Time For a VIrtual Aboriginal Province?

A Canada Day Commentary by Alastair Sweeny

With Canada facing a long, hot summer of native protests, Minister Jim Prentice and Chief Phil Fontaine deserve kudos for pulling together a new proposition to speed up specific land claims. But no amount of pushing and pulling and funding will cure what is at heart a deeply dysfunctional system.

Last year’s Kaseshewan Crisis and Chief Phil Fontaine's cri de coeur that the treatment of Canada's aboriginal children is a human rights issue only goes half way. This state of affairs is a travesty of government brought on by a lack of democracy and a crisis of modernism. Reserves like Kaseshewan are obsolete and everybody knows it.

Canada's antique reserve system was set up like a trusteeship, where the Crown was the official guardian of the Indian people, who were essentially the Queen's children. Reserves were never Indian property, but only set aside for their use and benefit. They remained Crown land. Like minors in orphanages protected by a court system, they had no real rights except those accorded under common law.

This state of affairs led to all sorts of stupidity, as for example when returning Indian veterans came back from the war to find they could not get veterans land grants because they already had the land, in common.

Maladministration by the Department of Indian Affairs was common, and malpractice flourished, as in the residential school system, run for the Department by the churches. The Indian people were like a body parasitized by thousands of bureaucratic fleas.

Indian agents were usually political appointees. Some were decent, but others used the reserves for financial and other gain. It is said by some Indian people that bad reserves usually had a bad series of agents.

The reserves themselves often turned into family run enterprises, sometimes in collusion with the agent.

All these were problems of democracy, which were eased somewhat when John Diefenbaker gave Canada’s Indian people the vote. An explosion of Indian politicking has occurred, and reforms have been made, but the system is still not meeting the needs of the aboriginal people of Canada.

Billions of dollars and scores of Kelownas cannot solve the whole rotten system. But how to reform it?

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"The solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy." Saul Alinsky

Canada’s Indian people need real democratic power to control their own destiny, and the way to do this is to establish a virtual Indian province with its own bicameral government, where Indian people are truly masters of their own destiny. But how to set up a structure that takes into account the different language and tribal groups that make up Canada's First Nations?

The US Constitution is a good place to start. Supposedly inspired by the Iroquois Confederacy, it gives the US a strong Congress with representative power balanced out by state power in the Senate. In an Indian province, an upper house or Council of Elders would be used to balance out the various linguistic groups so the Algonkians and Crees did not dominate by population.

This sort of system could be grafted onto Canada's current constitution without too many radical changes, and parts could be instituted in stages.

Instead of the money wasted today, instead of Kelowna-like feel-good agreements, the new province would be given transfer payments like any other less fortunate province.

Like any province, the new entity would have control over education, health and municipalities. Local reserves or provincial groups would have the option in some cases to hire expertise, and buy services from the provinces.

The new province would have control over reserve policing, and could hire the RCMP or OPP for individual cases, such as controlling corruption and criminal activity on and off reserves.

The Indian province could set up a rational tax system with auditor general. It could treat current reserves as municipalities, with a body like the Ontario Municipal Board to manage development.

The new virtual province could have its own capital, somewhere central such as Manitoulin, and it could use modern-day conferencing technology to limit face-to-face meetings to only a few weeks a year.

It's time to fix a structure that is no longer working and never will work.