The Conservative government has rejected calls from native leaders for major new social spending to address the devastating poverty on many first nation reserves, tabling a budget that is light on new aboriginal funding.
Instead, the 2007 budget presents a "new approach" to federal native spending that focuses on incentives to get individuals out of poverty through job training and home ownership.
The 2007 budget provides $300-million over two years to encourage private home ownership on reserves, a notion complicated by the fact that houses and land are normally treated as collective assets by aboriginals.
The budget also offers $105-million over five years toward job training programs for aboriginals; $20-million to increase fisheries opportunities for aboriginals and $15-million over two years for an aboriginal justice strategy.
The budget provides no money in response to three of the major demands facing Indian Affairs minister Jim Prentice.
The minister has been under pressure from the Assembly of First Nations and provincial premiers to honour the $5-billion Kelowna accord signed at a first ministers meeting by Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin just prior to his government's defeat in 2005.
At the time, Conservatives said they supported the accord's goals of reducing aboriginal poverty within 10 years, but said they could not support the $5-billion cost because it lacked detail.
As recently as this month, Quebec Premier Jean Charest urged the Conservatives to honour the federal government's pledge, but the 2007 budget makes no mention the accord.
The AFN has also recently launched a human rights complaint against Ottawa on the grounds that the federal government is under-funding child welfare services, resulting in thousands of native children landing in foster homes. That issue is not addressed in the budget.
Finally, the budget does not respond financially to a report tabled this year by the Senate aboriginal affairs committee, which said $250-million per year is needed to resolve the decades-long backlog of land claims.
The committee's Conservative chairman, Gerry St. Germain, had argued settling land claims produces immediate improvements in the lives of aboriginals. Land claims lay out a native community's rights to natural resources and make it easier to enter into arrangements with the private sector.
The 2007 budget contains a paragraph on land claims, saying it intends to work with native leaders to develop an action plan on the issue.
