ill people, today as before deinstitutionalization, live in the community. Only today we’ve made the pavement the only practical housing choice for all too many of them.
The more important characteristics of the homeless — whether or not they’re mentally ill — are that they have fewer work skills, fewer social skills, and less resourcefulness than the housed population. They have difficulty maintaining relationships with friends and family. Almost half reported that they could rely on “no one” in their lives. Only four per cent were married or in common-law relationships. All this speaks to their lack of community and numbing sense of isolation — conditions that, above all, explain much of the social pathology that is homelessness. Being society’s least valued members, they are the first to be fired, the last to be hired, those most shunned in civil society, modern lepers.
Those who live on the streets do not appear as a line item in government books, except for the odd outreach program. Neither do taxpayers take a direct hit. Some resent, others pity, the panhandlers; some fear the talkers and ravers that they encounter, but most see the homeless as an unsettling but cost-free fixture on the urban landscape.
Failing to deal with homelessness is a false economy, quite apart from the great moral costs of turning our backs on this defenceless population. The homeless cast a pall on our use of our cities, prompting parents and their children to abandon the public parks they frequent, pedestrians to avoid places they might be accosted, and merchants to relocate. The homeless show up big time in our penal system — 30 per cent have spent time in police stations or jail in the previous year — and in our health care budget.
As shown in a study published in June in the New England Journal of Medicine — the first extensive documentation of the impact of homelessness on the health care system — the homeless have been exacting a silent toll on a society that ignores their plight. The homeless at New York City’s public hospitals stayed an average of 4.1 days longer, and cost an average of $2,414 more per admission, than low-income patients who had homes. One group of psychiatric patients, whom clinicians believed couldn’t be discharged safely, averaged 70 days more than otherwise called for. At the city’s flagship Bellevue Hospital, nearly half the admissions were homeless. “The homeless account for less than one-half of one per cent of the city’s population, but they are having a huge impact on the health care system,” said Sharon Salit, the report’s lead author. “The extra costs for a single hospital admission are as much as the annual welfare rental allowance for a single individual in New York.”
About half the homeless admissions required treatment for mental illness or substance abuse, and half for skin disorders, respiratory complaints, trauma, and parasites – problems generally regarded as preventable among other populations. “For want of a place to clean between their toes, change their shoes and socks, and elevate their feet when they get swollen, homeless patients get infections in their feet” that often become a chronic condition called cellulitis, said Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, Bellevue’s director of emergency medicine. “We almost never see that among people who have homes.” A 1996 study of Los Angeles’s homeless warned that TB could reach epidemic proportions.
The homeless need medical care, especially psychiatric care. We must generously fund outpatient programs: Just as nobody would release Alzheimer’s patients onto the streets without adequate treatment and supervision, we cannot let these vulnerable people fend for themselves. We must also ensure that those few who are a danger to themselves or to the public receive compassionate care inside an institution. But most of all, the homeless need homes and an end to their alienation, without which their condition cannot improve. Most homeless advocates, while understanding the need for more housing, too often seek quick-fix solutions in government housing, forgetting that the last thing the homeless need is to be warehoused in anonymous public housing supervised by a faceless government bureaucracy. We must require the homeless to engage the rest of us.
The way out of homeless begins by backing out of the same path that created it. We must restore vagrancy laws, both to safeguard the public sphere for us all and to require housing for those unable to properly look after themselves. To shelter those evicted from the streets, welfare must provide the down-and-out with housing vouchers that can be used anywhere, not just in shelters but in exchange for that couch in a relative’s living room. (To discourage a black market, each voucher should identify its recipient and be dated, and the landlords, rooming houses, and others who accept vouchers without housing the voucher recipient should be liable to fines.) Generous vouchers will minimize substandard housing.
To encourage friends and relatives to take the homeless in and other landlords to re-enter the business, we must throw out rules preventing easy evictions of tenants who disturb the peace or otherwise fail to meet their obligations to their neighbors and the landlord (even publicly funded hostels and shelters routinely evict or refuse to admit disorderly occupants). This accountability will prod some of today’s homeless — whom the Clarke Institute found to be more aggressive, antisocial, moody, irritable, and less open to taking responsibility for change — to get along with those around them, as their counterparts once did.
While the government re-regulates the use of public spaces, it should deregulate the housing market to let the homeless find inexpensive housing niches for themselves. The largest sources of appropriate housing — ones that many municipalities wrongly ban — are basement apartments and other occupancies in residential districts.
Because most homeless individuals are neat, clean, and nonviolent, many would find shelter in middle- and lower-class residences willing to set aside some space in exchange for the housing voucher. Such a relationship would especially appeal to homeowners on fixed incomes, who find themselves single and perhaps frail in a large home, and who themselves need a little income and an occasional helping hand with household chores.
We live in times of plenty, with the means and the obligation to humanely look after our most unfortunate members of society. In helping others, we will also help ourselves through more hospitable streets, a healthier society, and the personal gratification of doing our share to help people who have fallen on hard times, and not always from sins of their own making.
