Video—Programs for Indigenous Peoples

Video Transcript

Today, we released two more audits that underscore the federal government’s seeming inability to improve the quality of life of Canada’s Indigenous people. And sadly, this isn’t new.

Indigenous Services Canada’s only tool for tracking well-being was the Community Well-Being Index. We found that this tool excluded important areas such as health, language and culture, and that it was updated only every 5 years. We also found that the Department didn’t use the information it did have to measure or report whether people’s lives were improving. That makes it difficult to know what needs fixing, or how to fix it. Successive governments have all committed for years to working to close that gap. Yet our audits over decades show that all have struggled to deliver on that commitment. And our most recent audits show that the struggle is ongoing. More specifically on education, we calculated that the gap in education levels between First Nations and other Canadians had increased from 30% in 2001 to 33% in 2016.

For its part, Employment and Social Development Canada funded training programs meant to help Indigenous people secure sustainable employment. The Department has been delivering this type of support since the 1990s. And though it spends over $300 million a year doing so, it does not know whether its programs are serving the needs of Indigenous clients by helping them find and keep jobs. The Department does not know why some service providers are more successful than others, in terms of training clients and helping them get jobs. It also has not analysed which of the services provided achieve the best results for clients.

With these audits, we see again government programs not delivering results for those they are intended to serve; programs that seem to exist for their own sake rather than serving people; programs that are managed using incomplete or inaccurate data, with funding formulas that are based on outdated information; and programs where public reporting overstates what departments have accomplished– such as the example we have in our report of the department of Indigenous Services who overstated the graduation rates of First Nations students by up to 29 percent.

We are dealing here with fundamental flaws, demonstrated by a decades-old lack of progress. Fixing these problems requires more than tinkering with policies or creating new processes. In my view, it requires a fundamental re-think of how the federal government goes about providing support to Canada’s Indigenous people, and how it engages them in developing and implementing sustainable solutions to achieve lasting improvement.