Inflated statistics, feeble bureaucrats blamed for growing Indigenous poverty gap By: Dylan Robertson Posted: 6:55 PM CDT Tuesday, May. 29, 2018 Last Modified: 4:21 PM CDT Wednesday, May. 30, 2018 Updates

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OTTAWA — Inflated statistics, flimsy goals and feeble bureaucrats are impeding Ottawa from closing persistent socioeconomic gaps for Indigenous people, according to two audits tabled Tuesday in Parliament.

“We don’t see those gaps closing, we don’t even see that they know how to measure those gaps,” auditor general Michael Ferguson told reporters, chalking it up to “incomprehensible failures” by the federal government.

A study published last October by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards found Manitoba will squander 11 per cent of its workforce growth over next two decades if the gap in Indigenous people’s employment and schooling persists.

Ferguson found Ottawa has been hapless at fixing those problems, especially in First Nations communities.

He found the federal government has been reporting a high-school graduation rate on reserves that is almost double the actual number of students who get a diploma. That’s because Ottawa counts who enters Grade 12 and compares it with how many complete the term, instead of tracking everyone who enters Grade 9 through to the end of Grade 12.

Over five school years ending in 2016, Ottawa said 46 per cent of First Nations teens on-reserve had completed high school; the actual number is 24 per cent.

Auditors noted the Manitoba government does a more accurate, annual count for students off-reserve, but Ottawa opts for the Grade 12 one on-reserve.

In any case, the gap in high-school graduation between reserves and the rest of Canada has widened since 2001.

Ferguson’s team also found bureaucrats don’t use the datasets available to them from federal departments, band councils and provinces, meaning they have a limited picture of both schooling and employment on reserves.

“It’s not a matter of that they need to collect a lot more data, or they need to do some sophisticated analysis of the data. They just need to look at what the data they already have is telling them — and most of it is pretty obvious.”

The audit also revealed the Assembly of First Nations directed its education committee in July 2017 to pull out of a year-long effort to help public servants craft an assessment tool for students on-reserve, over concerns it was going too fast and not reflecting band-council autonomy.

The AFN said Tuesday that was an accurate characterization of what happened.

Indigenous Services Minister Jane Philpott said her government was still able to shape its education policy with the AFN committee’s help and ultimate approval. “There’s still more work to do on that area. This is a new world where we are co-creating outcome metrics with First Nations, for First Nations,” she said.

Philpott said the Liberals’ move last summer to split the former Indigenous Affairs into two departments means her team can give more attention to such tasks.

She touted a “regional performance-measurement” approach, so students on Manitoba reserves don’t get assessed through tools designed in Ottawa.

Another audit found issues with the two major programs aimed at “securing sustainable and meaningful employment” for First Nations, Métis and Inuit. The audit revealed bureaucrats wrote off short-term gigs under that category.

“They didn’t have a definition of what sustainable employment means. So even if somebody got a part-time job, or a job for five days working on a construction project, they counted that as one of the clients getting a job,” Ferguson said.

Labour Minister Patty Hajdu said a new employment program will also be designed in lockstep with Indigenous people, instead of “paternalistic programming” she blamed on her Conservative predecessors.

She said the new program will assess types of job, pay, contract duration and whether it meets local labour needs.

Ferguson said his reports continue to find a public-servant “culture” that focuses on arbitrary goals over actual outcomes for Canadians, and hiding problems from higher-ups who direct departments.

“I think it’s very much that there’s something in the culture that makes people believe that they can’t bring forward these problems; (that) the system is not going to work.”

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca

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