Michelle Falardeau-Ram and Michael Walker
The Next City
June 21, 1998
The Next City asked Michelle Falardeau-Ramsay, chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, and Michael Walker, executive director of the Fraser Institute, to comment
It would bring federal human rights law into line with that of most Canadian provinces. Right now, five provinces provide protection from discrimination on the basis of either source of income or social condition. Two other provinces specifically ban discrimination on the basis of being “in receipt of public assistance.” However, there is currently no such protection from discrimination by employers or service providers in the federal jurisdiction: banks, transportation companies, telephone companies, or the federal government itself.
Poor people would have improved access to banking services. People on low incomes often have trouble cashing welfare or family allowance cheques at a bank because they may not have an account or proper identification, such as a driver’s licence. Instead, many are forced to use commercial cheque-cashing services that charge a percentage fee. A change to the federal law would make it illegal for a bank to deny someone a service merely because of his source of income or social condition.
Employers and service providers could still say “no” if they have a good reason. Banning discrimination based on income does not mean that a telephone company would have to provide service if a customer cannot pay, or a bank would have to cash a cheque it believes to be fraudulent, or an employer would have to hire a welfare recipient who is not qualified for the job. If there is a legitimate reason, it’s not discrimination. But denying someone a job or a service merely because of stereotypes or biases about poor people should be illegal.
There would be greater recognition that poverty is a human rights issue. While human rights laws cannot in themselves end poverty, banning discrimination based on income would go one step further toward recognizing that human rights are indivisible and that economic and social rights are as important as political and civil rights.
If the ban were applied in the public sector, the federal income tax system would change dramatically. The federal government engages in obvious income discrimination via personal income tax, charging a higher rate as incomes rise. The only sort of tax system to survive would be a flat tax.
Federal transfer programs would also need reform. For example, an inability to discriminate on the grounds of income would mean that all old age security payments, which the government now doles out according to family income, would be uniform. And what about the Canada Pension Plan, which cuts out at $35,800 — the maximum pensionable earnings? We couldn’t tolerate such crass discrimination against high-income people under this antidiscrimination law.
In reality, advocates of this law are really taking aim at the private sector. Of course a flat tax system would be an excellent idea, but it is opposed by the very people who normally support antidiscrimination laws, precisely because it would not discriminate against higher-income individuals. In the private sector, the standard questions that credit unions ask before they approve a mortgage would no longer be appropriate, so clients could demand and expect to receive mortgage money they cannot repay. The same would be true of car loans. And what about those juicy credit cards that would be available to all and sundry, with no consideration of the credit card user’s ability to pay the balances.
The germ of a plausible idea lurks behind this proposed law — that financial means should not determine, at the most basic level of consumption, a person’s ability to participate in the market place. But this is an argument for a minimum level of support, to let individuals afford the basic necessities of life. It is not an argument for a law that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of income.
Michael Walker
Michelle Falardeau-Ramsay
Tom Flanagan
The Next City
June 21, 1998
The last immigrants: Aboriginal self-government will likely solve nothing.
Joining Canada’s mainstream will likely solve nothing.
MOST CANADIANS SEE INDIANS ON OUR STREET CORNERS, displaced from their traditional homes and often drunk or unemployed. The hardhearted among us want them run out of town; the kind wish for a just settlement of native land claims to allow these unfortunates to regain their dignity through a return to their traditional ways.
Canadians rarely, if ever, imagine that most Indians — like most of our Chinese, Italian, Pakistani, Jewish, and Somali populations — really belong in our cities, along with the rest of us.
We hear almost nothing about life — and especially politics — on Indian reserves. Reporters seldom venture onto reserves, and if they try to, they may be physically ejected. Unlike the proceedings of elected officials in all other governments in Canada, the meetings of Indian elected officials are often closed; sometimes they’re held off the reserve, sometimes, even, in foreign countries. Only rarely — such as when a reserve is in crisis, and one faction resorts to the media — will the public get insightful information about political life on Indian reserves. That’s been happening for the last year with the Stoney Nation west of Calgary.
The three bands that constitute the Stoneys, a branch of the Assiniboine or Sioux people, are governed by their three chiefs plus a council of 12 members, elected every two years. Their population of about 3,300 lives on three reserves in the foothills of the Rockies. By far the biggest, about 100,000 acres, is the Morley reserve on the highway to Banff just 50 miles west of Calgary.
Morley sits on several pools of natural gas, providing the bands with annual royalties of about $13 million. In the past, royalties were even higher, as much as three times higher. By one estimate, the bands had earned $300 million from natural gas in the last decade. The Stoneys also receive about $23 million a year in federal transfers, mostly from the Department of Indian Affairs. Adding in receipts from band-operated businesses, the Stoneys now bring in about $50 million, roughly $16,000 for each man, woman, and child, or roughly $80,000 for a family of five, most of it tax-free. That astonishing amount of money, far above anyone’s definition of the poverty line, surpasses the mean income of Canadian families. With this much money coming in, Stoneys should be well off.
