On a topic that literally lends itself to satire — the continuing failure of successive federal governments to improve the lives of Canada’s Indigenous people no matter how much taxpayer money they throw at the problem — the CBC and APTN entertainment divisions chickened out.
Both government-funded organizations, their now-paused “satirical” show Northland Tales clearly had almost nothing to do with their stated claim which was to “increase better understanding of historical injustices” and to support truth and reconciliation.
Their real purpose, based on what they attempted, was to humiliate, through deception, people they despise. For example, those who question the claim of mass graves being found at residential schools, who believe Canada’s founding prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, should be honoured today, and who support the work of the RCMP.
Their tactics resembled the “in-crowd” at a high school where the cool kids plot to bully and humiliate those they dismiss as outcasts and loners. As my Sun Media colleague Brian Lilley accurately put it, they chose to “punch down” at those with no power to effect change in Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous people. Retired front-line RCMP officers, for example, are not responsible for policing or government policies with respect to Indigenous people.
Missed Opportunity for Real Satire
By contrast, what they never considered, apparently, was to engage in what the most effective satire does — which is to “punch up” at those with actual power. In this case, those with the power to influence Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous people, not in Macdonald’s time, but today. That would be those politicians, bureaucrats and Indigenous leaders — not all of them, but clearly far too many — who are incompetent at best and at worst, corrupt.
Those responsible for the fact that year after year after year — as documented in numerous reports by Canada’s auditors-general — the tens of billions of dollars spent annually on programs ostensibly designed to improve the lives of Indigenous people fail to achieve their goals, with no consequences for anyone involved in these failures.
Indigenous Disparities Persist Despite Massive Spending
Today, Indigenous unemployment, poverty, disease, drug and alcohol addiction, suicide and incarceration rates remain far above Canadian norms, despite spending in the Justin Trudeau era alone on Indigenous issues tripling from $11 billion to $32 billion annually, excluding land claim and other legal settlements.
A decade ago, the late auditor-general Michael Ferguson produced a series of scathing reports on what he described as the “incomprehensible failure” to close the socio-economic gap between First Nations and other Canadians. He called it an abject failure of leadership going back decades at the “federal, provincial, territorial and First Nations levels — with most of the responsibility falling on the federal government.”
The root problem, Ferguson said, was that the federal bureaucracy didn’t monitor the results of its spending on Indigenous programs to see if the money was accomplishing what it was supposed to accomplish. Instead, he said, these programs “are managed to accommodate the people running them rather than the people receiving the services … the focus is on measuring what civil servants are doing rather than how well Canadians are being served.”
“We don’t even see that they know how to measure those gaps,” that the funding is supposed to address, Ferguson said, and until we do, Canada “will continue to squander the potential and lives of much of its Indigenous population.” If anything is worthy of the effective use of satire, to humiliate those with power who are responsible for these massive and ongoing failures, it’s that.
