The are an estimated 40,000 indigenous children currently in Canada's child welfare system. While the nation has tied itself into knots trying to apologize and compensate indigenous people for the 150,000 children who attended residential schools over the course of a century, nearly 40,000 indigenous children are still in government care. I imagine future governments will feel obliged to compensate them as the cycle continues.

Since the 1990s, the solution to every indigenous issue has been to pour more tax dollars into the system and to hand control directly to the chiefs and councils on indigenous reserves. So far that strategy has led to mass corruption and housing and water shortages on reserves. Unemployment is rampant, poverty is rampant, people die at a younger age than those on reserves and they suffer from crime rates that make inner city levels look peaceful and safe by comparison. Not only that, but the people on reserves have become so socially and economically distressed that 40,000 of their children are now wards of the state.

So what solution is the government proposing?

They wanted to give $47.8 billion to indigenous people for child welfare programs on reserves. This is after the government already settled with indigenous people for $23.3 billion in 2023 to compensate them for having taken children into care in the past. The total comes to $1.77 million for each and every indigenous child in government care right now.

The funds are to be managed by indigenous reserves themselves as they take over the child welfare programs.

What could possibly go wrong?

Indigenous chiefs from across Canada gathered in Calgary last week to discuss the latest waterfall of funds being offered to ease their social ills. They determined that the offer of nearly $1.8 million per child wasn’t enough and rejected it.

Indigenous advocates still claim child welfare on reserves is underfunded.

Will it ever be enough?

No, it won’t.

Decades of tossing funds at indigenous reserves while never holding them accountable for the use of the funds has led to a class of entitled chiefs and advocates who have no concept of personal accountability and can’t look at solving any problems beyond holding their hands out for more funds. They will never be satisfied and they will never solve the problem.

The problem is the racial apartheid system of reserves. We could increase funding to the reserves a thousandfold, they still would be enclaves of socioeconomic misery. There is no situation where we can separate a race of people, put them in isolated places, and make them 100% dependent upon welfare where it would work out well for the residents of these places. Yet we keep trying.

Much of the reason residential schools were created over a century ago was because children were suffering horrifically on the reserves. A race and culture which had been living as a nomadic, neolithic people only a few generations before was suddenly crammed into reserves and expected to adapt to the modern living standards of the day.

It was a disaster and some felt that educating the children in residential schools could bring them up to health and prepare them to integrate into modern society. That didn’t work out well either. Part of the reason residential school graduates faired poorly in life was because as soon as the kids graduated from the residential schools, they returned to the reserves. Very few people do well in those places whether educated or not.

During what was called the “60s Scoop” 20,000 indigenous children were taken into government care. It wasn’t as if the government wanted to take over care of the children. They felt they had to. The kids were malnourished and subject to abuse as reserve living had made life so dysfunctional that parents couldn’t effectively raise their own children any longer. The separation from families was surely traumatic, but had they remained they didn’t face a nice future either. Ironically, if the government had left children in those conditions, they would have been blamed for neglect and indigenous leaders would demand compensation for that.

The common denominator in this whole affair for over a century has been the reserve system itself. This is the elephant in the room that no politician has the courage to address. The reserve system is doomed to failure and we haven’t even begun discussing how to ease people out of it, much less started acting on it.

How bad does it have to get?

Are 40,000 kids in care not enough?

The willful blindness to the root of the problem has led to proposed solutions which will only exacerbate it.

How can somebody look at this mess and think that moving the kids back onto the reserves while handing the chiefs and councils billions to deal with it will make things any better?

We are working to keep kids in the very situation that caused the problem in the first place and it's only going to get worse.

We will never solve the problems created by race based policy through implementing even more race based policies yet we keep trying.

Until the reserve system is dissolved, the cycle of policy failures and human misery for indigenous people will continue.

WATCH LIVE: If $1.7 million for every indigenous child in care isn’t enough, what will be?

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