The federal government has a lot of work ahead to keep its promise of improving the economic outlook for Indigenous people. Digging into data from the 2016 census, the Canadian Press found that four out of five reserves had median incomes below the poverty line. That means that of 367 reserves for which there were individual income data, 297 had incomes below the low-income measure of $22,133 for one person.
Chillingly, 27 communities had median incomes below $10,000.
In 2015, the year Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau campaigned on a promise to make things better on reserves, Statistics Canada census workers were gathering these statistics that show how serious the situation is for many Aboriginal communities.
In those communities, the people are younger, have shorter life expectancies and have significantly lower incomes than those in the rest of Canada.
Despite decades of good intentions, improvement has been beyond our grasp. One study in 2014 found that in 2006, Indigenous people were as financially disadvantaged as they had been in 1981, 25 years before. That’s a generation without progress, a generation of lost opportunities.
While the numbers tell us much about the extent of the problem, the picture is far from complete and the data don’t tell us how to make things better.
It’s not clear why some communities do better than others. The common notion that more remote reserves have lower incomes than others isn’t a universal rule.
“There’s not a clear geographic pattern,” said Martin Cooke, an associate professor in the School of Public Health and Health Systems at the University of Waterloo.
Statistics Canada plans to release more data that might give us a clearer picture, but it, too, won’t provide solutions.
The federal government and Indigenous leaders are trying to find a way to close the income gap, but two years into the Liberal mandate, there is no road map.
Perry Bellegarde, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, wants to put Indigenous leaders in the same room with federal and provincial decision-makers next year to find some answers. This is not something that can be fixed by one level of government, so including the provinces makes more sense than a flurry of separate one-on-one gatherings that could head off in contradictory directions.
The federal government has been working on its national housing strategy, which will include measures to help Indigenous people, but that is just part of a much broader issue. Entrenched, longstanding problems demand a co-ordinated response.
That response has to be founded on solid information. While the census data measure the problem, we need to dig deeper. Why, for instance, are incomes higher in some communities than others? Can successful strategies be exported? If geography isn’t always the determining factor, why does it matter in some places but not others?
Trudeau’s government has been hit with unexpected challenges such as the NAFTA renegotiations and business-tax reform that seem to have drawn its attention away from the relationship with Indigenous Peoples. However, the prime minister’s decision this summer to split responsibilities into two ministries, one dealing with Indigenous services and one with Crown-Indigenous relations, suggests he is thinking seriously about ways to live up to his promises.
Aboriginal people, too often disappointed by promises, don’t need Statistics Canada to tell them how little their situation has improved. They do need a sincere effort to find solutions before another generation of opportunities is lost.
