Auditor-General slams feds on First Nations public-safety funding
Canada’s Auditor-General found ‘serious issues’ with funding of First Nations policing services and public safety, but those haven’t changed since another auditor’s report a decade ago, the chief of Kahnawake’s Peacekeepers said.
“We had another auditor general’s report come out in 2013 that said the same thing, and where are we now? Nowhere,” Peacekeeper Chief Dwayne Zacharie said. “The Viens Commission, the (national inquiry) on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, they all came out and said it’s important the government invest further into First Nations policing and public safety, but it’s still really hard to get funding. Sure, they have funds that get us a car or a new truck, but I have no bodies to put in that truck.”
Auditor-General Karen Hogan’s scathing report said Indigenous Services Canada spent three-and-a-half times more money on responding to and recovering from emergencies than on supporting the communities to prepare for them.
“Until these projects are completed, First Nations communities are likely to continue to experience emergencies that could be averted by investing in the right infrastructure,” Hogan wrote. “Many issues have not improved since we first identified them in our 2013 audit of emergency management on reserves.”
She added that the federal government was in the dark as to which communities were in the toughest spots, resource-wise.
“For example,” Hogan said, ISC “still had not identified which First Nations communities were the least likely to be able to manage emergencies. The department also did not know whether First Nations received services that were culturally appropriate and comparable to emergency services provided in municipalities of similar size and circumstance because it did not identify or consistently monitor the services or level of services to be provided to First Nations.”
Zacharie said that jibes with his experience dealing with federal departments.
“We only have a job because of federal funding, so we’re subject to renewal of that funding every fiscal year,” he said.
The federal government’s repeated failure to designate any one of the 36 independent police forces that look after First Nations communities from coast to coast as an essential service is yet another bone of contention for him.
“We feel like second-class citizens,” Zacharie said. “The Kahnawake Peacekeepers are in a better position than some because we argue, we fight, we push the envelope all over the place. But at the end of the day, we are still funded under a federal program.”
Indigenous Services minister Patty Hajdu looked to alleviate some of the stress felt by those First Nations communities by partnering with those communities in matters of public safety – including the wildfires that threatened many Indigenous communities last summer.
“ISC will co-develop an approach to focus funding on First Nation communities at the highest risk of being impacted by emergency events,” the department said earlier this week, adding it would work toward multi-jurisdictional agreements.
Zacharie is taking a wait-and-see approach to see if there will be some sort of change in the funding model – but he’s not optimistic.
“Every year it gets incrementally better,” he said. “But every year, it feels like the government cares about everything else more than they do human rights. We heard the same thing in the past and not much has changed.”
Marc Lalonde, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Iori:wase