But money hasn’t brought happiness. The Stoneys, despite their collective affluence, are a community in crisis. The first public indication of dysfunction came in 1994, when an orgy of clear-cutting on the forested parts of the Morley reserve decimated 20 per cent of its pine and spruce in a matter of months. In an apparent bid for votes in that election year, the band council stood aside and encouraged families, which exercise loosely defined customary rights over land and timber, to cut their own deals with off-reserve loggers, who then shipped the wood to British Columbia for milling. The Department of Indian Affairs stepped in to stop the pillage in early 1995, leaving the land littered with logging slash and unsold fallen timber, and the courts clogged with a welter of lawsuits, all initiated by the Stoney Council. Alleging illegal sales and broken contracts, the council is suing various band members and logging companies; incredibly, it is also suing the Department of Indian Affairs for failing to manage the timber resources properly.
Things then went from bad to worse. In 1997, because the band — despite its revenues — had somehow run up a deficit of $5.6 million in the previous year, the federal government appointed one accounting firm as the financial trustee for the band and hired another to carry out a forensic audit. While the audit drags on, rebellious band members, who deplore the government they’re saddled with, leak fascinating bits of information to the outside world:
Meanwhile, other social indicators are dreadful. Nineteen ninety-seven saw 12 unnatural deaths by suicide, accident, violent crime, or drug overdose. Two-thirds of the residents are said to be on welfare (although, given the lax administration, some welfare recipients may also hold jobs with the band). A sympathetic doctor in nearby Cochrane, who treats many Stoneys in her practice, has tried to set up a food bank to alleviate what she considers serious malnutrition. “We need cash for bannock,” she told a reporter. But Chief Snow’s wife is not so softhearted. “All they want is bingo money. They are not really starving,” she told reporters while her husband received treatment in a Calgary hospital cardiology ward. In February, four buildings, including the Morley community centre, were burned to the ground in one night of arson; the damage to the community centre was estimated at $350,000.
How typical is the Stoney mess? With 608 Indian bands in Canada, situations vary widely. British Columbia’s Sechelt Nation — which suspended claims to inherent rights, accepts self-government within the existing constitution, and welcomes white-owned businesses within its boundaries — reportedly prospers. But despite pockets of good news, the Stoney situation is unusual only in its extreme concentration of bad news. Financial mismanagement is commonplace; 28 per cent of reserves have now run up such large deficits that — using powers in the Indian Act — the Department of Indian Affairs has forced them into remedial management agreements.
Almost daily, the media covers aboriginal social pathologies of welfare dependency, crime, and drug abuse. Their political pathologies — corruption, factionalism, and nepotism — are less widely reported but well known to all who have studied native politics or personally experienced life on Indian reserves. Here are two other recent examples of political pathology from Alberta:
Today’s conventional wisdom, summarized at enormous length in the 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, attributes all these social and political pathologies to a history of colonialism at the hands of the white man, and it sees their solution in the white man respecting aboriginal peoples’ inherent right to self-government. Numerous injustices, without doubt, have occurred. But believing that aboriginal self-government will solve much, if anything, is a pipe dream because it is beset with serious — probably fatal — problems. I do not refer to the lofty constitutional questions involved: Is the right of aboriginal self-government inherent or contingent? Should an aboriginal order of government be entrenched in the constitution as a third layer in the federal system? Can effective non-territorial governments be created for those who do not live on the aboriginal land base? I refer to problems with self-government at the community level, which most skeptics over these constitutional questions usually see as an unalloyed blessing.
ACCORDING TO MENNO BOLDT, A UNIVERSITY OF LETHBRIDGE SOCIOLOGIST and author of an important book on aboriginal government, “Indian leaders tend to view self-government in terms of taking over the [governmental] authority and structures on their reserves.” But a mere change of personnel, he believes “is no guarantee that the entrenched norms of paternalism, authoritarianism, self-interest, and self-aggrandizement by office-holders will be eliminated.” If self-government is worth having, he argues, Indians need to jettison the institutions imposed under the Indian Act and need to revive their communal heritage.
Boldt understands the problem but advocates a utopian solution. Although early Indian societies had no written laws, bureaucracies, elections, courts, police, and other formal institutions of modern states, their informal approach of yesteryear will satisfy neither them nor other Canadians today. Aboriginals are not primitive, fantasyland people who can be segregated in idyllic habitats, where the deer and the antelope roam. Aboriginals are integrated into our industrial society. They are literate and educated, own property (even if property rights on reserves are poorly specified), work for wages and salaries, supply their needs through transactions in the market rather than self-provision, and deal with state agencies in a multitude of ways.
On Indian reserves, elected chiefs and band councils collectively exercise the authority once exercised by the federal government’s Indian agents and will do so as long as reserves remain political systems. State institutions are here to stay, for aboriginals as well as for everyone else. In itself, this does not doom aboriginal self-government as unworkable or harmful; it does mean that aboriginal government, where it arises, will resemble other forms of government. But aboriginal self-government will rarely work well in practice. Not because of the nature of native people but because of the nature of people.
