Canadians were shocked and saddened by the news of the discovery of unmarked graves near residential schools last year. Many Canadians accepted this news with grief, remorse, sadness, and sympathy over our history and our past treatment of First Nations people. Some Canadians even went even further and declared that Canada was guilty of some of the worst crimes imaginable.
00:05:52.860And it was so interesting, Tom, to see some of the quotes, you know, subjective feelings about what had happened,
00:05:57.980sort of like rumors and oral history or whatever, being written in as fact in news stories.
00:06:04.020So there was one sort of famous example where they said, you know, children as young as three are said to have been missing.
00:06:10.520And then all of a sudden you see the report over in the CBC or in, you know, international publications like the BBC saying,
00:06:17.240you know, remains of children as young as three were discovered.
00:06:20.000It's like, well, that's not even what the news release said.
00:06:22.420The news release was talking about the sort of, you know, the memory of people in the area.
00:06:26.940And, of course, to your point, you know, one of the stories, one of the other reserves that came forward with similar claims,
00:06:33.860you know, it turned out that the graveyard where the graves were discovered, this was in Cranbrook,
00:06:37.920the lower Kootenai Reserve, the, you know, someone else came out and said, you know, this is a known graveyard.
00:06:44.860It's not, they're not unmarked graves.
00:06:46.480They're just graves that have fallen into disrepair.
00:06:48.400I did a bit of research about that graveyard and it predated the residential school by a few decades.
00:06:53.020And it was actually affiliated with the local hospital.
00:06:55.120So it had nothing to do with the residential school.
00:06:57.140It had everything to do with this is where bodies were buried that perished at this local hospital.
00:07:02.540So I completely echo some of your sentiments there.
00:07:07.440I want to ask you about some of the reaction because, you know, we saw a lot of sort of grief and, you know,
00:07:13.100we saw churches being burnt and politicians turn a blind eye.
00:07:16.460One of the things I was disappointed about with was the response from the Conservative Party.
00:07:21.480The Conservative Party at that point basically urged the government to fulfill the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Report.
00:07:30.680The Truth and Reconciliation Report was a radically left-wing initiative and document that completely butchered the facts and ignored the truth.
00:07:37.620And here we had Conservatives calling for basically more, doubling down on these failed policies of endless spending, more money to unaccountable leaders, doubling down on dependency of this community.
00:07:49.640Why is it that Conservatives don't really have an alternative position and don't have another approach when it comes to, you know, addressing residential schools, addressing some of the past discrepancies between treatment and helping move this community out of poverty today?
00:08:07.120Yeah. Well, you know, there's a tendency for a party in opposition to seize anything to attack the government.
00:08:14.740I mean, it's understandable. They are the opposition. It's their job to oppose.
00:08:18.680But sometimes parties in opposition will pick up opinions that don't really fit with their own philosophy, but it seems convenient in the short run to use them to try and beat up the government.
00:08:30.660I think that's what's happened here is the Conservatives in opposition kind of blindly grabbing something without stopping to think about how it would fit into a larger Conservative program.
00:08:44.680That's too bad. Well, let's move on to talk about your op-ed that you wrote.
00:08:49.260You wrote an excellent op-ed for True North sort of discussing some of the myths associated with residential schools.
00:08:55.140One of the major myths that we saw repeated by both sides, I have many libertarian friends, and they say that this was their major issue with residential schools,
00:09:04.580was that children were forcibly removed from their parents.
00:09:08.840Your op-ed paints a different picture and says that this isn't true, that the program was never compulsory.
00:09:14.520So why don't you sort of explain what you wrote in your op-ed and try to address this myth?
00:09:21.360Yeah, sure. Yeah, a few facts would be useful.
00:09:24.540We don't maintain that the program was never compulsory, but we point out that it was not nearly as compulsive as is commonly portrayed today.
00:09:33.060You know, it's become a narrative meme to say that 150,000 children were ripped from the arms of their parents.
00:09:41.800Well, first of all, at all times, there were more Indian students in day schools than in residential schools.
00:09:52.720The main option for educating the children of status Indians in this period of time was the day school, which was set up on reserves.
00:10:02.920Many of them were run by churches, not all, but many were.
00:10:05.660But the children lived with their parents or whoever at home.
00:10:09.680There's also a large number of Indian children who didn't go to school at all.
00:10:15.840As late as the mid-40s, about 40% of Indian children were not enrolled in any school.
00:10:24.860The residential school was mainly used, I mean, they were scattered around the country,
00:10:31.660but they were most heavily used in remote areas of the west and north.
00:10:40.420So the Prairie Provinces, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Northern Ontario.
00:10:45.260There was only one residential school in the Maritimes, and there was a handful in Quebec.
00:10:49.860So residential schools were never the main option.
00:18:49.640Well, I want to sort of move on to the issue today, because it seems like there's still a lot of problems in this community.
00:18:57.120And we as a country haven't really come up with a lot of good solutions as to how to help address some of these.
00:19:02.360I know Harper, he did make some strides in trying to make reserves and bans more accountable by making the spending more transparent so that people who live on the reserves could see where the money was going.
00:19:14.200Of course, Trudeau, one of his first moves in office was to scrap the Accountability Act and allow First Nations to continue to spend without any record of what they're spending the money on.
00:19:24.940But I'm wondering if you can help me sort of try to understand or come up with some ideas and solutions as to what can be done today.
00:19:32.380Because the reality, Tom, is that there's still a lot of poverty in First Nations community.
00:19:37.040There are negative, much worse health outcomes.
00:19:39.820We were doing some research on this topic and the life expectancy for First Nations men is nine years less than non-First Nations men.
00:20:39.920Well, first of all, we have to get rid of the idea that there is some single government solution to this so-called problem.
