Leaked document reveals INAC is changing direction

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Minister of Indian Affairs Robert Nault announced the department is considering re-working the B.C. treaty process.

"The treaty and the treaty process is like anything else. It must evolve or die," Nault said.

Nault was speaking to delegates at the British Columbia Treaty Commission conference "Speaking Truth to Power III" in Vancouver on March 15.

The minister also suggested a willingness on the part of the government to walk away from treaty negotiations if First Nation negotiators don't show they're willing to make major concessions.

While some negotiations have reached advanced stages and the prospects for further progress look good, others are "stalling because of the sheer number and complexity of issues," he said.

"A third group of negotiating tables face a different set of challenges. Quite frankly, in these cases, the gap between governments and First Nations is too large to overcome at this time. . . . In this case, I have said across the country, there is no shame in taking a break. . . . I recognize that there are impediments for taking a 'time-out' from negotiations, once they have begun."

Nault said the government is reviewing the way it does business at Indian Affairs on all fronts.

"The Prime Minister is committed to a fundamental re-thinking of how we can help to improve the quality of life of First Nations."

Get ready to start hearing a lot about the "quality of life" agenda. A document leaked to Windspeaker titled "Renewing treaties, claims and self-government negotiation processes to support a 'Quality of Life' agenda" shows that the minister is about to change gears in a number of areas.

Indian Affairs won't confirm or deny the document's authenticity, but the minister's comments in Vancouver seem to mirror what the report details he has told his 14 cabinet colleagues in the Reference Group of the Prime Minister on Aboriginal People.

Each of the 31 pages in the 'Quality of Life' agenda report provides many interesting insights for veteran Indian Affairs observers.

The first page states the purpose for the renewal of the government's approach, as the minister sees it.

"The reconciliation of pre-existing rights of Aboriginal peoples with Crown sovereignty has been, and continues to be, a major political, legal/constitutional and socio-economic challenge for the Canadian federation," the document reads.

On page 3, the document reveals what's in store for Native leaders who stand on their rights and don't budge.

"Give priority to those negotiation tables that can reach agreements; suspend non-productive processes and redirect our energies to address capacity and economic needs of affected communities."

The report also contains some startling admissions of what is wrong with the department's current approach.

INAC's "existing negotiation processes are over-extended," the report said. "... a number of negotiations have become self-perpetuating processes dominated by consultants, without clear mandate and community direction."

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INAC's "internal mandating and approval systems" are slow, cumbersome and ineffective, the report reads.

One explosive admission in the report seems to confirm what chiefs, dismissed by the department as extreme, have been saying all along about the British Columbia Treaty Commission process. "Mounting negotiation loans as percentage of potential capital transfer is a disincentive to closing some agreements."

In plain English, that means First Nations that have borrowed money from the federal government to pay for the cost of treaty negotiations are now finding that they'll have to give back most of their treaty settlements to repay the loans.

The leaders in those communities, the documents said, are not willing to bring the agreements to a conclusion and then have to face that reality and its consequences.

In the document, the minister appears to tell his fellow cabinet ministers that he will be seeking cabinet approval for a couple of new initiatives i the coming months.

"I will be coming to cabinet shortly for a decision on the acceptability of an approach providing certainty for those non-land rights set out in the treaty and establishing an orderly process for additional rights to be proven in court and brought into the treaty," page 14 reads.

"I will return to cabinet in the spring of 2002 to seek a mandate to negotiate ways to improve the treaty negotiations in B.C.," page 16 reads.

The report also suggests the minister is thinking about cutting the money the government provides to First Nations for research into land claims.

"Could we and can we suspend our current research funding to focus on the existing backlog of accepted claims and increase settlement funds to reduce the backlog," the report reads on page 20.

There is no mention of whether funding for land claim research would be re-instated after the backlog is cleaned up.

Native technicians believe the government is talking up the quality of life agenda to distract attention from its decision to refuse to look at the rights agenda. The technicians say this is a sign the government may be talking about change, but things are staying the same when it comes to the most basic issues. The report only talks about "managing 'the rights agenda'."

Many other technical details in the report needed explanation, but the department's policy of not commenting on leaked documents made it impossible to ask those questions.

At the Vancouver conference, the minister said he hoped soon to be able to make public the final report of the Joint Ministerial Advisory Committee, a group made up to advise the minister on changes to the Indian Act, because "one of the things I've prided myself on is that we have to be more transparent and release documents to everyone to have a view of what our position is."

He then joked about how his officials get nervous when internal documents are made public.

"Now sometimes they leak them without my knowing and sometimes I sugget they should leak them and they get all nervous about it," the minister said. "I heard just today that somebody leaked one of my documents out to the general public and there's a little stir about it and it talks about what we're going to talk about today, which is making treaties, claims settlement and the issue of advancing the process."

Six Nations of the Grand River Chief Roberta Jamieson showed she has no doubt the 31-page document is the real thing.

She mentioned some of its contents in her speech to the Manitoba chiefs' governance conference in Winnipeg on March 12.