Episode 4: Indigenous people and public services in Canada
Hi and welcome back to the podcast about my research project on the challenges of accessing public services in different countries around the world. First of all, I would like to say that I dedicate this episode to Rory Voudrach who sadly died on January 5th 2024, and who I had the opportunity to meet one month earlier in Inuvik. He was a well-respected Inuvialuit leader, a longtime youth mentor and he served the community on many boards and organizations.
As you might remember from last time, my second case study was in the Northwest Territories in Canada. Conducting research there was more difficult than in Quebec for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is that it was rather difficult to get hold of people and to win them for participating this research project. Although it is fair to say that there is not really any sociological empirical research on access to public services in general in the NWT, there is a lot of other research done in that Territory. And since the population is not huge, only around 42,000 inhabitants, many people are tired of participating in research and being consulted, which is particularly true for the Indigenous population which makes up for a little over half of the population.
Nevertheless, in today’s episode I want to share with you some insights concerning the situation of the Indigenous people in Canada. Although there are many different Indigenous peoples living throughout Canada, and I’m only focusing on my two case studies, Quebec and NWT, there are still commonalities in the problems and challenges many of them experience. Now, you might ask yourself what exactly is the connection to the topic of my research. So, since I’m interested in understanding the challenges of both providing and accessing public services and administrative justice, it’s also relevant to know who is actually providing the services to whom. And in the case of the Indigenous peoples in Canada that’s not an easy question to answer because there are several orders of government in place. The different IPs have different visions and aims regarding their relation to the Canadian government, or the Crown, as it is also called. Some of them have been able to establish self-governments, others have band councils, some live in reserves, others don’t. It is a complex issue which makes it interesting to study, also to find out which entity provides which kinds of services, including of course the non-autochthonous local, territorial, regional and federal governments. In addition, it’s worth noting that IP often prefer not to identify as citizens but rather as members or participants of their respective band. So, trying to understand the relation between the state and the so-called governed subjects is at least a basis for any further inquiries. And of course, a key issue in this regard is colonization and all the effects and consequences it had and still has. In particular, the atrocities of the Catholic church and its residential schools have had a devastating impact on the Indigenous population to this day and has caused an intergenerational, collective trauma.
I can’t go into more detail here because this would require much more time and I have another focus in today’s episode. In this episode I will try to illustrate with some interview excerpts how different persons experience and describe the situation concerning IP in NWT and Quebec.
To start with, one of my Indigenous interview partners puts it quite bluntly: “We’re born behind the eight ball,” he says, “We’re separate societies.” And later he adds, “But we know who we are and what we need.” He first points out the inequalities that exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada, and in this case in the NWT, and with which the Indigenous population is confronted in many ways that are detrimental to them. As he says, they are disadvantaged as soon as they are born. By saying that Indigenous and non-Indigenous or autochthonous and non-autochthonous populations are different societies, he suggests that there seem to be incommensurable differences, for instance, with regard to values, way of living or organizing themselves within their communities or self-governments. And his statement that they know who they are and what they need, refers to his strong belief that IP need and can look independently after themselves, which includes providing services to their members in culturally secure ways. In fact, the municipal, territorial, and federal governments increasingly provide funds to Indigenous governments and communities to create and offer their own services for their communities because they know best what they need.
The matter of living in a different world is also mentioned by a non-Indigenous interviewee in the North of Quebec who works with Indigenous people, and maybe I should add that Quebec is both the name of the province and its capital city; in the interview he illustrates the stark difference between living in the South and living in the North of Canada. “It's inconceivable that we're living like a third world in Quebec, like sometimes there's no water in the house. You can't wash; [or] there's no food coming in because of extreme weather conditions. It's incredible, this is crazy. It's inconceivable. What's even more inconceivable is that the world won't know about it in Quebec; the majority of Quebecers [don’t know].”
And he adds that even if there is no water sometimes, many Inuit won’t care much because they were able to live here long before the white people came anyway; they don’t depend on them. It was also mentioned by another interview partner that schools in the North of Quebec sometimes can’t provide drinking water to the children.
This huge North-South gap also became evident in some interviews in Quebec City, when I asked interviewees how come the situation is not improved in the North, it was usually said that well, “it’s so far away.” They mean that it’s far away from the South, where the government and most of the population is located. And when I say far away, this means that for instance taking a plane from Montreal to Kuujjuak, where I had the opportunity to interview two persons online, takes 2,5 hours and costs minimum 2,000€; and that’s within the same province.