NATIVE COMMUNITIES ARE TOO SMALL TO SUSTAIN A FUNCTIONING DEMOCRATIC society. Canada’s 608 bands have about 610,000 registered Indians. About 70 per cent of the bands have under 1,000 people, and only 10 per cent have over 2,000. Even these already tiny figures give a misleading impression because about 42 per cent of registered Indians live off the reserve. How can a community of a few hundred people located far from major population centres provide the amenities of modern life — everything from schools to snowplowing — that Indians now demand?
Some argue that small communities can work together to provide services otherwise beyond their means. Others that aboriginal governments can contract with nearby cities or rural municipalities, or with the provincial government, for government services. In some cases, workable solutions will no doubt arise, particularly for culturally neutral services, such as sewage disposal and highway maintenance. But for other services, such as policing, child protection, and education, such approaches miss the mark, since many tribes, if not most, who would work through a multitribal consortium would find that their traditions and cultures would need to bend. So, too, through a cooperation with non-aboriginal governments in culturally sensitive fields.
Small native communities would also fail to retain the skilled personnel needed to deliver these amenities. Aboriginals are becoming highly educated; their postsecondary enrolment rate is now 6.5 per cent of persons aged 17 to 34, not that far behind the Canadian rate of 10.4 per cent for that age. Aboriginals with advanced education have attractive opportunities off the reserve, leading many to exercise their preference and work in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, and other major centres rather than return to their childhood homes, even though they may remain band members. With the cream of Indian society heading for the cities, the dream of aboriginal government would often amount to native elected officials and to non-native administrators, accountants, and other professionals. Whether that amounts to self-government is a rhetorical question with no simple answer, but it illustrates a problem unlikely to go away in our lifetime.
More fundamental to the problem of size than delivering amenities is delivering good government. In his famous 10th essay in The Federalist, James Madison argued that representative government suits larger societies — smaller communities tend to be socially and economically homogeneous, enabling a majority faction to take control and exploit others. Madison’s answer is the extended republic: “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests: you make it less probable that a majority of the whole have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”
From the federal government’s landmark Hawthorn Report of 1966-67 onward, empirical studies have documented how family-based factionalism dominates native politics. In field work at a large Manitoba Saulteaux reserve in the 1970s, an anthropologist found about 25 informal “bunches,” each with membership of about 5 to 10, and a varying number of followers. Kinship determined the composition of these bunches, and band members saw the distribution of the Department of Indian Affairs benefits as the main purpose of politics. A study of the Okanagan Nation in the 1980s discovered that “in the absence of formal political parties there are informal campaigns [for chief] involving kin and friendship networks.” A public-opinion survey on two of the Alberta Métis settlements found large majorities agreeing with the proposition that “if you’re looking for something like a job on the settlement or a new house, it helps to be related to a council member.” In research on the Blood and Peigan reserves in Alberta, a political scientist found that extended kin groups “run slates of candidates during each election. Sponsorship of candidates usually occurs in informal kin group caucuses, where decisions are made as to who should run for council or the chieftainship.” These kinship-sponsored candidates were motivated by the prospect of economic gain for themselves and their relatives.
Strater Crowfoot, chief of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation for eight years, confirms that the family is “a pivotal unit in reserve politics,” calling nepotism its “sustaining discourse.” People not only act according to the incentives of nepotism, they openly discuss band politics in those terms. Relatives routinely approach those in power for financial assistance. Opposing factions interpret all decisions in nepotistic terms and plan to act the same way when they come to power. “After the election where I was defeated,” writes Crowfoot, “one voter said: ‘The Crowfoots are no longer in charge; it’s my family’s turn.'”
Religion is another source of faction, with lines drawn between Christians and traditionalists, or between different Christian denominations. On one northern Ontario reserve, Anglicans moved to a new location en masse, leaving Roman Catholics behind. Religion, of course, interweaves tightly with kinship, as does place of residence, which counts where a large reserve has multiple nodes of settlement, or where a band or tribe occupies several reserves. Economic lines of cleavage on reserves also exist between those who control property rights over housing, land, and natural resources and those who are shut out. Kinship counts here, too, with customary property rights passed on through inheritance from generation to generation.
As native people become well educated and well paid, they create another class cleavage — between haves and have-nots. These haves have become citified. Even the activists in the native political movement, unless they are band chiefs, tend to live in major cities, where they work as lawyers, professors, administrators, and consultants. This urban native middle class, though it remains involved in local band politics, can’t help but adopt a different world view over time.
None of this is to say that native politics is more factional than Canadian politics generally. All politics is factional. But whereas Canada’s factionalism operates on a large scale and in a formalized way, with competition pervading diverse linguistic, regional, and economic organizations, native factionalism operates on a small scale and in an informal way, with competition limited to kin groups and friendship networks. This family style of politics ushers in patronage, nepotism, and outright corruption by the majority factions.
