Poll showed grassroots wanted governance act

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A poll commissioned last summer by several federal government departments that asked grassroots on-reserve First Nation people what they thought about the First Nations governance act produced results that might surprise you.

The poll showed that more than half of the grassroots people wanted the legislation. Even more provocative, the poll showed that opposition to the act was high in higher income groups and low in low-income groups.

At least that's what we're told the poll shows. It's a funny thing; the poll supporting the governance initiative was never released.

The fact that such polling was being done under Robert Nault, the former minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC), was not a secret. Departmental staff had advised Birchbark the poll produced some interesting results. But when it became clear that Paul Martin would succeed Jean Chretien as prime minister sooner than the original February 2004 transition date, suddenly the poll with the interesting results went underground.

Martin had made it clear he had been convinced the well from which the governance act had sprung was poisoned by Nault with his approach of forcing the legislation through Parliament against the wishes of First Nations leaders.

Such was the Martin camp's displeasure with the second longest serving Indian Affairs minister in history, that Nault was forced out of politics and not allowed to run as a Liberal for a seat he had held for the party for more than 11 years.

Birchbark sources say its because of this atmosphere that the government has been suspiciously slow to release the poll results. Dianne Laursen, an INAC communications officer, says there is no funny business afoot. She says the poll will be made public shortly.

"The survey of First Nations people living on-reserve, it was conducted as well by EKOS in October 2003. After further work was done on focus groups, the reports on those survey results were completed in late March. So that one is in the process of being deposited with Public Works. The results will be in the public domain shortly, probably the end of June or early July," she said.

Another EKOS poll, called Rethinking Government, was a poll of the general Canadian population.

In that poll, a question was put to the Canadian public, essentially asking people if they approved of the First Nations governance act. Nationally, 33 per cent strongly supported and 39 per cent somewhat supported the legislation.

"The results were deposited with Public Works and Government Services within Treasury Board guidelines. The survey polled 1,501 people during a three-week period in June and early July 2003. The reports were completed in September. INAC results were deposited Sept. 10, 2003," she said. "By depositing it, it means it's been made public as copies with the Library of Parliament and the National Archives and is available to members of Parliament and other Canadians."

So the poll that was released took a mere two months to go from completion of the polling itself to public release. The on-reserve poll, if it is released when Laursen said it will be, will have taken almost eight months from completion of polling to public release.

When the results are made public First Nation leaders will have to deal with statistical information that could support the claim that they have very different agendas from those of the grassroots First Nations people they represent. Some might suggest that those same leaders opposed Nault's legislation only to protect their positions of privilege in their communities.

Don Kelly, spokesman for the Assembly of First Nations, had a couple of cautions about jumping to any quick conclusions.

"The one thing I always looked for when the previous minister was in place was that to support the governance act they would do surveys on reserve and they would ask people to rank priorities, including things like governance or accountability. But the always separated governance from things like lands and resource issues or settling claims or implementing treaties. We always thought that's very misleading because we don't see, and the Harvard project would agree, the Royal Commission, any other number of studies would agree, that claims, access to lands and resources, etc. are not separate from governance. They're all connected," he said.

Kelly said he would have to see the polling questions before he ventured an opinion on the worth of the data.

"I haven't seen it. But if it's a question about accountability, that's fine too. We've always said, under the previous national chief and under the current national chief, that we're willing to work on accountability," he said. "In fact some of those proposals, like the First Nations auditor general and ombudsman, we would really like to pursue those things because it takes the burden off of a lot of our leadership who are unfairly blamed for the fact that not all of this money gets to the communities. Our leadership gets unfairly blamed when we know the department has got its own share of accountability problems."

As for the inference by government officials that high income earners on reserve opposed the governance act because they were probably the ones benefiting from the existing Indian Act system, one media-shy consultant who worked to oppose the governance initiative suggested another interpretation.

"I would interpret the results quite differently-most of the grassroots people on reserve had little balanced information on [the governance act]. And what information they had was INAC's spin. So, of course, they said 'Looks pretty good to me.' But with higher income, higher access to Internet, higher education, more information on [the act] comes negative opinion. I am on numerous reserves frequently in Manitoba, and I know of none where one could say that 53 per cent of grassroots people even knew of [the act], let alone supported it."