00:20:47.600We have a set of facts and, you know, the facts are that people who are ethnically different, less human capital for a modern society and living in remote places have a much lower standard of living.
00:21:06.240I mean, that's a fact that has no single immediate solution.
00:21:11.100What is happening is that many First Nations are making progress for themselves by playing a role in the modern market economy.
00:21:21.760And a lot of my research over the last 10 years has been directed towards chronicling that and trying to figure out how they are making progress.
00:21:29.120And there are now a number of First Nations where the living standard is quite comparable to the Canadian norm.
00:21:38.900And they've done it on their own by – well, again, there's no single way that they have done it.
00:21:44.700But the broad picture is through playing a role in Canada's market economy.
00:21:50.540It could be through casinos in a few cases, recreational industries, hotels, restaurants, fishing lodges.
00:22:03.840Participation in the resource economy is a big one.
00:22:07.200What can government do to help this along?
00:22:11.540Well, the single biggest thing that government could do is to stop impeding the development of resource industries.
00:22:16.600The large number of the poorest First Nations live in parts of the northern parts of the provinces where not much is happening except resource development.
00:22:34.400These aren't going to be manufacturing centers or high-tech centers or whatever.
00:22:39.120These are places where you find oil and gas and hard rock minerals and forestry, in some case fish.
00:22:46.600And that's how these people are going to be able to progress and make a good living for themselves.
00:22:51.700And right now, the government seems to be doing all it can to impede development up there.
00:23:00.000So blocking, for example, of the Northern Gateway Pipeline.
00:23:03.580There were dozens of First Nations that would have benefited from the Northern Gateway Pipeline.
00:23:09.080What about the Ring of Fire mining development in Ontario?
00:23:12.820Again, many First Nations would benefit from that.
00:23:20.420But, you know, it's certainly not fast.
00:23:23.300So that's the single biggest thing that governments could do to improve the standard of living for the poorest First Nations is to improve transportation and communication in the northern parts of Canada.
00:23:38.820So that resource development can proceed.
00:23:41.320But unfortunately, the government of Canada and, to some extent, other provincial governments are doing exactly the opposite.
00:23:51.740The opposition to some of these natural resource developments, often in the name of First Nations groups, even though those First Nations groups themselves are for the pipelines, is really remarkable.
00:24:02.640And thank you for the clarification about the Transparency Act there.
00:24:26.640And I know it was really controversial at the time and they ended up walking away from it.
00:24:30.900But he said that there was still, I don't know his exact quote, Tom, but he said something along the lines how there's still some merit to the idea of basically just, you know, ripping up the treaties and moving away from this whole reserve ban system that we have in Canada.
00:24:45.980And I was wondering if you could comment on that.
00:24:48.940And, you know, do you agree with the 1969 white paper?
00:25:15.720I have a lot of conservative friends who still are thinking in these terms and they talk about abolishing the Indian Act and repealing all the treaties and everybody's going to be equal.
00:25:25.060And so, you know, but that's not the world that we live in.
00:25:28.840For better or worse, I don't know which it is, but it's a fact that our First Nations have come to be considered as kind of separate entities within Canada.
00:25:41.720Talking about them as nations is, you know, kind of an exaggeration, but they are definitely separate entities.
00:25:49.440And they're going to have to find their way to prosper given that.
00:25:55.960So that's why I've been devoting myself for the last 10 years to trying to figure out how First Nations can prosper.
00:26:04.360And I don't spend any time on utopian dreams about repealing the Indian Act and unwinding the treaties and all of that.
00:26:15.340You know, history is what it is and we are where we are and we have to try and make the best of it, is my view.
00:26:23.660So, you know, as I say, many of my friends still pursue what I think is this utopian libertarian vision of everybody being the same and equal rights for all and none of these legislative differences and so forth.
00:26:43.580But, you know, maybe there was a moment in 1969 when that could have worked, but, you know, it didn't.
00:26:51.860Politically, there was just too much opposition to it and it has to be enacted by politicians and they have to take account of, you know, political realities.
00:27:00.840So, you know, so we are where we are and we have to make the best of it.
00:27:07.060And I think there are things that will help First Nations to find their way.
00:27:13.580And partly it's there are some positive things that government can do, but a lot of it is government getting out of the way, you know, not with extreme measures like, you know, repealing the Indian Act.
00:27:26.760But the Indian Act has been amended repeatedly.
00:27:29.980You know, it's not the same thing as it was in 1876.
00:27:34.900You know, people say, well, the legislation's been on the books since 1876.
00:28:19.300Not dreaming of, you know, some kind of big bang in which we get rid of all the debris of the past and start over.
00:28:28.080You know, that kind of thinking doesn't get you anywhere, in my opinion.
00:28:34.160So I see a lot of signs for optimism in the progress that First Nations have made for themselves, pessimistic about a lot of current political trends, which I think are doing a lot more harm than good.
00:28:48.380If I can just mention one, I hope you're covering the recent announcement about the $40 billion settlement of child welfare.
00:29:00.460You know, this is an unprecedented amount of money.
00:29:04.900And everybody knew this was coming, that there would be a settlement as a result of the victory in court of the one side.
00:29:14.440But the amount has suddenly been ratcheted up from somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe $4 or $5 or $6 billion compensation, which is a lot already, up to $20 billion cash payouts with no explanation of why.
00:29:29.860The only explanation I can see is that Murray Sinclair was invited to the table.
00:29:33.900And suddenly you get multiplication by a factor of three or four of the cost of this thing.
00:29:40.520So anyway, there are lots of causes for pessimism as well, but I guess that's kind of typical of human life.
00:29:48.900Well, Tom, I really appreciate the very nuanced, thoughtful discussion that we've had today.