The First Nations enterprise engine has been jump-started in various areas of the country, but there are still miles to go before it’s firing on more than a couple of cylinders.
Bright spots abound. The most recent examples include the Kwantlen First Nation’s launch of the Seyem’ Qwantlen Group of Companies (“Rise in aboriginal enterprise” – issue 1132; July 5-11) and last week’s BC First Nations Leadership Council announcement of a strategy to cultivate stronger relationships with China.
But not all is clear skies on the native business frontier. Native society, especially on reservations, needs to undergo a major cultural shift from dependency to self-reliance if the free enterprise seeds sown now are to bear more than occasional fruit.
That’s not going to be easy.
A recent Frontier Centre for Public Policy report underscores that reality.
The Nisga’a Treaty, Self-Government and Good Governance: the Jury is Still Out assesses the impact of the controversial agreement B.C. signed with the Nisga’a 13 years ago.
It claims to be the only such assessment thus far of how the treaty and its allocation of self-government to the band has affected social and economic realities in what has aspirations to be an independent country within Canada.
It’s not surprising that no measurement of the treaty’s impact has been done elsewhere. Management accountability, after all, remains in short supply on too many of Canada’s native reservations.
As the study quotes former BC Liberal leader Gordon Gibson: “the Nisga’a treaty is held out as an example of the right way to settle Indian claims, and yet we simply do not know how it is working after seven years and cannot trust any of the three governments involved to tell us of problems.”
The Frontier Centre study mines much of its information from extensive interviews with Nisga’a band members.
Insights from interviewees include misgivings about the new Nisga’a government and the continuation of old-style tribal nepotism that inter-marries bloodlines, business and politics.
The study also found what Clint Davis, CEO of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business, previously pointed out to Public Offerings (“Job 1 on native reserves: Build business-management skills” – September 28-October 4, 2010; issue 1092). As with many other native bands in Canada, the Nisga’a nation needs help in training its people in business basics. Without those, it will remain ill-equipped to take advantage of the opportunities in resource development and other enterprise that can free its members from what author and Tsimshian Nation member Calvin Helin (Dances with Dependency) calls Ottawa’s welfare trap.
Concerns were also expressed about “the preparedness of Nisga’a citizens for income taxation,” which is scheduled to come into effect in 2013. Tax freedom day everyday is apparently seen as a native birth right in Canada.
But one of the report’s most unsettling revelations is Ottawa’s view that the Nisga’a will likely never be self-sufficient.
According to the study’s conversations with the treaty manager for B.C. at Indian and Northern Affairs, self-sufficiency “may never be achieved.”
“In practice,” write the study’s authors, “the federal government apparently lacks a written plan for self-sufficiency, and it did not conduct any risk assessments for the Nisga’a treaty.”
That underscores the destructive dual-dependency factor in Canada’s native enterprise equation.
If no one in a native band, especially the “independent” nation of Nisga’a, is ever ultimately going to be held accountable for ensuring its people become economically self-sufficient, it will never happen.
That’s a grim prospect for more than just Canada’s natives.