Western Standard - October 28, 2024


Money can't solve Canada's indigenous crisis

Topics
reserve system
Mentioned
Neolithic
If $1.7 million for every indigenous child in care isn’t enough, what will be？ Alberta takes Ottawa to court

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

209.2

Word count

966

Sentence count

65

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Since the 1990s, the government has been trying to solve the problem of Indigenous child welfare in Canada by handing control of the system over to Indigenous Chiefs and Councils. Since then, the problem has only gotten worse, and now there are more than 40,000 Indigenous children in government care.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.360 Right now, we've got an estimated 40,000 indigenous children currently in the child welfare system.
00:00:06.320 Yeah, that's not a typo, 40,000.
00:00:08.140 And the nation's tied itself into knots, you know, trying to apologize and compensate indigenous people 1.00
00:00:13.040 for the 150,000 children who attended residential schools over the course of a century.
00:00:18.160 But think of that, we've got 40,000 still in care right now.
00:00:21.480 Since the 1990s, the attempted solution to every indigenous issue is, of course, 1.00
00:00:25.620 to pour more tax dollars into the system and hand money directly to chiefs and councils
00:00:30.440 in the spirit of self-government.
00:00:32.820 So far, that strategy has led to mass corruption, housing and water shortages, unemployment, poverty,
00:00:39.980 people dying at younger ages.
00:00:42.620 They're suffering from crime rates that make inner city levels look like peaceful and safe by comparison.
00:00:47.920 And not only that, but the people in the reserves have become so socially and economically messed up
00:00:51.680 that 40,000 of their children are now wards of the state.
00:00:55.620 So what's the solution the government's proposing?
00:00:57.340 Well, guess what?
00:00:58.520 They wanted to give $47.8 billion to the indigenous people for child welfare programs in the reserves.
00:01:04.560 This is after the government already gave indigenous people $23.3 billion just the other year
00:01:08.660 to compensate them for having taken children into care in the past.
00:01:12.320 Now, when you break all that down, it comes up to about $1.77 million for each and every indigenous child
00:01:18.780 in government care right now.
00:01:20.760 Of course, these funds were to be managed by indigenous reserves themselves
00:01:23.740 as they were supposed to take over the child welfare programs. 0.98
00:01:26.440 What could possibly go wrong?
00:01:28.260 Well, indigenous chiefs from Canada across the country gathered in Calgary.
00:01:32.280 We paid for that, of course.
00:01:33.500 And sat around in the naval gaze to discuss what they're going to do with this latest waterfall
00:01:37.880 of funds being offered to ease their social ills.
00:01:41.000 They determined that the offer of nearly $1.8 million per child wasn't enough,
00:01:44.920 and they rejected the offer.
00:01:46.100 Yeah, they rejected it.
00:01:48.600 Will it ever be enough?
00:01:49.860 No, it won't.
00:01:51.460 Decades of tossing funds at indigenous reserves while never holding them accountable for the
00:01:55.280 funds being spent has led to a class of entitled chiefs and advocates who have no concept of
00:01:59.980 personal accountability and can't look at solving any problems beyond holding their hands out
00:02:04.260 for more funds.
00:02:05.200 They're never going to be satisfied, and they're never going to solve a problem.
00:02:08.600 The problem is the racial apartheid system of reserves.
00:02:11.840 We could increase funding to these reserves a thousandfold.
00:02:14.920 They'd still be enclaves of socioeconomic misery.
00:02:17.860 There's no situation where we can separate a race of people, put them in isolated places, 1.00
00:02:22.280 make them 100% dependent upon welfare, and have it work out for the residents of these
00:02:27.080 places.
00:02:27.420 Yet we keep trying.
00:02:29.040 Much of the reason the residential schools were created over a century ago was because
00:02:32.140 children were suffering horrifically on the reserves.
00:02:35.400 A race and culture that had been living as nomadic, Neolithic people only a couple generations
00:02:39.480 before, were suddenly crammed into reserves and expected to adapt to the modern living
00:02:43.340 standards of the day.
00:02:44.720 It was a disaster.
00:02:46.180 And some people felt educating the children, yeah, through residential schools could bring
00:02:49.340 them up to the proper health and help them integrate into modern society.
00:02:52.840 Now, that didn't work out really well.
00:02:54.240 We know that.
00:02:55.540 Part of the reason was as soon as these kids graduated from residential schools, they went
00:02:58.280 right back to the reserves.
00:02:59.780 Well, what did you expect to happen?
00:03:02.020 During what was called the 60s scoop.
00:03:04.080 Yes, this is a big one.
00:03:04.900 20,000 indigenous killed children were taken into government care.
00:03:07.680 It wasn't as if the government really wanted to take over the care of these children.
00:03:11.060 They had to.
00:03:12.040 The kids were malnourished and subject to abuse as reserve living had made life so dysfunctional 1.00
00:03:16.660 parents couldn't raise their children any longer.
00:03:19.060 The separation from their families was surely traumatic.
00:03:21.900 But if they had remained in those households, they didn't face a very good future either.
00:03:25.820 Ironically, if the government had left the children in those conditions, we'd be sued
00:03:29.120 and blamed for neglect and having left them with their parents to be abused.
00:03:33.020 Instead, the government took on the abuse and they're more effective at it.
00:03:35.420 Look, indigenous leaders won't be satisfied no matter what we do. 1.00
00:03:38.840 The common denominator in this whole affair over a century, though, is the reserve system
00:03:42.260 itself. 0.97
00:03:42.860 It's the elephant in the room that no politician has the balls to address. 0.97
00:03:46.260 The reserve system is doomed to failure. 0.91
00:03:48.780 And we haven't even begun discussing how to ease people out of it, much less start acting
00:03:53.320 on it.
00:03:54.020 How bad does it have to get?
00:03:55.300 Are 40,000 kids in care not enough?
00:03:58.120 The willful blindness to the root of the problem has led to proposed solutions which
00:04:02.240 only exacerbate it.
00:04:03.340 But how could somebody look at this mess and think that moving more kids back onto the
00:04:07.340 reserves while handing more money to chiefs and councils is going to make it any better?
00:04:11.340 How many times you got to fail and keep trying that, guys?
00:04:13.920 We're working to put kids back into the very situation to put them in the mess in the first
00:04:16.980 place.
00:04:17.260 And it's only going to get worse.
00:04:18.860 We're never going to solve problems created by race-based policy through implementing even 0.83
00:04:22.200 more race-based policy.
00:04:23.580 But we keep trying.
00:04:24.880 Either way, right now, yeah, the taxpayers are paying it, but the kids in the reserves are the
00:04:28.920 ones paying the highest price right now.
00:04:30.600 So we've got to get realistic with this.
00:04:32.660 And yeah, when you can see chiefs turning down money like that, it's never enough.
00:04:36.500 And it won't be.