So, governing on a vast territory of course comes with its own challenges, both in Quebec and NWT. In NWT less than 42,000 people are spread out in 33 communities in a territory of more than 1,1 million square kilometers, which is 16 times as big as Austria or more than three times the size of Germany. Such a geographical context also comes along with difficulties in areas such as health, higher education and cost of living. The harsh weather conditions bring additional problems in the field of transport of both people and goods; and as this is also relevant to my project they also affect the possibilities of digitalization: Permafrost and harsh winters have made it difficult for a long time to provide households up North with stable internet through fiber optics. Currently, the availability of satellite internet is changing things. But these are only some aspects of the general living conditions North of 60, as they say in the NWT, referring to the 60 degrees north latitude, which is also the southern boundary of the Northwest Territories. It is also worth noting that many interview partners point out that policies by the federal government are typically South centered since 90% of the Canadian population live within 160 kilometers of the U.S. border.
Adding to that, Indigenous or autochthonous people living in the Canadian society are confronted with a number of other problems also regarding their treatment by the government and public bodies.
The fact that especially in Quebec, where only 1 to 2% of the population is autochthonous, there seems to be little understanding from the allochthonous or mainstream white society is illustrated also by an Indigenous interviewee who mentions that the history that is taught in school still explains that Jaque Cartier and Champlain were the ones who discovered Canada, when in reality Indigenous peoples have been living here for several thousands of years. Still, the Indigenous people have not been included in the writing of history. And what was a bit shocking to me, when I had the opportunity to talk to a well-known Indigenous spiritual leader in NWT, he said that even many Indigenous people don’t know their own history.
But the allochthonous people not being aware of the autochthonous’ situation becomes evident in another concrete example related to health care. The same interviewee explains that there are two coverages systems – a provincial one and a federal one – which are complementary in some aspects, but sometimes they clash because the people mainly working in the provincial system often aren’t aware of how the programs offered by the federal government work. With prescriptions, for example, the federal program which is relevant to the IP has its own processes and requires certain justifications specific the respective drugs and supplies, whereas the hospital staff often don't know about this. So, sometimes the patient leaves, goes back to her community, which can be a two or three days' drive from the hospital, without any of these drugs or supplies, because there's a clash of coverage between the two programmes and the drug that was prescribed is not covered by the federal program. And, when people arrive home, the prescription is no longer valid because it's not covered, so they have to pay for it, if they can afford it, or they simply stop the treatment. And then of course, the state of health can deteriorate and they often have to return to the hospital, again at the expense of the federal government. So, the two programs are not necessarily complementary, as the interviewee explains, and can thus make accessing health services very difficult for IP.
What’s more, concerning the field of health care, the death of the Indigenous woman Joyce Echaquan on September 28, 2020, in Quebec needs to be mentioned. Before she died she was mistreated in the hospital and she was able to stream her mistreatment on Facebook. This was a big shock for the Quebec society although many, and especially the IP have long been aware of this kind of mistreatment; and while the premier of Quebec, François Legault, condemned the medical staff as racist, he denied the existence of systemic racism in Quebec, an admission which many people regard as long overdue. It is a consequence of the Canadian history and still ongoing discrimination that many Indigenous people still have mistrust in the government and will therefore often avoid contact with public institutions and authorities as far as possible.
There are a number of measures in place to improve the situation, such as Jordan's Principle, which was also installed after the death of an Indigenous child. The aim of this policy principle is to ensure that autochthonous children have equitable access to all government funded public services. In particular, it is set out to make sure that Indigenous children will not be denied access to public services while governments fight over who should pay. Also, in Quebec in 2019 the so-called Viens commission published a report on the relation between the autochthonous people and the public services; subsequently, a follow-up report was published by the Ombuds of Quebec, the Protecteur du Citoyen, in 2023, in which the conclusion is reached that most of the calls for action of the original report have not yet been implemented.
So, these were just some aspects that might give you a first impression of the situation of IP in Canada, or more concretely NWT and Quebec. There are many more, one of them being the aspect of language as a key instrument for access to public services and justice – a topic which I plan to talk about in another episode.
And for the time being, I can only say so much that there are several parallels to my next case study in Curacao, a small island in the Caribbean that was colonized by the Dutch, and as people say, is still semi-colonized although it is a separate country with an autonomous status since 2010. But there is still a high degree of dependency on the Dutch Kingdom which affects people’s everyday life. I look forward to sharing some thoughts on that case study with you in the next episode. Thank you for listening and stay tuned!
