National Chief Phil Fontaine addresses the fourth National Conference of the Aboriginal Financial Officers Association (AFOA) Calgary, Alberta Thank you, Regional Chief, the Blackfoot people and the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Aboriginal Financial Officers Association. I want to thank all of you for giving me an opportunity to be here this morning to present a few thoughts on matters that are of some importance to our community. I’m sorry I missed the elder’s prayer this morning. We were delayed coming in from Vancouver but I’m sure that he was as generous as he usually is. I want to thank him as well. Before I go to my presentation, I want to make a couple of comments that are maybe a bit off topic. When I was invited to speak here, I of course accepted the invitation. I thought it was a wonderful opportunity to speak about a number of challenges that we face together though I was a bit uncertain that I would have anything of importance to add to all of the important issues that you were going to talk about, so I was thinking about what would be of a real interest to all of you and I thought well maybe if I spoke about hockey in Calgary that would spark some real interest here because Calgary is really fighting for a playoff spot and the Red Wings are in town tonight. I really wanted to make two points. One, I was reading in the Globe and Mail today, there’s a very small article in the Business Section and it’s a piece from Statistics Canada’s annual report, and this piece has to do about corporate profits in 2003, and corporate profits in 2003, and this has been fueled largely through the chartered banks and oil and gas producers, it was $168.3 billion in 2003 which is a new record. The previous record was in 2000 and the corporate profits then were $165.1 billion. Those are numbers that I have difficulty in comprehending. Billions, $168 and $165 billion. That’s a big chunk of change. And the total allocation for all aboriginal programs and services on an annual basis is $7 billion. I mean we all know the hue and cry that’s raised by many about all of the money that’s being allocated for aboriginal people. When you compare $7 billion to $168 billion or $7 billion to $165 billion, there’s just no comparison. We could look at those figures and say my goodness, there’s a real travesty here, we’ re being hard done by. We could also look at it in a positive way and say, you know, there are corporate interests, there are people that are achieving great success and their success is benefiting, at least hopefully, benefiting many. We’ve been largely excluded from those success stories but there’s an opportunity for our community, and if we become engaged in such a way that we can also be part of that story in a positive way. And that’s a challenge and I spoke about challenges that we face together, that’s one of the challenges that we face because what we do together to turn things around, right, to turn the corner so that we’re not, so that our communities are not burdened by poverty, plagued by poverty and all of its manifestations. And I believe given the changes that are before us – Regional Chief Goodstriker’s alluded to these changes – I think there are significant opportunities for us. But we have to be positive, we have to be confident in our community that we have the wherewithal to make a real difference and to in fact make a real positive contribution to Canada’s well-being, as we have, of course as we have in the past but in a way that does justice to the interests of our community. The other point I wanted to make is that your organization, the Aboriginal Financial Officers Association, has become a significant presence in our community. You represent much of what is good in our community. You provide the kind of trust and confidence that people on the outside need to have in order to have, in order to secure the kind of support that we need so that we can continue to bring about positive change. And I can only start it off small. In the beginning, who would have thought that you would have emerged as you have here? And all it took was one meeting with Chief Bressette, Glen Rayjack in discussions with then-Minister Stewart. That is about institutions, First Nations institutions, institutional change and we believed that it was possible to bring about positive change through the strength of our community and through our own institutions. People like Chief Bressette were criticized, in some circles heavily criticized for taking that step. And as I said, look where we are today I think to the credit of Chief Bressette and others that have been firm believers in First Nations institutions and change through our institutions, and these people should be applauded for their foresight and their vision. I certainly applaud them. Now I can proceed with my presentation and I’ll try and be brief. I was taking long with my preamble. I’m sure that when you first planned this conference you could not have predicted that accountability would be such a huge issue on the national agenda. But the Auditor General’s recent report on the federal Sponsorship Program has ignited the headlines and has made accountability, openness and transparency the topic of conversation in newsrooms and living rooms across the country. When that report came down, my first response was to say that accountability is clearly a two-way street. I was being somewhat wry in my remarks because we know too often that our people and our governments are targeted or tagged as unaccountable by our critics. Yet we continue to see the many examples of gross mismanagement in a number of government organizations and private corporations. We have seen the criminal investigation in the former Privacy Commissioner, insider trading cases involving prominent Canadians and Americans, and even the former owner of the National Post, one of our harshest critics is under investigation. I know that we can prove to our critics and the general public that First Nation governments can not only match but surpass the prevailing standards of accountability and transparency. Your work and consistently high standards help to ensure that ours is a measure of excellence and achievement. We don’t just share best practices, we will develop and promote best practices. The Auditor General herself in her December 2002 report noted the problem is not a matter of First Nations being unaccountable. The opposite is true. First Nations are overburdened by over-reporting. The Auditor General’s report stated that our governments have to file 168 reports a year on average. That’s three reports a week along with all the resources, time and costs required to prepare the reports. Worst of all, the Auditor General stated that federal officials do not even read these reports, and if they did the information would not be helpful because it’s purely quantitative information. In other words, the focus is on how much was spent and where did each penny go. There was no qualitative information like: did this program work? Was it helpful? Is it actually working to improve the lives of First Nations citizens? This is the information that’s really important to the effectiveness of any program or initiative. For more than 10 years now, the Auditor General’s office has produced reports saying that Indian Affairs has its own massive accountability problems and that our people bear an unfair burden of responsibility for the accountability issue. And I want to note here that the 10 years I speak of includes work by the former Auditor General, Denis Desaultels. The current Auditor General has identified many problems with the current system, and I won’t repeat all of them here because you probably know them