Some constitutional experts believe that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms will protect minority rights in native communities. In practice, however, the Charter can’t help much because it does not protect property, and favoritism in a native community typically involves property — nepotistic hiring practices, misuse of expense accounts, denial of housing or welfare, reassignment of property rights in land or timber. Aboriginals under the thumb of the majority faction would have normal recourse to the Canadian courts, but because the legal system is so expensive to use, this recourse would ordinarily be meaningless. In most cases, the only remedy available to the losers in factional fights — and the one they’ve been taking in droves — is moving off the reserve.
WOULD-BE ABORIGINAL GOVERNMENTS EXPECT TO COVER A GREAT DEAL OF ground. Even some of the more modest plans, such as the one by Queen’s political scientist C.E.S. Franks, list six broad categories:
1. Cultural preservation — the maintenance of traditional lifestyle, language, and culture
2. Cultural adaptation — assisting a culture and community to change so that it and the individuals within it can interact effectively with the economy and lifestyle of the non-native society
3. Service delivery — the economic and effective provision to the community, in a form adapted to and suitable to its needs and circumstances, of services such as health, welfare, education, justice
4. Economic development — the active involvement of the self-governing unit in projects and activities that improve the well-being of individuals and the community
5. Resources and environmental management — native populations who maintain a traditional lifestyle will need some control over the resources of their land base.
6. Law enforcement — the relationship of the native peoples to the law and the judicial system is a major issue at present and will continue to be for most self-governing units.
This list combines functions that, for the rest of the country, take all three levels of Canadian government to fulfil, and it includes some that no Canadian government undertakes. Aboriginal governments, with their small size, limited resources, and shortage of skilled personnel, have no hope of handling so ambitious an agenda, at least not without much suffering. In a Manitoba experiment that gave five Indian agencies responsibility over the welfare of Indian children, the number of children in care soared even though it fell in all other provinces. Reported incidents of sexual and physical abuse multiplied once children were placed in Indian foster homes. Finally, the suicide of a 13-year-old boy forced a judicial inquiry followed by a legislative inquiry. Of course, aboriginal self-government may sometimes succeed where senior governments have failed. Nonetheless, the practical difficulties at the ground level will be enormous, no matter what deals are struck at the symbolic level of constitutional politics.
To further complicate matters, the impossibly wide scope of aboriginal government would have chiefs and band councils control, or strongly influence, education, welfare, and health care, as well as the usual service functions of local governments. In the wider Canadian system, these functions would be parcelled out to numerous public bodies — federal and provincial departments, regulatory commissions, courts, city councils, school boards, police commissions, hospital boards, and regional health authorities. While aboriginal government is not devoid of such bodies, band councils have more political authority than any entity in the outside world. This concentration of authority lets a small group of officials direct large volumes of money passing through the community, making the potential rewards of holding office in an aboriginal government far larger than for, say, a city councillor, a mayor of a small town, or a reeve of a municipal township. Band chiefs and councillors more easily appoint their relatives and supporters to jobs, sign contracts with well-connected businesses, and manipulate the assignment of property rights.
TO THICKEN THE QUICKSAND OF ABORIGINAL SELF-GOVERNMENT, native society lacks an institution fundamental to democracies: taxation. The Indian Act exempts land and personal property on Indian reserves from taxation. In 1985, band councils received the power to levy property taxes on the reserve; but in practice, they mainly tax non-Indians who, through lease or other arrangement, occupy reserve property. Indians on reserves do not generally tax themselves and are not taxed by any other government. Instead, Indian bands depend on federal government moneys, not just from the Department of Indian Affairs, but also from other departments; in all, the combined spending on status Indians and Inuit exceeds $6 billion a year.
Band governments also raise revenue by running businesses, both long-standing, traditional enterprises such as farming, ranching, and lumbering and new ventures such as shopping malls, golf courses, housing developments, gambling casinos, hotels, and financial institutions. Businesses typically provide a cash flow and jobs but not always profits: Many rely on revenues from government programs, land claims settlements, or oil and gas royalties.
Fiscal transfers, land claims settlements, and natural resource rents have a common characteristic — they are not earned in the usual sense of the term by working for an employer or by investing one’s own property. Natural resource rents flow from the good luck of sitting atop a hydrocarbon reservoir. While band members watch, the energy companies negotiate a deal through Indian Oil and Gas Canada (a division of the Department of Indian Affairs), explore the reserve, build pipeline connectors, pump out the oil and gas, and pay royalties. For most people in the community, the money might as well have come from Ottawa because no one needs to work for it.
This external, unearned funding heightens factional politics, as research on so-called rentier states in the Third World, particularly oil rich gulf sheikdoms in the Middle East, illuminates. In the rentier state, the government redistributes external income through grants to citizens, contracts with privileged businesses, and state employment. “The whole economy,” writes one authority, “is arranged as a hierarchy of layers of rentiers with the state or the government at the top of the pyramid, acting as the ultimate support of all other rentiers in the economy.” The result is an allocation state, “an état providence, distributing favors and benefits to its population.”
