Community escapes third party

Page 8

Chief Irvin McIvor said goodbye to his third-party manager on Feb. 1. The rookie Sandy Bay First Nation chief was elected in September after leading a fight to depose the previous council. He inherited a $9 million debt, but came into office with a plan to wrestle that debt to the ground.

"When we won the election, we already had a plan in place. We got rid of the band political advisors. They were taking the reserve in the wrong direction. And then we, well, I fired a bunch of people, I guess. There's always circles and circles of people that are loyal to the government of the day and with their own personal agendas," he said. "We evaluated the reserve as a whole. We did a management and personnel evaluation and people didn't like it. They said, 'Well, they're looking for reasons to get rid of us.' That wasn't the case. The case was to better the program delivery."

Radical changes to the band's administration have cut the payroll by $30,000 a week and thinned out the ranks of the First Nation's senior management.

"We cut payroll by $60,000 bi-weekly. So in the amount of time I've been here it's probably about $700,000 [in savings]. We made positions redundant. We amalgamated other services. We amalgamated social services, housing and membership, which only makes sense. We lowered salaries on some people. This reserve is prospering. It hasn't skipped a beat without all these people. We made sure they were all eligible for EI," he said. "We were talking about $60,000 and $70,000 salaries. How are you going to get rid of any deficit by getting rid of people that are making seven or eight dollars an hour?"

Many of the moves he has made in his six months in office have not been popular. His election was challenged. On Feb. 19, it was decided that challenge would not be allowed. The new chief also saw protesters set up outside the band office for the first week of his administration. McIvor said the resistance was generated by his drive to impose accountability on band officials.

"There's 5,000 people in this community. I only won by 50 votes, so there's people saying it could have gone either way. The bottom line is they've got to live with it. I'm here till September of 2005," he said.

McIvor, a 39-year-old carpenter who ran a contracting business before running for chief, set up a new system that centralizes authority and oversight of all band operations.

"We created what I call management and tech services. It's an umbrella company within our structure. We have INAC funding. We have health. We have human resources development. We have our video lottery terminals. We have child and family services, education, housing and treaties-16 portfolios. It's like a framework agreement but we initiated it on our reserve. We're the only reserve that's doing it. All these programs are under co-management by chief and council. Most of the program managers are gone because of the lack of accountability," he said. "It's not just restricted to INAC funding. When the third-party manager was here, he couldn't say anything about health. . . Our video lottery terminals generate $1.3 million a year and the former chief and council, even when they were not recognized by Indian Affairs, they still had access to all these other programs. When we came in, we slapped INAC with so many plans that we had that they had no choice but to take it. They said, 'Well you have to go through capacity building.' We said, 'Bang. There's a proposal right there. We're going to do it.' They approved it right away. We got $70,000 from them our first week there. They did a management assessment and this piggybacked onto our assessment and they said no First Nation has ever done this."

Chief Irvin Mcivor said it's a simple solution: a business-like approach rather than a bureaucratic approach.

Windspeaker asked if he worried about making other First Nation leaders who haven't had his success look bad.

"I'm not concerned about it My heart and soul is within my community. I see the problems within my community so I don't care what anybody else says in the outside world. My mandate is to fix this community and within that two-year span the people have given me a mandate to do my job and I'm working seven days a week on it."

"This management and tech services negotiates for buying power. We negotiate for anything you can think of the band uses. It goes through management and tech services," he said. "All the consultants are gone from every organization. We provide the consultants from management and tech. Health had three consultants. One was for $3,500 a week, and for what? They were there once a month and you're still paying $14,000. So we got rid of all of them and said, 'Look when you need a consultant, we'll send one over from management and tech.' They tell us how long they need him-everything has to be done on paper, by the way-and we send them a bill from management and tech. We pay the consultant. If we send them a $10,000 bill for that week, that doesn't mean the consultant gets $10,000. So management and tech is also putting money in the bank for the reserve. Health was going to pay $14,000 anyway. So we do it for $7,000. We give the consultant $4,000. We get a profit of $3,000."

He made getting out of third-party management a priority because the third party system causes chaos in the community.

"When a school bus broke down, we had to find him. We had to get him to send a fax over to another city for them to release the parts. The school was closed sometimes two or three times a week," he said. "I'm proud of this. The school has not been closed one day since I got in as chief. Even if there's a blizzard here, I've got machine operators and they work all night."

Many chiefs say INAC won't respond to a progressive chief because it wants to maintain control. McIvor said he had encountered some resistance from bureaucrats but he refuses to play the game.

"I don't get itimidated by suits or somebody's degrees hanging on the wall. I know why they're there and I know the history of our people. This is our money from our resources and they have absolutely no business telling us how much we're eligible for in a year," he said. "They give me the red tape and all the crap and I say why do I deal with all the puppets. I tell them, 'If you're going to jerk me around, I'll go to your superior. If you can't do it, I'm on my way to Ottawa.' If you talk to a minister you can expect something done the next day. If you talk to someone in the region here, it'll take two years."

When it comes to quality of life issues, he said, you don't need a new governance act. All you need is for bureaucrats to stop acting like bureaucrats and employ a more business-like approach.

"It's very, very simple," he said. "You go beyond those invisible boundaries that we're in, those invisible lines they call reserves. In my language, you know what "reserve" means? It means 'left-over.' There's absolutely nothing here. There's no arable land. They gave us a big marsh-11,000 some odd acres. That's one of the things we're fighting for in our treaty land entitlement. What makes marshland arable? Who the hell's going to live on weeds?"

McIvor said the community members who aren't blindly loyal to the previous chief and council are telling him they can see a difference in the community already.

"Since 1998 we've been in third party twice, we've been in co-management three times, so nothing was working under the leadership. People didn't realize how serious a situation it is to be under third party. It's not just taking over our funding. It almost seems there's a string attached to punish a First Nation. Sort of, 'You guys got yourself into a fiscal nightmare and I'm here as an Indian Agent-like 50 years back-and I'm going to punish you for the timeframe that I'm here,'" he said. "Then the co-manager takes over. The co-manager I have here, he's here every day. f you go to another First Nation, you'll see the co-manager maybe once a week. If you see him bi-weekly you're lucky because he can sign cheques for payroll. But in this community, we have one here every day and there's also capacity building. I actually had [the co-manager] picked before the election."

And the co-manager knows that chief and council are the ultimate authority, he added.

"Co-manager is self-explanatory. He co-manages with the chief and council; he works with the chief and council. I don't think that's been happening. I don't know if it's been chief and council passing the buck or the co-manager passing the buck. I don't pass the buck to anybody," he said. "I don't blame Indian Affairs for our problems. I don't blame the co-manager or third-party manager. I say, 'These are the problems. Let's fix them.' Offer solutions instead of dwelling on how Indian Affairs has short-changed us. They're always going to short-change us. We're not going to let our reserve go just because of that. I'm going to show them I can develop a governance structure that's even better than Indian Affairs' structure."

Observers of the intervention policy system say former federal government employees identified an opportunity to make a lot of money, resigned from government and went into business for themselves as co-managers or third party managers. Several sources said they often made things worse for First Nations in the long term. But by then they've got the First Nation's money and they're long gone.

McIvor has seen that, but he maintains that a First Nation government that allows itself to be exploited must share the blame.

"I haven't really thought about where these guys come from. I know most of them are leeches," he said. "When I became chief, I got so many calls from people offering their services. People come here and do a presentation for us regarding co-management. They say, 'I can save you millions and millions of dollars from INAC.' I say, 'Hey, I c