http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/reevely-indigenous-affairs-ministry-a-likely-target-as-tories-streamline-cabinet

Reevely: Indigenous-affairs ministry a likely target as Tories streamline cabinet

Premier-designate Doug Ford Stan Behal / Postmedia Network

Officials in Ontario’s Ministry of Indigenous Relations are preparing to see their department folded into another ministry when premier-designate Doug Ford and his new cabinet are sworn in Friday.

The 10-year-old ministry was created after the inquiry into the police killing of an Aboriginal protester at Ipperwash Provincial Park found that Indigenous people were getting scant attention from the government and what they did get came from ministers who often had conflicts of interest.

Depending whom you listen to, the standalone ministry could be collapsed into either the Ministry of Natural Resources or the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines, as Ford streamlines the 30 ministerial jobs in Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government to as few as 18.

As a government ages, premiers promote junior people with potential and try to ease out veterans without injuring their dignity. Premiers like to show voters they really care about certain causes, too, and devoting new ministries to them is a flashy yet mostly harmless way of doing it.

For the moment, Ontario has a Ministry of Education; a Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development; a Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science; a Ministry of Economic Development and Growth; a Ministry of International Trade; and a Ministry of Labour. All that takes more than one ministry to oversee but it sure doesn’t need six.

Wynne promoted several “non-portfolio responsibilities” to full cabinet status, including seniors’, women’s and francophone affairs, that a conservative-minded premier wouldn’t have a problem demoting again. Indigenous Relations is easy to plunk in the same category, a bit of symbolism like Wynne’s practice of starting speeches with land acknowledgments and saying “meegwich” or “bozhoo.”

“We are currently in the middle of a transition process, and look forward to swearing in a new government on June 29th,” Progressive Conservative spokesman Simon Jefferies said in answer to specific questions about what the Progressive Conservatives are planning and why. “Doug Ford and the Ontario PCs are committed to working with Ontario’s Indigenous communities as partners in government.”

That partnership is already off to a tense start. Ford has promised to move fast on opening mines in the “Ring of Fire” chromium deposit in Northern Ontario, accusing Wynne of having been too slow.

“If I have to hop on a bulldozer myself, we’re going to start building roads to the Ring of Fire,” Ford declared during his campaign this spring.

A challenge for the government is that First Nations bands have a say, too. The Liberals struck deals on infrastructure with several whose co-operation they sought but others accused them of pushing too hard and moving recklessly. This isn’t just a slow-moving construction job.

“A piecemeal approach of unplanned and uncontrolled road development is like driving off a cliff then trying to sort out how our lives and future have been impacted after the fact,” Chief Elizabeth Atlookan of Eabametoong First Nation — almost right on a line between Thunder Bay and the Ring of Fire deposit — said in a blistering statement released a week before the election.

Given the history of the Ministry of Indigenous Relations, eliminating it would pretty definitely make the Ring of Fire negotiations even harder.

Indigenous issues used to be handled by a sub-cabinet secretariat. Ernie Eves and Mike Harris put native affairs on their attorneys general; before them, Bob Rae gave the responsibility to natural-resources ministers. That was a problem.

In 1995, shortly after the Harris Tories were elected, an Ontario Provincial Police sniper shot Dudley George dead in Ipperwash Provincial Park, near the south end of Lake Huron, at the climax of a land protest over a Crown expropriation in the 1940s. The federal government took part of an Aboriginal reserve there for wartime use, then never gave it back.

George was unarmed; the police officer who shot him said at the time that he took a stick George was holding for a rifle but was later convicted of criminal negligence causing death. The judge who found Kenneth Deane guilty called him and other police officers who testified about the killing liars.

A whole lot was done wrong at Ipperwash and it took 10 years — and the replacement of Harris’s Progressive Conservatives with Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals — before a formal inquiry laid it all out. Among the many findings in Judge Sidney Linden’s 2006 report was that Ontario needed a separate ministry for Aboriginal issues.

“The absence of a dedicated minister and deputy minister means that it is inevitable that the heavy demands of other duties will frequently overshadow Aboriginal issues,” Linden wrote.

Problems festered until they became crises and people new to them suddenly had to figure them out, which they generally did badly. Though Harris denied it, the attorney general at the time eventually testified that the premier lost patience and declared that he wanted “the f—–g Indians out of the park,” an account Linden trusted over Harris’s.

“A dedicated ministry would also eliminate what some see as the inherent conflict of interest arising from placing Aboriginal affairs in a larger ministry,” Linden added.

Such as, perhaps, the same person being responsible for fulfilling the Tory promise to get the Ring of Fire developed and for making sure that Indigenous people who might be inconvenient to the effort get the respect they’re owed under law and the Constitution.

Chief Isadore Day, the regional chief for Ontario for the Assembly of First Nations, didn’t return an email on the subject Monday (he’s facing a re-election vote himself in a major gathering of Ontario chiefs that starts Tuesday).

Ontario’s had a standalone ministry for Indigenous affairs since 2007, the year after Linden’s report. Sometimes it’s had ministers with other duties as well, but for the past five years its minister, David Zimmer, only had the one assignment.

A separate ministry doesn’t resolve anything by itself, but it does make talking our way to resolutions easier. In the long run, it’s probably better for getting the Ring of Fire mined, and certainly for having an Ontario that doesn’t treat Indigenous people like obstacles.