When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals came to power in 2015, federal spending on Indigenous issues was $11.4 billion annually.
According to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s latest budget, it’s estimated at $27.4 billion this year — an increase in nominal dollars (not accounting for inflation) of 140% in seven years.
A new report by the Fraser Institute projects federal spending will be at least $35.5 billion by 2026, in large part due to the continuing economic fallout from settling class-action lawsuits with Indigenous plaintiffs, including the recent child welfare settlement of $40 billion.
“At a time of large budget deficits and mounting debt, the explosive growth of Indigenous spending is expected to continue driven largely by settlement payouts,” said Tom Flanagan, author of the report “Indigenous Spending in Budget 2022.”
“If the latest federal budget is any indicator, there’s no end in sight to Ottawa’s Indigenous spending increases, despite any rhetoric about spending restraint.”
The problem, as described by independent, non-partisan Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux in a report last month, is that while the Trudeau government is spending more than ever on Indigenous services, it’s accomplishing less.
“Over the 2015-16 to 2022-23 period, there has been a significant increase in the amount of financial resources allocated to providing Indigenous Services,” Giroux said, but the increase “did not result in a commensurate increase in the ability of the organizations to achieve the targets they had set for themselves.”
In fact, “the ability of the organizations to achieve the targets … has declined.”
In 2017, Trudeau split the Indigenous and Northern Affairs ministry into two departments — Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada and Indigenous Services Canada.
Giroux found that five years after the administrative shakeup, the Trudeau government is failing to meet its own targets for improving the lives of Canada’s Indigenous people.
No comments:
Post a Comment