Northerners echo report that finds federal programs failing Indigenous people

The federal government is failing Canada's Indigenous people when it comes to measuring the success of costly programs designed to serve that population,according to an auditorgeneral's report released earlier this week in Ottawa.

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Michael Ferguson, Canada's auditor general, slammed Indigenous Services Canada for failing to close the "socioeconomic gaps between Indigenous peoples and other Canadians in this country."

Ferguson went on to say the federal government does not appear to even know how to measure those gaps.

The main measure used the Community Well-Being Index only looks at data on education, employment, income and housing. But these categories fail to measure other indicators of well-being that are important to Indigenous peoples such as traditional knowledge, health, food security, environment, language and culture.

And even where the government does have data, it sometimes fails to use it to the benefit of Indigenous people.

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Over four years, $40 million was spent on a program to prepare young Indigenous people for post-secondary school, but only eight per cent of the Indigenous youth the program targeted actually made it through. Ferguson said there are many indications the program isn't working and it's not that the government needs to collect more data.

"Despite these poor results, the department did not work with First Nations or education institutions to improve success rates," he said.

Donald Prince is the executive director and CEO of the Arctic Indigenous Wellness Foundation in Yellowknife. He echoed the auditor general's criticisms.

"The government develops their own policy and process about what they think we need and then they give it to us from their point of view," he said. "They don't take into account what we say."

Flipping the approach

John B. Zoe, former land claims negotiator and now adviser to the Tlicho Government, offers away forward in simple terms.

He said the federal government needs to "make sure that language, culture and way of life are the basis for anything they deliver."

Indigenous people "have thousands of years of knowledge," he said.

"We have a lot to bring to the surface."

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