Federal ministers ready plans to boost reconciliation agenda

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This article was published 28/11/2021 (1026 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — The two ministers who are overseeing the federal government’s reconciliation agenda say they want to speed up reform of the foster care system and get cash to Manitoba reserves to search possible burial sites at former residential schools.

They’ll have to contend with a split within Métis governments and lingering jurisdictional issues in child welfare.

The Free Press recently interviewed both Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller and Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu.

Miller said he’s concerned after hearing Manitoba bands have been frustrated in their efforts to access federal funding to search suspected burial sites. In August, Ottawa announced $321 million for searches and commemorations. As of Nov. 22, it had approved about $35 million in requests from 21 groups, including two in Manitoba. Another 47 have submitted applications, four of which are from Manitoba.

Miller said that’s fast by government standards.

“We will be there for you; take your time. If you want to hurry up, we will hurry up these applications,” he said. “It could go faster. But we know that the process to get this money out in the various envelopes and readiness of each community will vary.”

Miller’s new job focuses on long-term issues in how Ottawa and Indigenous leaders relate in areas such as land transfers and how the bureaucracy responds to the national inquiry on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

Hajdu has taken over Miller’s former job, which focuses on providing health care on reserves and transferring authority over some services to Indigenous communities. She met with senior chiefs in Winnipeg this month, and almost all raised the issue of housing on reserves after decades of overcrowding that created huge COVID-19 outbreaks.

She has asked to “urgently” meet with cabinet colleagues about how to make the national housing strategy easier for Indigenous communities to access, she said.

Hajdu said she’s also hoping to build on the success of the First Nations pandemic response team, which had Indigenous leaders steer federal and provincial officials toward some of the highest contact-tracing and vaccination rates in Canada. That system bucked a decades-long trend of services for Indigenous people falling between jurisdictional gaps between Ottawa and the provinces.

Hajdu met with Manitoba Families Minister Rochelle Squires; the talk focused around legislation that allows Indigenous governments to take over foster care. Currently, Manitoba First Nations can help run foster agencies, but their rules and budgets are set by the province and Ottawa.

Squires called it a productive meeting, but said issues the PC government raised in 2019 still persist.

It’s unclear who would have access to the child-predator registry under a decentralized system. Similarly, there’s no protocol for including autonomous agencies in the existing database of children in care, which helps authorities know whom to contact if a kid is at risk, even as a family moves between federally administered First Nations reserves and urban systems run by the province.

“(Hajdu) and I both agree that there’s no greater priority in reconciliation than helping Indigenous communities repatriate their children,” Squires said.

Hajdu said that overall, she will be guided by honesty, equity and autonomy.

“We need to be completely transparent and honest with communities about what we can commit to, and what we can’t commit to,” she said, adding that good services are key to forming healthy, productive communities.

Beyond working with provinces, a top challenge for Ottawa will be navigating a rift within Métis governance.

In September, the Manitoba Métis Federation broke out of the Métis National Council, which still holds branches in all other provinces from B.C. to Ontario.

MMF President David Chartrand says those branches are extending Métis citizenship to people who can’t prove they descended from the Red River Colony, which he argues will derail projects to have Métis people assert their identity and bridge decades of socio-economic gaps.

The MMF is now discussing expanding beyond Manitoba, giving its own citizenship to people in other provinces who can prove ancestral ties to what is now Winnipeg.

Ottawa has signed funding agreements with the MNC and its provincial branches,and also a self-government agreement in July with the MMF.

Miller said it’s inappropriate for the Crown to be deciding who is Indigenous, especially as the government tries to move away from the blood-quantum rules in the Indian Act.

“I have to show some restraint, because of the legacy of the position that I hold,” he said. “We feel that this is something that is internal to their nation. At the end of the day, it’s about respectful engagement, and it’s far from the federal government to be the referee in this.”

For now, the plan is to follow the existing funding formula, where programs for Métis health and education will be sent to provincial federations based on their population.

Both ministers said they hope to make more progress with the Stefanson government than her predecessor.

Former premier Brian Pallister oversaw collaboration on a COVID-19 response that put First Nations the driver’s seat, with outcomes that were praised nationally.

And yet Pallister made national headlines for comments that Indigenous leaders deemed racist, and he frequently battled with them in court or traded barbs with them in press conferences.

Miller said the and his federal cabinet colleagues have a duty to speak up in the face of racism.

“The process of marginalization and demonization, bigotry and bias, in all its forms, creates the excuse to justify social-economic gaps that are the basis of the lack of trust towards Canada, and it colours every aspect of our relationship,” he said.

“I have a moral duty — and I would say it rises to the level of the honour of the Crown — to speak out about these things, and to be relentless in holding people to account.”

Miller is hoping to move faster on getting land to First Nations and Métis groups in Manitoba. That includes both parcels of rural protected land for cultural practices, as well as urban reserves for economic development, such as the former Kapyong Barracks site.

“The broken relationship started with land, and it is fixed by reconciling ourselves with land and land restitution,” he said.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca