Category Archives: canadian politics

On Policy Alpha geeks, network thinking and foreign policy

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In the past few weeks the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) and the Canadian International Council (CIC) both launched new visions for Canada’s foreign policy. Reading each, I’m struck by how much overlap both documents have with Middle to Model Power, the Canada25 report written 5 years ago by over 500 young Canadians from across the country and around the world.

With Middle to Model Power, a group of young people largely self-organized to lay out a vision and selection of ideas around how Canada could rethink its foreign policy. Take a look at this selection from its executive summary, including an overview and the first recommendation:

We submit that Canada should cease assessing its influence on the basis of its size or position within an obsolete global hierarchy. Instead, Canada25 calls on Canadians to look at the world as a network, where influence is based on the capacity of an individual, company, non-governmental organization (NGO) or country to innovate and collaborate. Building on this perspective, we propose that Canada become a Model Power—a country whose influence is linked to its ability to innovate, experiment, and partner; a country that, by presenting itself as a model, invites the world to assess, challenge, borrow from, and contribute to, its efforts.
In pursuit of our vision of Canada as a Model Power, we outline three priorities for action. These, accompanied by some of our recommendations, include:

MAKE CANADA A NETWORK NODE. Enhance the ability of Canadians to create, nurture, and tap into international networks:
• Issue five-year work visas to foreign graduates of Canadian universities • Reach out to Canada’s expatriate community by creating an international network of
Canadian leaders…

You can download the full report here, but you get the idea. Remember this is a group of 23-35 year-olds writing in 2005.

Now, quickly compare this to the summary’s of both the LPC and CIC’s new reports.

The LPC report, called a Global Networks Strategy opens by stating:

Networks define how the world works today, as hierarchies did in the past. Influence is gained through connectedness, and by being at the centre of networks. That is good news for Canada, because we have a reputation for being able to work with others, we have shaped many multilateral organizations, and our population today reflects the diversity of the world. The Global Networks Strategy is designed to leverage these assets. It sets priority areas in which the federal government must collaborate with the full range of players who contribute vigorously – and most often in networks – to Canada’s presence in the world: other governments, non-governmental organizations, the private sector, young Canadians, academia, faith- based groups, artists and others.

And in the CIC report, titled Open Canada: A Global Positioning Strategy for a Networked World, has as one of its opening paragraphs:

Canada will never be the most powerful nation on Earth. But we live in a digital age, where might is measured in knowledge rather than muscularity. If we keep building on our openness—attracting the best and the brightest citizens, generating and exchanging new ideas and new ways of doing things and welcoming investment in our economy—Canada can position itself at the centre of the networked world that is emerging in the 21st century.

And, unsurprisingly, the deeper details of the reports offer many similar prescriptions.

So how, on a shoestring budget, can a group of young Canadians many of whom were not foreign policy experts, write a report that identifies an organizing principle that 5 years both a major political party and one of the country’s newest and best funded think tanks would put at the hearts of their own reports?

A few ideas come to mind:

1) The Medium is the Message: Middle to Model Power was not written on a wiki (in 2005 none of us knew what a wiki was!) but it was written over email. The authors were scattered across the country and the process of organizing local events was relatively decentralized. People raised whatever topics that mattered to them, and during the drafting phase they simple sent me their ideas and we batted them around. There was structure, but were were a pretty flat organization and… we were very connected. For Canada25 a network wasn’t just an idea that emerged out of the process, it was the process. It should hardly be surprising that the way we saw the world reflected how we organized ourselves. (When I say that Canada’s digital economy strategy will fail unless written on GCPEDIA this is part of what I’m hinting at). The medium is the message. It’s hard (but not impossible) to write about networks deep in hierarchy.

2) Look for Policy Alpha Geeks in resource poor environments: So why did Canada25 think in terms of networks? How was it that before Wikinomics or GPS or pretty much most other things I’ve seen, did Canada25 organize itself this way?  Well, it wasn’t because we were strategic or young. It was because we had very little money. We couldn’t afford to organize any other way. To get 500 Canadians around the world to think about foreign policy we had to let them self-organize – we didn’t have an org structure or facilitators to do it for them. We had to take the cheapest tools (email) and over use them. Don’t get me wrong, Canada25 was not poor. Our members were generally very well educated, we had access to computers and the internet and access to interesting people to interview and draw ideas from. But the raw infrastructure we had at our disposal was not significant and it forced us to adopt what I now see were disruptive technologies and processes. We became Policy Alpha Geeks because we had to innovate not to be relevant, but to ensure the project survived.

3) It’s not about the youth: People presume that our thinking emerged because we were young. This is not entirely correct. Again, I submit that we got to thinking about networks because we were operating in a resource weak environment and had exposure to new tools (email) and a risk tolerance to try using them in an ambitious way. This isn’t about age, it just happens that generally it is young people who don’t have lots of resources and are willing to experiment with new tools. Older people, who frequently have more senior titles, generally have access to more resources and so can rely on more established, but more resource intensive tools and processes. But again, this is about mindset, not about age. Indeed, it is really about the innovators’ dilemma in policy making. Don’t believe me? Well, as lead author of Middle to Model Power I can tell you that the most influential book on my thinking was Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock which I read in the month preceding the drafting of the report. It was written in 1970 by an author who was, at the time, 42. In sum, young people can be a good guide, but it is environmental factors that you can replicate, not intrinsic qualities of being young, that allow you to innovate.

Both the LPC and the CIC’s documents are good and indeed, more up to date than Middle to Model Power. But in terms of core organizing principles the three documents are similar. So if you are genuinely interested in this take a look at all three documents. I do think they put forward what could become an emerging centrist consensus regarding organizing principles for Canadian foreign policy. Certainly that was the ambition back in 2005.

Half victory in making BC local elections more transparent

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Over the past few months the British Columbia government (my home province – or for my American friends – state) has had a taskforce looking at reforming local (municipal) election rules.

During the process I submitted a suggestion to the taskforce outlining why campaign finance data should be made available online and in machine readable format (ie. so you can open it in Microsoft Excel, or Google Docs, for example).

Yesterday the taskforce published their conclusions and… they kind of got it right.

At first blush, things look great… The press release and taskforce homepage list, as one of the core recommendations:

Establish a central role for Elections BC in enforcement of campaign finance rules and in making campaign finance disclosure statements electronically accessible

Looks promising… yes? Right. But note the actual report (which ironically, is only available in PDF, so I can’t link to the specific recommendations… sigh). The recommendation around disclosure reads:

Require campaign finance disclosure information to be published online
and made centrally accessible though Elections BC

and the explanatory text reads:

Many submissions suggested that 120 days is too long to wait for disclosure reports, and that the public should be able to access disclosure information sooner and more easily. Given the Task Force’s related recommendations on Elections BC’s role in overseeing local campaign finance rules, it is suggested that Elections BC act as a central repository of campaign finance disclosure statements. Standardizing disclosure statement forms is of practical importance if the statements are to be published online and centrally available, and would help members of the public, media and academia analyze the information. [my italics]

My take? That the spirit of the recommendation is for campaign finance data be machine readable – that you should be able to download, open, and play with it on your own computer. However, the literally reading of this text suggests that simple scanning account ledgers and sharing them as an image file or unstructured pdf might suffice.

This would be essentially doing the same thing that generally happens presently and so would not mark a step forward. Another equally bad outcome? That the information gets shared in a manner similar to the way federal MP campaign data is shared on Elections Canada website where it cannot be easily downloaded and you are only allowed to look at one candidates financial data at a time. (Elections Canada site is almost designed to prevent you from effectively analyzing campaign finance data).

So in short, the Taskforce members are to be congratulated as I think their intentions were bang on: they want the public to be able to access and analyze campaign finance data. But we will need to continue to monitor this issue carefully as the language is vague enough that the recommendation may not produce the desired outcome.

Canadian Governments: How to waste millions online ($30M and counting)

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Back from DC and Toronto I’m feeling recharged and reinvigorated. The Gov 2.0 expo was fantastic, it was great to meet colleagues from around the world in person. The FCM AGM was equally exciting with a great turnout for our session on Government 2.0 and lots of engagement from the attendees.

So, now that I’m in a good mood, it’s only natural that I’m suddenly burning up about some awesomely poor decisions being made at the provincial level and that may also may be in the process of being made at the federal level.

