Attawapiskat Nightmare 3

Should Toronto be put under third party management? That community has been running a deficit for years, and the combined total of all government spending (federal, provincial and municipal) is $24,000 a year for each Torontonian.

Attawapiskat, on the other hand, which is only funded by one level of government — federal – received $17.6 million in this fiscal year, for all of the programs and infrastructure for its 1,550 residents. That works out to about $11,355 per capita in Attawapiskat.

People often forget, when talking about costs of delivering programs and services to First Nations, that almost all those costs are paid from one pot: Aboriginal Affairs. By contrast, non-Aboriginal Canadians receive services from at least three levels of government.

Here are the total expenditures per capita per level of government for Toronto residents:

In the pre-budget report tabled on Wednesday, the committee calls for the federal government “to examine the concept of a First Nations Property Ownership Act as proposed by the First Nations Tax Commission.”

“I think it’s fantastic,” said Manny Jules, the head of the commission, who has been advocating the idea for years. Mr. Jules wrote the forward for a book on the topic last year, called Beyond the Indian Act: Restoring Aboriginal Property Rights, that was co-authored by University of Calgary political science professor Tom Flanagan.

Mr. Flanagan is a former campaign manager and adviser to Mr. Harper. He had previously written a book called First Nations? Second Thoughts, that attracted controversy by challenging many of the accepted positions of native leaders.

Mr. Jules and Mr. Flanagan argue that, while not a panacea, having access to private property would lead to major improvements in the lives of many native Canadians. They also recommend that the legislation be optional rather than mandatory. Mr. Jules says there are about 10 communities out of the more than 600 first nation reserves in Canada that are ready to move in this direction, while others are expressing interest.

Mr. Jules said that in light of the current focus on aboriginal issues triggered by the attention on the living conditions in Attawapiskat, he’s hopeful that now is a good time to push for change.

...a growing group of Indigenous people and chiefs have been speaking out against the Jules/Flanagan proposal, arguing that fee simple property ownership will leave collective Indigenous title and rights and reserve lands—which are affirmed in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982—vulnerable to encroachment by developers, corporate interests, and federal and provincial control. Chingee has been open in his rejection of the fee simple proposal, as has Arthur Manuel, spokesperson for the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade.

De Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), is notorious for advocating fee simple property ownership and market-led agrarian reform among Latin America’s campesinos. His ideas are promoted by international financial institutions like the World Bank, as well as the US international development organization USAID, which uses his theory to back their own market-driven development projects throughout Latin America.

He’s also been assailed with criticism from popular and grassroots organizations such as Via Campesina—a global peasant movement—which maintains that the ramifications of de Soto’s economic agenda are the global phenomena of dispossession of Indigenous people and intensified economic stratification.

Like de Soto’s proposal for Latin America, which aims to convert latent or “dead” assets into market capital, Jules and Flanagan aim to transform collective rights into individual titles, which can be openly traded on the market. In Canada, collective land title is understood to be the inherent right of Indigenous peoples.

In a letter against the fee simple proposal published in the First Nations Strategic Bulletin, Manuel asserts the power and protection of collective title. “No single individual can give up or extinguish our Aboriginal title and Indigenous rights. It would be suicide or extinguishment for our future generations to accept fee simple in exchange for our collective title,” he wrote.

Chingee’s response to the proposal warns of the damaging impact of privatizing reserve land. “The change would undermine signed treaties across Canada, undermine our political autonomy, restrict our creativity and innovation and place us in a dangerous position where any short-term financial difficulty may result in the wholesale liquidation of our reserve lands, or the creation of a patchwork quilt of reserve lands, like Oka,” he wrote...

You know what would solve this whole "crisis"? Private property.