Education funds needed-AFN

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The Assembly of First Nations' national chief, Matthew Coon Come, immediately responded to the census with his own bulletin commenting on the finding that half the First Nations population is under age 25 and more than a third are under age 14. He stated the federal government should target spending on youth and Aboriginal languages as an "investment in Canada."

As Aboriginal births far outstrip the general population increase, Aboriginal youth are entering the labor market at an unprecedented rate. But as the federal government is not meeting its responsibility to fund post-secondary education, many will be unprepared to step into the job vacancies left by a mainstream population rapidly reaching retirement, the AFN maintains.

It says 10,000 First Nations students are eligible to attend post-secondary education now, but not enough money is going to their bands to pay for it.

Don Kelly, communications director for the AFN, said, "The federal government does recognize the right of First Nations to access post-secondary funding," of various kinds.

"The problem," said Kelly, "is the funding is not always based on need. So some communities that don't have a lot of people going to post-secondary institutions may have monies available to fund all their students . . . but other communities that are either larger in population or have a lot of students who want to access post-secondary education may not have enough in their budgets. And that's what that 10,000 number refers to: it's not the number of students who could go to post-secondary education. It's actually more urgent. It's the number of students who are currently on waiting lists."

The AFN also responded to a "one-pager," that was not a part of the official Statistics Canada census, Kelly said, which states the North American Indian population of 608,850 "isn't consistent with what Indian Affairs has on its registry, which is closer to 680,000.

"So there's approximately 70,000 and possibly maybe even more [First Nations] people that for various reasons are being missed in the census," Kelly said, adding the difference is explained by people being more likely to put their names on band lists in order to take advantage of programs and services available to them.

That's why the AFN release states "First Nations governments are best placed to keep track of their membership and citizenship and should have more control in this area."

Dwight Dorey, national chief of the Ottawa-based Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, says his organization takes a different approach from the AFN, in that it prefers to work with Statistics Canada's data. That's because of the cost of undertaking a census and the "massive undertaking" of enumerating Metis people, who are scattered among all population groups. The congress pays for "special runs from Statistics Canada on the various tabulations that they have done," to better analyze the implications of the census as it applies to them.

The health conditions of off-reserve people, for example.

"It might be something specific to the rate of diabetes for people off-reserve," something like that."

Dorey said their primary objective in analyzing statistics is to "try to get the federal government to broaden its scope" to pay for programs and services needed by off-reserve people. Beyond that, he said the congress aims to "bring the awareness of the provincial government to these kinds of issues and our concerns." That extends to the general public and the private sector, because the provincial and federal governments are promoting partnerships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal businesses and agencies.

Dorey says it is critical they get this recognition because 78 per cent of Aboriginal people in Canada do not live on reserves and do not benefit substantively from the $7.5 billion in annual federal funding the government reports it spends on Aboriginal people. Canada sets the off-reserve population around 60 per cent.

What isn't in dspute is the Aboriginal population is growing rapidly and the migration into urban centres continues.

Dorey said as the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People pointed out, if such a large segment of the population is ignored, "There are going to be very serious social and economic problems that the whole country is going to be faced with." He cites a trend to growing youth gangs in some major urban centres.

Whereas Dorey said he finds Statistics Canada data is for the most part useful, other off-reserve groups think the census numbers are so skewed as to be useless.