Money can't solve Canada's indigenous crisis
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
209.19656
Summary
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
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Right now, we've got an estimated 40,000 indigenous children currently in the child welfare system.
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And the nation's tied itself into knots, you know, trying to apologize and compensate indigenous people
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for the 150,000 children who attended residential schools over the course of a century.
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But think of that, we've got 40,000 still in care right now.
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Since the 1990s, the attempted solution to every indigenous issue is, of course,
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to pour more tax dollars into the system and hand money directly to chiefs and councils
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So far, that strategy has led to mass corruption, housing and water shortages, unemployment, poverty,
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They're suffering from crime rates that make inner city levels look like peaceful and safe by comparison.
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And not only that, but the people in the reserves have become so socially and economically messed up
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that 40,000 of their children are now wards of the state.
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So what's the solution the government's proposing?
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They wanted to give $47.8 billion to the indigenous people for child welfare programs in the reserves.
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This is after the government already gave indigenous people $23.3 billion just the other year
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to compensate them for having taken children into care in the past.
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Now, when you break all that down, it comes up to about $1.77 million for each and every indigenous child
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Of course, these funds were to be managed by indigenous reserves themselves
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as they were supposed to take over the child welfare programs.
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Well, indigenous chiefs from Canada across the country gathered in Calgary.
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And sat around in the naval gaze to discuss what they're going to do with this latest waterfall
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of funds being offered to ease their social ills.
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They determined that the offer of nearly $1.8 million per child wasn't enough,
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Decades of tossing funds at indigenous reserves while never holding them accountable for the
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funds being spent has led to a class of entitled chiefs and advocates who have no concept of
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personal accountability and can't look at solving any problems beyond holding their hands out
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They're never going to be satisfied, and they're never going to solve a problem.
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The problem is the racial apartheid system of reserves.
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We could increase funding to these reserves a thousandfold.
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They'd still be enclaves of socioeconomic misery.
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There's no situation where we can separate a race of people, put them in isolated places,
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make them 100% dependent upon welfare, and have it work out for the residents of these
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Much of the reason the residential schools were created over a century ago was because
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children were suffering horrifically on the reserves.
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A race and culture that had been living as nomadic, Neolithic people only a couple generations
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before, were suddenly crammed into reserves and expected to adapt to the modern living
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And some people felt educating the children, yeah, through residential schools could bring
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them up to the proper health and help them integrate into modern society.
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Part of the reason was as soon as these kids graduated from residential schools, they went
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20,000 indigenous killed children were taken into government care.
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It wasn't as if the government really wanted to take over the care of these children.
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The kids were malnourished and subject to abuse as reserve living had made life so dysfunctional
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parents couldn't raise their children any longer.
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The separation from their families was surely traumatic.
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But if they had remained in those households, they didn't face a very good future either.
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Ironically, if the government had left the children in those conditions, we'd be sued
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and blamed for neglect and having left them with their parents to be abused.
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Instead, the government took on the abuse and they're more effective at it.
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Look, indigenous leaders won't be satisfied no matter what we do.
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The common denominator in this whole affair over a century, though, is the reserve system
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It's the elephant in the room that no politician has the balls to address.
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And we haven't even begun discussing how to ease people out of it, much less start acting
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The willful blindness to the root of the problem has led to proposed solutions which
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But how could somebody look at this mess and think that moving more kids back onto the
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reserves while handing more money to chiefs and councils is going to make it any better?
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How many times you got to fail and keep trying that, guys?
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We're working to put kids back into the very situation to put them in the mess in the first
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We're never going to solve problems created by race-based policy through implementing even
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Either way, right now, yeah, the taxpayers are paying it, but the kids in the reserves are the
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And yeah, when you can see chiefs turning down money like that, it's never enough.