Western Standard - April 25, 2024


The Indian Reserve system must be dismantled

The Trudeau Liberal government unveils Federal Plastics Registry to 'combat' plastic pollution... Alberta's Ambitious Passenger Rail Master Plan

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

207.78

Word count

1,283

Sentence count

73

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about the dire situation in Canada's Indian Affairs system, and why we need to do something about it. I also talk about why it's time for the media to get on board with the problem, and how we can fix it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 It says, the only sacred cow that terrifies politicians more than Canada's vaunted health care system is the catastrophic Indigenous affairs system. 1.00
00:00:10.780 I mean, to try and address problems with Indigenous peoples in Canada with any plan aside from throwing money at it and offering intergenerational apologies is to invite accusations of racism and garner political ostracization.
00:00:22.660 If politicians can't find the courage to state the obvious when it comes to the mess with Indigenous citizens, then maybe it's time for media members to start this ball rolling. 1.00
00:00:31.180 The taboo with this issue must, and if we are ever to dream of seeing improvements, we have to drop that taboo.
00:00:38.880 I've worked in energy exploration for more than 20 years.
00:00:41.600 Much of my time was spent working on or near Indian reserves and working directly with the citizens on them, watching the condition on those reserves going from bad to worse every year.
00:00:49.980 It was one of the most heart-wrenching and frustrating things I've lived through.
00:00:52.920 There's lots of fantastic people living in those reserves, but they're living in abject poverty and misery, and no amount of money is going to change that. 0.99
00:01:00.020 I mean, how stupid can we be, really? 0.96
00:01:02.240 How can we possibly think that we could separate a segment of the population based on race, constantly tell them every problem in their life is due to the malignant action of settlers of prior generations, 1.00
00:01:12.400 shower them with money, and expect them to become well-adjusted citizens in the modern world?
00:01:16.700 The legal term for these racial enclaves is Indian reserves.
00:01:21.140 That's why I use the term.
00:01:22.680 It's an old, out-of-the-date term, but that says a lot about what it is, isn't it?
00:01:25.900 The proper term should be apartheid. 1.00
00:01:27.800 It's racial segregation, and that's no better than what we used to decry in South Africa, 0.89
00:01:31.960 and it won't create racial unity or prosperity any more effectively than the South African model did either.
00:01:37.360 You can't fix the ills created by race-based policies by implementing more race-based policies, yet we keep trying.
00:01:44.020 We need to take a results-based approach with Canada's reserves.
00:01:48.700 Spending on Indigenous affairs has been growing in leaps and bounds, yet the situation continues to get worse by every measure.
00:01:54.880 Isn't it time to admit we can't spend ourselves out of this problem yet?
00:01:59.080 2024 federal budget, it's a massive free spending endeavor, and despite this, activists immediately condemned it for underfunding Indigenous people.
00:02:06.100 Underfunding, really?
00:02:06.800 Currently, just in federal spending alone, more than 15,000 a year is dedicated for every man, woman, and child of Indigenous descent in Canada.
00:02:14.960 They also get loan guarantees, grants, tax exemptions, free post-secondary education.
00:02:19.140 That's all on top of that.
00:02:21.020 And the provinces spend billions on top of that.
00:02:23.360 And municipalities with countless programs and grants.
00:02:25.680 This is above and beyond every service granted to them as Canadian citizens.
00:02:29.180 They still also, of course, get health care, education, use roads, get full access to all those tax-funded services, as they should.
00:02:34.620 But in theory, this should make Indigenous people the richest, most well-adjusted people in Canada, shouldn't it?
00:02:40.300 Well, instead, they suffer with poverty, lower life expectations, high crime, low education levels, high domestic abuse statistics, massive addiction issues, mental health challenges, suicides.
00:02:50.140 They lag average Canadians in every measure of standard of living. 1.00
00:02:54.240 Yet some folks, some idiots, still think we can spend our way out of this. 0.99
00:02:58.040 If every Canadian had just spent one day on the average Indian reserve, the national attitude on this system would change in a hurry. 1.00