In rentier states, parties jockey to get favors from those in power. Democracy and the rule of law can’t take hold because citizens, not having to pay for the government, do not take ownership of it. The population develops a rentier mentality in which reward rests on chance and situation rather than work and risk. The rentier state describes the political economy of Canadian native communities.
Many Indian spokesmen view immunity from taxation as a boon — an aboriginal right, or a treaty right, or, as one writer calls it, “a fundamental component of the special relationship” between native peoples and the Crown. Canadian taxpayers are unlikely to accept this forever, and Indians, themselves, must recognize that there is no real representation without taxation. Even the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples recommended that members of self-governing native communities should pay taxes to their own governments, though not to the federal or provincial governments.
Aboriginal taxation, in any degree, should be encouraged as a step toward more open and accountable government. Nonetheless, all who have seriously studied self-government agree that, even if aboriginal governments fully taxed their constituents, they would overwhelmingly depend on federal transfers, supplemented by resource revenues and occasional land claims settlements. Aboriginals demand that most, if not all, fiscal transfers come in unconditional grants; if granted, they would only intensify the aboriginal rentier state. Indian band councils already receive 80 per cent of the Department of Indian Affairs transfers for self-administration. The Auditor General laments the lack of accountability for expenditures, both to local native communities and to Parliament.
BECAUSE NONE OF THIS WILL CHANGE IN THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE — native communities will continue to be small, impoverished, factional, supported by fiscal transfers, and governed by elected chiefs and councils trying to carry out an impossibly wide range of functions — the federal government must assess its options. As long as it remains responsible for Indian affairs, simply transferring more money and power to local aboriginal governments would only increase the abuses.
Some helpful steps are being taken. The University of Victoria runs a special program to train Indians in local public administration. The Banff Centre for Management sponsors an aboriginal leadership and self-government program. Embarrassed by bad publicity, the Assembly of First Nations and the Department of Indian Affairs are trying to improve accountability in financial administration, and the AFN recently signed an agreement with the Certified General Accountants Association to improve training and standards of practice on reserves.
The single most constructive reform would be for the members of native communities to begin taxing themselves, to give them a greater stake in the doings of their own governments. No negotiations, no constitutional amendment, no legislation would be required to take this step; the power already lies in the Indian Act. In most cases, though only small amounts of money would be raised, greater political accountability would grow at the local level.
More accountable band governments might confront some of the human tragedies of native governance. While housing for aboriginals is in chronically short supply, many reserves are littered with abandoned and derelict homes. Although many prairie reserves are blessed with good agricultural land, the Indians themselves rarely farm it; instead, the bands rent it to neighboring farmers and ranchers. The authority to deal with these problems — many stemming from a rigid system of inheritance that creates uneconomically small landholdings — already lies with band governments.
Indian band governments can learn, too, from the so-called Harvard Project in the United States. Those researchers studied a wide variety of tribal governments and their correlations with successes or failures in promoting economic development. Successful tribal governments, they found, tended to separate powers, with an independent judiciary and a strong chief executive elected for a term longer than two years and not dependent on the band council. The Harvard Project also found that successful tribal governments maintained a stable regime of property rights to encourage investment and kept elected politicians away from day-to-day involvement in business enterprises. All valuable lessons for Canada.
The American situation only applies so far because a third of their 554 recognized tribes now operate gambling casinos, some of which are fabulously profitable. Yet unemployment in “Indian Country,” as the Americans call it, exceeds 30 per cent, compared with less than 5 per cent in the overall population, and the average Indian income is well below American norms. Indian rates of alcoholism, suicide, and child abuse exceed that of any other American ethnic group.
Canada badly needs a comparative study of different native communities, to let the government, the communities themselves, and the public at large find out why some of our reserves do so much better than others. And we should also study how Indians do off the reserve, because the great weight of evidence to date indicates nothing would better serve our Indian population than to integrate with Canadian society as a whole.
THIS INTEGRATION IS WELL UNDERWAY. FORTY-TWO PER CENT OF registered Indians live off the reserve; that percentage has been increasing for decades and will soon exceed 50 per cent. And that is just registered Indians. There are additional hundreds of thousands, even millions of people (no one is sure how many) of part Indian ancestry who call themselves Métis, non-status Indians, or just Canadians. Registered Indians living on reserves are a steadily decreasing minority of the entire native population.
As more and more native people join Canada’s mainstream, is there any way of ending the dysfunctional reserve system? Frankly, I doubt it. Both the United States and Canada have tried various schemes of allotting reserve land and enfranchising individual Indians, with little success. Now, due to provisions in the Constitution Act of 1982 that constitutionalized aboriginal and treaty rights, it is both politically and legally impossible to convert status Indians into ordinary Canadian citizens by simply dividing up reserves into individually owned parcels of land, repealing the Indian Act, and abolishing the Department of Indian Affairs. Even if it were possible, it would be neither wise nor just because Canada, through the treaty and reserve system, has encouraged the survival of native communities as collective entities for more than a century.
