Government cuts itself last and least

Page 6

When a government cuts, it seems to be inevitable that internal government programs get cut the last, and the least.

Witness the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, the bureaucratic behemoth that all of us love to hate, and usually for good reason.

While programs all across Canada are being slashed to the bone - friendship centres are losing 21.5 per cent, Native communication is losing 22 per cent, transfer payments (read education, health care and social services) are next up - DIAND's budget is being increased by Paul "Mr. Fiscal Responsibility" Martin.

Actual services are going to suffer, but the bloated bureaucrats who continue to make Native lives miserable and getting more. They'll claim that this will go to services to Native communities, but the fact that fully 80 per cent of the more-than-$5 billion budget goes to administration continues to be a major reason for First Nations poverty in this country.

Indian Affairs Ron Irwin will continue to talk about directing the funds to the right places, but the fact is that department mandarins guard their turf like starving dogs. It'll take more than good intentions to see even half-decent use of the funding DIAND gets. It'll be a long and bloody battle. No politician will have the stomach for it, when he'll have so much to lose and so little to gain.

And then there's Native broadcasting, being cut to the point that the people who work in the communities wonder whether their non-profit societies will be able to make it. And this is now, when it takes on Native broadcaster to do the work of 10 in the mainstream media. (No, I don't mean CBC. They're next.)

Ah, yes, CBC. It takes 10 of them to do what one mainstream broadcaster can do.

Listen to one of their newscasts, if you have the stomach. The wailing and keening is eardrum-shattering. These fattest of broadcast journalists - maybe in the whole world - are facing cuts, and they may turn out to be actual real cuts, this time.

Oh, horrors. The real world encroacheth.

If you've ever been to a news conference - one that the people at the centre of the known universe (that's Toronto) think is worthwhile - you'll have trouble seeing anything through the forest of CBC "personalities" and their hangers-on.

That guy over there? He's from FM. That one? She's from CBC French. That one? She's AM. That one? I'm not sure what he does, but I saw him carrying a cable or something half an hour ago. And that guy's a producer for one of them.

The rest of the world gets by with one reporter, maybe two if the end of everything or the start of a World War is being announced.

But the CBC is wholly a creature of government, and they'll be the last to go. Even though they blow tons of money on bad drams, soft arts reporting and complacent (and slanted) news coverage. Before them there'll be dozens of small, independent broadcasters, who rely on government funding to make it, who go. People who make a substandard wage will lose their jobs because CBC people who make twice the national average have to keep theirs.

More important, coverage of and by the Native communities will be gone, and replaced with touching colonial pieces by power-sited reporters aching to get out of the boonies and onto a "real" beat. Maybe one of them will be lucky enough to land a job at TSN or on a political show out of Ottawa.

That might even be worth a pay cut.