Last year at the BC Chapter of the Municipal Information Systems Association conference I stumbled, by chance, into a session run by the British Columbia government about a single login system it was creating for government website. So I get that this sounds mundane but check this out: it would means that if you live in BC you’ll have a single login name and password when accessing any provincial government service. Convenient! Better still, the government was telling the municipalities that this system (still in development) could work for their websites too. So only one user name and password to access any government service in BC! It all sounds like $30 million (the number I think they quoted) well spent.

So what could be wrong with this…?

How about the fact that such a system already exists. For free.

Yes, OpenID, is a system that has been created to do just this. It’s free and licensed for use by anyone. Better still, it’s been adopted by a number of small institutions such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, PayPal, and Verisign and… none other than the US government which recently began a pilot adoption of it.

So let me ask you: Do you think the login system designed by the BC government is going to be more, or less secure that that an open source system that enjoys the support of Google, Yahoo, AOL, PayPal, Verisign and the US Government? Moreover, do we think that the security concerns these organizations have regarding their clients and citizens are less strict than those of the BC government?

I suspect not.

But that isn’t going to prevent us from sinking millions into a system that will be less secure and will costs millions more to sustain over the coming decades (since we’ll be the only ones using it… we’ll have to have uniquely trained people to sustain it!).

Of course, it gets worse. While the BC government is designing its own system, rumour has it that the Federal Government is looking into replacing Epass; it’s own aging website login system which, by the by, does not work with Firefox, a web browser used by only a quarter of all Canadians. Of course, I’m willing to bet almost anything that no one is even contemplating using OpenID. Instead, we will sink 10’s of millions of dollars (if not more…) into a system. Of course, what’s $100 million of taxpayer dollars…

Oh, and today’s my birthday! And despite the tone of this post I’m actually in a really good mood and have had a great time with friends, family and loved ones. And where will I be today…? At 30,000 ft flying to Ottawa for GovCamp Canada. Isn’t that appropriate? :)

Open Data: An Example of the Long Tail of Public Policy at Work

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VancouverGraffiti_AnalysisAs many readers know, Vancouver passed what has locally been termed the Open3 motion a year ago and has had a open data portal up and running for several months.

Around the world much of the focus of open data initiatives have focused on the development of applications like Vancouver’s Vantrash, Washington DC’s Stumble Safely or Toronto’s Childcare locator. But the other use of data portals is to actually better understand and analyze phenomena in a city – all of which can potentially lead to a broader diversity of perspectives, better public policy and a more informed public and/or decision makers.

I was thus pleased to find out about another example of what I’ve been calling the Long Tail of Public Policy when I received an email from Victor Ngo, a student at the University of British Columbia who just completed his 2nd year in the Human Geography program with an Urban Studies focus (He’s also a co-op student looking for a summer job – nudge to the City of Vancouver).

It turns out that last month, he and two classmates did a project on graffiti occurrence and its relationship to land use, crime rates, and socio-economic variables. As Victor shared with me:

It was a group project I did with two other members in March/April. It was for an introductory GIS class and given our knowledge, our analysis was certainly not as robust and refined as it could have been. But having been responsible for GIS analysis part of the project, I’m proud of what we accomplished.

The “Graffiti sites” shapefile was very instrumental to my project. I’m a big fan of the site and I’ll be using it more in the future as I continue my studies.

So here we have University students in Vancouver using real city data to work on projects that could provide some insights, all while learning. This is another small example of why open data matters. This is the future of public policy development. Today Victor may be a student, less certain about the quality of his work (don’t underestimate yourself, Victor) but tomorrow he could be working for government, a think tank, a consulting firm, an insurance company or a citizen advocacy group. But wherever he is, the open data portal will be a resource he will want to turn to.

With Victor’s permission I’ve uploaded his report, Graffiti in the Urban Everyday – Comparing Graffiti Occurrence with Crime Rates, Land Use, and Socio-Economic Indicators in Vancouver, to my site so anyone can download it. Victor has said he’d love to get people’s feedback on it.

And what was the main drawback of using the open data? There wasn’t enough of it.