The movement toward self-government will continue. Although many rank-and-file Indians may be indifferent to it, Canada’s political elite accepts it, and it represents the unanimous demand of the native political class, whose interests it serves: They administer the reserves, litigate and negotiate with government, and increasingly fill civil service positions in the Department of Indian Affairs and other agencies that deal with native communities. They are directly rewarded by obtaining ever increasing transfers of public money with ever diminishing controls over its use.
Meanwhile, living conditions on most reserves will continue to stagnate and even deteriorate for those outside the power structure. Population growth intensifies the shortage of jobs, housing, and other amenities, so that more and more native people will seek new lives in Canadian cities. In spite of the rhetoric of self-government, the reserves will grow less and less relevant to a majority of native people in Canada. Indians will become, in effect, a new immigrant ethnic group in our already pluralistic societies. Their places of origin will be geographically closer than Hong Kong or the Punjab, but their social distance from the world of the reserves may be greater.
Under the circumstances, Canadians should put ambitious reforms for reserves aside while these long-term processes have time to work. Help the reserves run as honestly and efficiently as possible, but don’t flood them with even more money, which will encourage further unsustainable growth in the number of residents. I leave the last word to Stoney Nation councillor Tina Fox, commenting on cuts to social services required to balance the budget: “We may have to encourage our young to work off the reserve.”
Would that be such a bad thing? The Morley reserve sits in the middle of one of the most dynamic areas of the Canadian economy. Fifty kilometres to the east lies the perpetual boom town of Calgary. Thirty years ago, 330,000 people lived in Calgary; now it has over 800,000, one-sixth of them visible minorities, and an unemployment rate less than 6 per cent. Fifty kilometres to the west of the reserve lies Banff, with its chronic labor shortage. Young people go there from all over the world and find jobs immediately.
Other Canadian cities offer members of other Indian bands opportunities. While they haven’t found city streets paved with gold — Indians are the most disadvantaged of all Canadians — many have succeeded mightily, particularly when compared with the fate of Indians who remained on the reserve. An Indian who has left the reserve is four times as likely to earn $40,000 or more and almost half as likely to be on welfare.
Since about 1980, Indians have begun to call themselves the “First Nations,” to embody their claim to an aboriginal right of self-government. Yet they were also the first immigrants because their ancestors, like the ancestors of everyone else in North America, moved here from the Old World. Now they are en route to becoming the last immigrants, the latest group to take advantage of the opportunities that Canadian society offers.
June 21, 1998
JOHN ROE TAKES IN HIS ROWBOAT’S OARS as another man cuts the motor on a barge piled high with rusted metal and rotted logs. A yellow Lab pants happily at the barge’s bow while its master turns to wave. “How’s it going, Darryl?” Roe says jovially. A few friendly words, and we move on our way, Roe explaining that Darryl Youlden has the contract to pick junk out of Victoria’s Gorge Waterway, two hours a day, seven days a week.
Youlden’s work is a testament to Roe’s three-year effort to clean up the Gorge. “You hardly see any surface garbage at all anymore,” he says proudly. This stands in stark contrast to the Gorge’s condition when Roe and his 10-year-old son pulled their first shopping cart out of the waterway. And then tires, engine blocks, and entire ships’ keels.
John Roe — a stocky man with greying curly hair and arms thick from rowing — knows every clump of underwater eelgrass, every cormorant and otter haunt in the 40-kilometre waterway, which meanders inland from downtown Victoria’s oil-slicked Inner Harbour, rushes into the reversing rapids of the Gorge narrows and spreads into its terminus at tranquil Portage Inlet. The water cuts through seven municipalities — and seven separate headaches on Roe’s quest to clean up the Gorge — whose warm waters used to be Victoria’s premier urban swimming hole until industry, development, and neglect left them choked with heavy metals, sewage, and silt.
Roe organized his first volunteer shore cleanup in 1995, netting a solid 70-person turnout. Soon, he marshalled military divers to scoop up underwater garbage. Next, he finagled the donation of a commercial barge with a crane to haul out the heaviest relics. Roe’s commitment — full time for the last year and a half — came as a surprise even to him. “It just happened,” he admits. “I’d never spoken in public before, or shaken a politician’s hand,” but now he’s meeting with volunteers and politicians every day.
“I come from Hamilton, so I know all about pollution. I just couldn’t see myself working in one of those factories for life,” he continues. He moved around Northern and Southern Ontario, doing construction and mechanic work, before heading West. At Calgary’s Bow River, he rolled up his sleeves for his first cleanup. Then in 1994, he moved to Victoria, where his daily rowboat commute on the Gorge ignited his environmentalism. “When you see how beautiful it is, you just have to do something.”
Roe had no real model for the work he set up for himself and his Veins of Life Watershed Society, whose 10-member board of directors and 700 volunteers operate on provincial funding and donations of money and services from Gorge industry. As he started reading studies of waterway restoration and data on the Gorge dating back to the 1960s, he realized: “We don’t need more information. Millions of studies have been done. We just have to act on them.”