00:03:04.620 How could somebody go out and spend a day looking at the piles of trash, the dilapidated houses, the wild dogs, and worst of all, the broken state of the citizens and residents, and imagine for a second that this system can work?
00:03:16.160 People need to ask themselves, what's the long game?
00:03:19.200 Most reserves are in isolated areas with few economic opportunities.
00:03:22.540 The populations are doomed to lifetimes of dependency, which leads to depression and social breakdowns.
00:03:28.140 The reserves aren't going to become hubs of technological advancement or educational institutions.
00:03:31.900 They're not going to become manufacturing centers or tourist destinations.
00:03:35.020 They're just going to keep growing in population and dependency while disorder and misery spreads.
00:03:39.860 The main employer on most reserves is almost always the government, whether federal or provincial or banned administration jobs.
00:03:44.920 And nepotism is rampant among these jobs.
00:03:46.820 Many of them are high-paying but token roles.
00:03:50.220 I worked on one reserve in northern Alberta where the person assigned to manage the band's land affairs was the chief sister, and she didn't even know where the boundaries of the reserve were until I showed her on a map.
00:03:59.780 Band managers are usually non-Indigenous members brought in at great expense to take care of the actual management of the reserve.
00:04:05.680 The local members, unfortunately, are usually in too dysfunctional a condition to take on that role.
00:04:09.800 I'm not shooting at the Indigenous people as a race, though I doubtless I'm going to be accused of that.
00:04:14.720 Look, any race kept on reserves as Canada's Indigenous people will be just as messed up after a few generations. 1.00
00:04:19.800 It's not the race that's the problem.
00:04:21.660 It's the system and the entrenched attitudes towards the issue.
00:04:24.960 Look at the endless debate over clean water and Indigenous reserves.
00:04:28.160 Every government with every party gets hammered on that issue.
00:04:30.820 Don't you think one would invest in getting clean water by now?
00:04:34.280 Actually, they did, and they have, and they do.
00:04:36.600 It's just that their efforts are failing.
00:04:38.700 Bringing water and septic services to rural areas is no small task.
00:04:42.100 In urban centers, you get plants for treating fresh water and disposing of sewage, and it's all connected with pipes for the water and effluent.
00:04:48.060 That doesn't work well in areas where the houses are separated by hundreds of meters, if not miles.
00:04:52.020 In rural areas and reserves, people have their own water wells outside of reserves and septic systems.
00:04:58.420 Homeowners have to maintain those systems, though.
00:05:00.160 They're going to fail.
00:05:01.120 The problem on reserves is citizens don't hold a sense of responsibility.
00:05:04.040 They don't have property rights, and they're just, unfortunately, socially dysfunctional.
00:05:08.060 The systems then aren't maintained, and the water becomes contaminated.
00:05:11.420 I don't doubt somebody will accuse me of racism for saying it, but too damn bad.
00:05:14.740 I challenge them to prove me wrong.
00:05:16.300 I'm not saying that people are dysfunctional because of their race.
00:05:18.500 I'm saying they're dysfunctional because the system is breaking them.
00:05:22.960 Until people are willing to point that out, though, it's not going to get any better.
00:05:25.700 If Canada's Indigenous people were living in luxury and happy, I might grumble about the expenditures of taxes, but I can at least accept it. 1.00
00:05:32.000 When we spend this much on the issue, though, and they're living in misery, I have to call it out.
00:05:36.040 I don't hate Indigenous people.
00:05:37.800 If I did, I can't think of something more cruel than supporting the current system.
00:05:41.580 The reserve, the system is doomed to failure by its very nature.
00:05:45.240 It won't be easy to end the system, and it's going to take some time, but it has to end eventually.
00:05:50.200 The roadmap and plan to end the policies of racial apartheid in Canada need to be developed.
00:05:54.840 To do that, though, we first need to accept that the reserve system is irreparably broken.
00:05:58.340 To get there, we need to start talking frankly on the issue.
00:06:01.340 We aren't even close to that part yet.
00:06:03.460 Enough with the policies of good intent.
00:06:05.020 We need policies with good outcomes.
00:06:06.820 The best outcome we could see is the end of the Indian reserve system in Canada. 0.98