better than I do, you are the experts in this field. The important point is her prescription to treat the problem. She has said consistently and in many contexts that the over-arching solution is for the government to work with First Nations in partnership to identify the real problems and the real solutions. I am pleased to stand before you today because I believe that your work is an important part of the answer to these concerns. The Aboriginal Financial Officers Association is dedicated to implementing sound and clearly-stated financial- management practices, and expanding and implementing best practices and good governance. Again, we have the Auditor General on our side. In her recent report she provided a brief look at third-party management and outlined a number of problems with this intervention policy. But her major recommendation was that we must be proactive and focus our efforts on finding ways to prevent First Nations from getting into a third-party management situation in the first place. Again, this is where your organization and your work is instrumental. Your work will further the longer-term visionary goal of rebuilding our governance and reconstituting our Nations. I believe we have a right to self-determination and it is my sincere conviction that self-sufficiency is the foundation of self-determination. This means many things like implementing the treaties, expanding our land base, employment, education and many other crucial aspects of development, but an effective, efficient and capable First Nations public service is crucial to the over- arching goal. By demonstrating the excellent management and financial practices that your organization embraces and promotes, we can demonstrate to First Nations, our community, government and Canadians at large that we are responsible, accountable and actively interested in effective administration and planning for our futures. For our communities to grow, our finances must be in good order. As they say, you can start a revolution any time, any place, but make sure your books are in order. We must be able to improve, we must be able to manage our growing prosperity to improve our communities and our lives. Sound financial management is a pillar of strength and will help lift our communities out of the third world and into the age of innovation. We can grow and prosper based on our priorities, our direction and our vision. We must ensure accountability first and foremost to our people. Yes, we can be accountable to government, and I also suggest that government must start being accountable to us. Our elders will tell us that we are here as stewards of our land and caretakers for the generations to come. Our responsibility is to our people and our Nations first. The resources entrusted to our financial officers ultimately belongs to all of our people. They are your clients, but they are more than that. You must maintain their trust. Good management and accountability will bring us increased economic and political security, greater self-determination and more opportunities to contribute to Canadian society and economy as a whole. We can build that strength now but we must also be able to reinforce that strength as times goes on. We need to encourage our young people to consider looking at careers in finance and administration not only for their own benefit but because they can benefit their communities, their families and their futures. Financial officers, both the ones I see before me here and the ones to come, will need a support network that will allow them to share and learn from best practices and new innovations. Your organization provides that support and can work to bring even higher standards to financial management. I would respectfully suggest that one rule for your organization is to develop further the call for best practices and good governance becomes more prevalent. You know what to do and you must be able to show how it is done. We need to lead by example. We must take responsibility for our own concerns and find our own solutions that work for us. I want to conclude now so that you can begin your important work, but I want to make this one quick point to illustrate to you the challenge that we face, and it’s a big challenge and we have to take it on full force with all of the strength and resources and capability and capacity within our community because if we are going to, as I said earlier, eradicate poverty in our communities, if we are determined to create the kind of opportunities that we need to establish for our people so that we can access the jobs that our people need so that our communities can become healthy, safe places for our children, so that all of our people that want to be educated can be educated, we need money to do that. But in order to convince government, we must by turn convince those people that government looks to for support that we are worthy of support of the kind that we deserve and need, that every penny that goes to our community achieves a return, a return on investment. We need to establish trust and confidence in mainstream. So what we have to do, and this is part of the challenge that I present to you... I met recently with the owner of... one of the owners of the National Post, CanWest, because CanWest owns the National Post, and we talked about... I was there to talk about some of the serious concerns that have been expressed by our people with the negative coverage that we’ve received from the National Post; some of it has bordered on hate propaganda, racist stereotyping that’s been promoted, the most recent articles on education and the piece by this so-called reporter from Australia, and it’s simply unacceptable. So we talked about that and he turned to me and said why is it that there’s so much poverty in your community when we allocate approximately $7 billion a year for aboriginal people, and now it’s going to be bumped up to $8 billion if you’ve seen the recent coverage because of the information released by the government a couple of days ago. And he wondered aloud and said look, is it because of corruption? Is it because the Chiefs are so corrupt? And of course we know the answer. It isn’t. There are problems in our community, absolutely. But these I would argue are isolated examples. But when these problems surface, we must deal with them forcefully, immediately. And your organization, you that are part of this organization must be central in dealing with such matters, and I know you’re capable, very capable of doing that. What we have to do, because that’s a small part, is that we must herald, right, we must trumpet, we must market better than we have, far better than we have the successes and achievements in our community. There are so many, but they remain largely unheard of. We spend very little time talking about all of the incredible achievements and successes in our community, and that’s a mistake. We have to change and we have to change significantly on how we address our issues, how we speak about our community, how we present ourselves to the outside. There is so much to be proud of, so many outstanding individuals in our community. My goodness, in the space of 30 odd years we’ve increased the number of university students from 1969 when we had about 100 to close to 30,000. That’s an incredible achievement and that’s ours, ours to share, so that people know that there is indeed significant return on investment and that people have nothing to worry about when it comes to monies that are allocated for our community, absolutely nothing to worry about. And that’s something that we have to do and do forcefully but respectfully. Thank you very much. |
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