Several local groups have responded to Roe’s call to action. Provincially funded summer Youth E-Teams survey landowners whose properties back onto the Gorge, and the Gorge Waterway Society is digitally mapping the shoreline, to catch bank razing and other shore alterations. Kate Forster, president of the Gorge Burnside Community Association, called Roe for advice when she started a group to clean up Cecelia Creek’s shores. Mostly underground, the creek — polluted with lead, mercury, and fecal coliform — passes through a ravine park before emptying into the Gorge. At Burnside Elementary School, a teacher now takes her students to Cecelia Creek to pick up garbage in the ravine. Since the fall, they’ve been keeping a diary of what they see and smell — and if anything seems amiss, they call a provincial hotline. To remind people not to pollute, the students paint fish on neighborhood storm drains that lead into the Gorge.
Fish are a potent symbol in this whole endeavour: When the fish flourish again, the Gorge will truly be revived. As a seal cuts noiselessly past the rowboat, Roe says, “Poor seals. People say there are 30 of them and they eat all the fish. In reality there are only about 6. If we fixed the habitat, there’d be plenty of fish to go around.” He wants to see people feeding their families off the Gorge’s bounty. It happened not so long ago. Roe tells a story about an old, wood-sided white house overlooking the dock we launched from. “The first cleanup started here, at the end of Arcadia Street,” he says. Since public boat access is limited along the Gorge, he knocked on the door to ask to use the homeowner’s dock. A kindly 73-year-old lady granted his request. He learned that her family immigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1956, and until the 1960s, she fed her family of six off the water’s bounty: crab, shellfish, salmon, and trout.
Such abundance is only a dim memory now, and Roe advocates extreme measures to bring it back. “We’d like to see all fishing on the Gorge banned for five years. That’ll be controversial,” he says. Afterward, he envisions the community controlling the fishery with a licensing system to pay for management and improvements, as is done in England.
Roe’s philosophy is simple. Now that the Gorge is relatively junk-free, he says, all you have to do is keep more pollution from entering the water. So polluters, beware: Roe takes his job personally. “We had a big problem with carpet cleaners dumping down the storm drains. If I saw them doing it, I’d have to say something — and I’m not that polite! After a few visits from the feds, we don’t have a problem with that now.” Through Roe’s efforts, Victoria’s Capital Regional District now labels outfalls with a 1-800 number for spill alerts; vigilant citizens have made 155 calls in the last year to the provincial emergency program, which then contacts the proper government agency.
Above all, Roe sees the Gorge as a people place. Photos from 70 years ago show it as Victoria’s favorite playground. Boathouses, public change rooms, diving towers, vaudeville stages and promenades lined its shores, and citizens flocked to watch swimming competitions and boat races through the rapids. But as the Gorge’s condition deteriorated, summer revellers abandoned it. A typhoid breakout in 1938 closed beaches to public swimming, and vandals torched the derelict public bathing pavilion in 1945.
Roe wants to see children swimming in the Gorge again by the year 2000, a goal he just might make, now that outfall contamination has been considerably reduced. “These days, I swim in it myself,” he says. “It’s only public perception that keeps people away.”
From the rowboat, Roe points out an old yellow house on the shore. “In that old house there, the front door faces the water. But look at the newer houses — their front doors are on the street,” he says. “As time went on, people turned their back on the Gorge.”
Roe wants the community to re-embrace the Gorge Waterway as the heart of Victoria. Now that the water is clearing up, he sets his sights on his next big vision: improving public access. Presently, the Gorge is closed off by private property for much of its length.
As he pulls his little boat into the lee of a rock near the Gorge rapids, he motions to a dense condominium development that replaced a seedy hotel and tavern a couple of years ago. Many criticized it for altering the shoreline and taking out too many trees. But what rankles most, says Roe, is that an expected public dock never materialized. There’s a dock there, all right — but strictly for private use. A lone German shepherd barks angrily at us from the shore as if to underscore the point.
“Half of the neighborhood still won’t talk to the other half because of it,” he says. “But we’re trying to bring them together.” Roe has plans for a new wooden walkway and dock to be built on nearby neutral ground where anglers cast for herring; as well, he sees stairs, a dock, and a revamped beach at the little bay near Bamfield Park, an area already popular with local children. To untangle the web of seven municipalities’ bylaws, he recently organized a waterway board to bring together councillors, civil servants, provincial and federal government representatives, and members of the public.
Though Roe is busy with various committee meetings most weekdays, his greatest power lies in his ability to inspire others. “We had an ex-alcoholic who said he could dive and wanted to do some clean-up work with us. We lent him a mask and some flippers, and he spent the whole summer skin diving. He piled bottles under the dock there for us to pick up,” he says. “There were 4,000 bottles in the end.”
After three years of hauling junk, raking up debris from the shoreline, transplanting eelgrass, rowing and dreaming, Roe takes special pride in people no longer automatically turning their backs on the Gorge. He never will. Most days of the week, after patrolling the shores, he bumps his little boat against the wooden dock at the foot of Dingley Dell and walks up the stairs to his apartment — where all windows overlook the Gorge Waterway.
Urban Renaissance Institute 