Funds withheld to pressure chiefs, say First Nations leaders

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First Nation chiefs are getting ready to fight the Indian Affairs minister on several fronts as details of how the federal government will change the way First Nations are governed begin to surface.

Three separate pieces of legislation are being prepared that will fundamentally change the role of First Nations leaders. Along with a proposed First Nations Governance Act, a First Nations Financial Institutions Act and an act that will create an independent claims body (ICB) are being framed.

Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief Matthew Coon Come met with Robert Nault, the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, on two occasions in late March. The AFN executive met with DIAND Deputy Minister Shirley Serafini and other department staff on April 12. The executive members were provided with two documents (a total of seven pages) during this briefing. AFN staff members are working on an analysis of the government documents. When completed, that analysis will be forwarded to chiefs across the country.

Former national chief Ovide Mercredi, now a political advisor to Coon Come, wrote a four-page response to these documents that criticizes the federal government for not being more open about the process. He also predicted that the minister's plan to consult Native people, and then have a broadly supported bill ready for Parliament by the autumn of 2002, will fail.

Coon Come wrote a letter to the chiefs on March 29 that tells the them to be ready to make a decision about the AFN's approach to Nault's proposal when they gather for the spring Confederacy in Vancouver from May 8 to 10.

"There is no question this legislation will affect us all," the national chief wrote. "The AFN will require a mandate from the confederacy on our strategy with respect to Minister Nault's Governance Act. Paramount to our actions will be the necessity to have the Canadian government recognize the rightful place of First Nations people in this country. Our treaty and Aboriginal rights are not negotiable nor should they be subject to political manipulation or further entrenched in regulatory minutia that effectively moves control further away from the First Nations governments."

First Nation sources say political manipulation has already begun in the form of financial pressure. More than two weeks after the beginning of the fiscal year, the Atlantic Policy Conference of First Nations Chiefs (APC) had only received $200,000 of its expected $700,000 annual core funding. A well-placed source at the APC told Windspeaker the chiefs believe they are being pressured to sign fishing agreements with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Several sources confirmed that a travel ban is in place at the AFN because funding there has not been finalized. The national chief confirmed that his organization is still not sure what its final budget for this year will be.

"That's still outstanding. We'll be meeting them again next week to review the budgets," he said during a phone interview on April 18.

Several sources, including Penticton Indian Band Chief Stewart Phillip, said it's extremely unusual for an annual financial agreement to still be incomplete several weeks after the beginning of the fiscal year. Coon Come was asked if he saw it as an attempt by the government to pressure his organization to co-operate.

"That's not rare, that's always been the government's attitude," he said. "It's the same approach they've always taken. They'll string you along. They will approve an interim budget and then you end up scrounging and trying to make do until your budget is finalized."

Still Coon Come may get stung by his own words as an excuse to cut the budget. His election campaign position was the AFN shouldn't be a "super band office."

"Right now, I've heard that they're cutting back right across the board," he said. "I think they'll try to use that but the question will be, if they do cut back, where will that money go? They're saying it's goingto go directly to organizations or to the communities. But if they're going to cut off two or three million from our budget, let's find out where that money's going."

Some observers believe the government is cutting the AFN back in direct response to Coon Come's more adversarial, rights-based approach.

"Well, people can make all kinds of assumptions," the national chief said. "I know they've said they don't like a rights-based agenda, that's for sure."

Indian Affairs Minister Nault told Windspeaker he has not ordered any cuts. He suggested that First Nation leaders are playing some politics of their own.

"No. There's no review of tribal council funding," Nault said. "There's been no discussion of tribal council funding, at least not from the minister's perspective. There's going to be a review of the mandates of tribal councils. I've indicated to headquarters and to the officials before the election that I wanted to look at the mandates of tribal councils to see whether they still met the needs of First Nations based on the fact that they were set up to give them technical services."

Yet rumors persist that something is up within the department in regards to funding. The minister explained that some internal changes had been made, but only in response to First Nation requests.

"There's no negotiations with tribal councils. They get core funding," said Nault. "What I instructed the officials is that, historically, the [political tribal organizations] . . . that those negotiations had been done by the [regional director generals] but they will now be done out of headquarters and approved by the minister. I have also said that funding will be the same as it was last year. But the whole objective of this new process was to accommodate what I had been asked to do by grand chiefs right across the country, which is to try to find a way to do multi-year funding, versus one-year funding," he said. "I've been trying to accommodate that but the first step is to change th process."

He couldn't explain why APC had received only a portion of its funding, but denied the department was applying any financial pressure.

"I'm not familiar with why APC has got $200,000 and not the rest," Nault said. "It's probably because they have not submitted their detailed plans."

Rumors about budget cuts at the AFN were flatly denied as inaccurate and uninformed.

"I'm hearing all this conversation about AFN; their budget is close to $20 million. Their budget has never been $20 million. Their core funding is $2.1 million," said Nault. "And their budget, that has gone that high, is based on joint initiatives that the government of Canada has entered into with the AFN based on a lot of things that occurred in the last two years. Now, a lot of those things are starting to wrap up. Obviously, when they do wrap up, a lot of those funds will disappear," he said. "Unfortunately, I think what's happened in a lot of these organizations is that certain people have gotten used to a level of funding and they have been hiring staff when they shouldn't have been and now they're into a tussle internally, as far as I can tell.

"For us, the AFN [budget] fluctuated close to $20 million last year. Now they're down to $16 million. For us, that's not a cut because their core hasn't changed. So the portrayal of that obviously is technocrats and bureaucrats over at AFN who want to continue doing the same thing. You know I've said before we do a lot of talking around here and we don't deliver a lot. I'm interested in seeing some deliverables, and so far my relationship, or the government of Canada's relationship with the AFN over the last two years, has delivered very little."

Nault talked about AFN funding during a face-to-face meeting with the national chief on Feb. 12. Windspeaker obtained minutes of that meeting and several points in the minister's opening comments questioned how the AFN is using government funding. On April 18, Nault explained that those remarks rflected his impatience to produce tangible results.

Veteran First Nation political observers who were not at the meeting, however, interpreted the minister's focus on funding as a veiled threat and a form of pressure. Nault said that was not the case.

Many chiefs are very suspicious of the government. The unforeseen negative impacts of past legislation always seem to erode Native rights and serve a suspected government agenda of extinguishing Aboriginal rights and decreasing federal obligations, they say. Hard line chiefs who insist that Canada recognize their sovereignty are especially wary. Chief Phillip, who is also president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, said the governance initiatives seem to fit in with other government policies and regulations that he sees as threats to his people's rights.

"There's a pattern here," he said. "It's not coincidence."

Phillip believes the Cabinet, Treasury Board and Prime Minister's Office are unhappy with the costs associated with residential school litigation and such high profile lawsuits as the billion dollar Samson Cree Nation's oil and gas action. As a result, he believes Indian Affairs is under pressure to cut costs and limit future spending and that will lead the department to impose taxation, cut funding levels and seek to force band councils to raise their own incomes.

"The residential school compensation, the oil and gas lawsuit in Alberta, what we're hearing is they're all having an impact on finance. In the big, big, big picture, somebody's budget has to get tagged for it. There's some pretty dramatic changes being proposed," he said. "The crunch is on this year. I see this as a watershed year."

Nault rejected Phillip's allegations.

"No. If you were to talk to Paul Martin, the minister of Finance, what he has said to me is, through First Nation leadership and yourself, show me a vision. Where are we going here? What's the objective? How do we build First Nation economies? Obviously First Nat