What’s wrong with remote native reserves?

Since this week’s release of an audit report showing Chief Theresa Spence’s Attawapiskat reserve to be the land that accounting forgot, the tide of public opinion has turned against her. But at least one knowledgeable observer makes a convincing case that the audit numbers may not be nearly as bad as they seem.

His name is Murray Trusler, a former doctor who began his career in Norway House, Manitoba in 1967-68.  He retired in 2010, after serving as Chief of the Medical Staff at Moose Factory, where he worked serving the four First Nations communities on the west coast of James Bay, Moosonee and the two First Nations in Moose Factory. All in all, his career in the north spanned more than four decades.

As explained below, Dr. Trusler is no apologist for Canada’s current aboriginal policies. But as a doctor, he’s seen what kind of financial pressures chiefs come under.

From his experiences, he supplies the example of a set of six siblings living in a remote fly-in reserve, whose father is dying at Kingston General Hospital, where he had been receiving specialized treatment. Their bill for return airfare, accommodation and food in Kingston easily could total $15,000 — money they don’t have, because there are no jobs. “The band, out of compassion, pays the expenses,” he explains. “There is no alternative. Then the chief is reprimanded for mismanaging funds.”

Trusler isn’t arguing that all of Attawapiskat’s undocumented expenditures were medical mercy calls. What he’s arguing is that the larger issue isn’t corruption, it’s destitution: People who have no jobs and no money inevitably become dependent for ad hoc handouts on band leaders, whose only political legitimacy comes from making life as bearable as possible with the money that they get from Ottawa.

And so in the long term, Dr. Trusler believes, the solution has to come in the form of economic development — not more handouts from the federal government. Quoting Clarence Louie, chief of the economically successful Osoyoos Indian Band, Dr. Trusler explains: “If you want to kill a man, take away his job. If you want to kill a community, you take away its economy.”

Over his career, Dr. Trusler has watched many native communities fall into poverty. When he began at Norway House in 1967, many aboriginal Canadians still worked as true subsistence hunters, trappers and fishermen. But as modernization set in, the old ways were largely abandoned, and Natives increasingly became sedentary, like the rest of us. Men lost their traditional jobs as their economy lost its relevance in the modern world. Furs went out of style. Hunting and fishing could no longer support the growing population; and, out of necessity, social welfare became the new normal. Resource development passed them by, as most lacked the skills to participate.

In 1967-68, Dr. Trusler witnessed just one myocardial infarction at Norway House. Now, coronary artery disease is common on reserves. So is Hepatitis A, due to contaminated water supplies. Overcrowded, unhygienic living conditions also contribute to poor health. Dr. Trusler has very specific memories, from his Moose Factory days, of “25 people living in a three-bedroom house with one washroom.”

Forty-six years ago, Dr. Trusler remembers, the reserve at Norway House was dry: There was just one alcohol-related death that year. Now, alcoholism is epidemic, and a fifth to a quarter of kids on some reserves are born with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.

Like a lot of First Nations reform advocates, Dr. Trusler believes a major root of the problem on reserves is the communal land ownership model: Because most band members do not own their own home, they are denied pride in ownership, and cannot accumulate home equity over their lifetimes. As for the bands, they are dependent on the federal government for construction and repair funds. Many houses become mold traps with unventilated plywood basements, leaky roofs, and no weeping tiles. Some of these houses, he can attest, end up getting torn down within just a few years of their construction.

Doctors and other needed non-aboriginal professionals, meanwhile, get homes built to code with ventilated basements. These homes stay up in good shape for decades. This is a form of ongoing “housing apartheid” that no one ever talks about. That includes band leaders themselves, some of whom collaborate with shady contractors to throw up a high number of rickety non-code homes that everyone knows are shoddy. When the mold-infested buildings quickly become uninhabitable, the leaders can cynically just throw up their arms and claim they have a “housing crisis” — and demand help from Ottawa.

In a normal, capitalist-based Canadian housing market, no one would move into these homes — even putting aside the code issue — because no one would buy them. But residents of reserves typically must accept whatever housing their band leadership gives them, just as citizens of Soviet Russia had little choice about what crumbling apartment edifice they had to inhabit.

Dr. Trusler has an ambitious home-ownership reform plan for rectifying this. But as a doctor, he also has developed a wide range of very specific health-related reforms that he’s articulated to Ontario authorities in a letter-writing campaign waged over the last few years of his time in Moose Factory — several of which he shared with me. These include access to basic Ontario health, housing, water, policing, education and infrastructure standards.

His plan isn’t anything grand and romantic on the order of treaty renegotiation. But taken together, his recommendations would make a huge difference in the lives of thousands of ordinary First Nations people. Stephen Harper and the other politicians appearing at this week’s First Nations summit in Ottawa might want to have a read.

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