…one thing I would have liked was better crime statistics, in particular, the data for the actual location of crime occurrence. It would have certainly made our analysis more refined. The weekly Crime Maps that the VPD publishes is an example of what I mean:

http://vancouver.ca/police/CrimeMaps/index.htm

You’re able to see the actual location where the crime was committed. We had to tabulate data from summary tables found at:

http://vancouver.ca/police/organization/planning-research-audit/neighbourhood-statistics.html

To translate: essentially the city releases this information in a non-machine-readable format, meaning that citizens, public servants at other levels of government and (I’m willing to wager) City of Vancouver public servants outside the police department have to recreate the data in a digital format. What a colossal waste of time and energy. Why not just share the data in a structured digital way? The city already makes it public, why not make it useful as well? This is what Washington DC (search crime) and San Francisco have done.

I hope that more apps get created in Vancouver, but as a public policy geek, I’m also hoping that more reports like these (and the one Bing Thom architects published on the future of Vancouver also using data from the open data catalog) get published. Ultimately, more people learning, thinking, writing and seeking solutions to our challenges will create a smarter, more vibrant and more successful city. Isn’t that what you’d want your city government (or any government, really…) to do?

Parliament: invite me to audit your books (I'm not really asking)

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“Following careful consideration, the auditor general will not be invited to conduct a performance audit of the House of Commons”

– A parliamentary statement released last Thursday afternoon

There was a time when the above statement made sense. It was a time when accounts were kept on paper, when copying and shipping such papers was expensive and time consuming, and when the number of people who would have gone through a giant binder of accounts would have been quite small.

In such an era, auditors had a unique role – they represented the interests of the public since the public could not review the books themselves. Thus, picking the auditor mattered. Since this person would be one of the few people with the time, resources, and access to review MP’s accounts, it became a powerful and politically sensitive position. The public demanded someone they could trust, the politicians – justifiably – wanted to ensure that this person would not abuse their role by shedding light on certain members or applying standards unevenly. Hence, choosing who would see the books mattered, since few people, if anyone, would review the work of the auditor.

So should Parliament acquiesce to the auditor general and hand over their books to her? She meets all the standards set above so the answer seems like it should be yes. But it isn’t. the auditor general does not oversee parliament, and she should not receive special access, nor should we begin to establish precedent that she does.

However.

We don’t live in an era described above. Today, the accounts are kept in a digital format. It should be easy to convert them to Microsoft Excel or another computer format. They could be posted online where anyone could download and look at them at no cost. And, as the Guardian newspaper proved last year, thousands and thousands of people would be interested in using their computers to analyze and write about them.

What Parliament should do is hand their expense accounts over to everyone. Indeed, I am today making that formal request: I would like Parliament to invite Canadian taxpayers – the people who vote for them, who pay their salaries, and who cover their expenses – to review their books. Please take all the expenses and post them online. Today.

As in the United Kingdom I am confident that many Canadians will take an interest in the accounts. The Guardian asked people to help review the accounts and ordinary citizens from across the UK found a number of unusual claims. Others took the information about expenses and visualized it in interesting ways, ways that allowed citizens to better understand how their money was being spent.

Would the process be painful for MPs? Possibly for some. Would it lead to a clamp down on MP’s expenses? I have my doubts. I think most people recognize that MPs engage in a tremendous amount of travel and, more importantly, want their MPs to use these funds to educate themselves, conduct research, think independently and, of course, better represent their constituents. But there will be little or no money for these important activities if people feel that expense accounts get used up on other activities.

More importantly, posting MP’s accounts could reduce the likelihood of misspending in the future – a truly good outcome. Our goal shouldn’t be to catch problems after the fact, but to prevent them in the first place. Knowing that constituents will be able to see one’s expenses can be a more effective constraint than any ethics or spending guideline. Indeed, this is the same argument I made around why publicly accessible charitable receipts should be downloadable as such an act might have saved taxpayers $3.2 Billion. Here the stakes are smaller, but no less important.

In the end, as this is our government, this is also our money, and these are our documents. Parliament, we would like you to invite us to see what is already ours, so that we can collectively do our own analysis. If the auditor-general wants to do hers as well… power to her. But we agree that you are not accountable to her. You are accountable to us.

Mick Jagger & why copyright doesn't always help artists

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I recently read this wonderful interview with Mick Jagger on the BBC website which had this fantastic extract about the impact of the internet on the music industry. What I love about this interview is that Mick Jagger is, of course, about as old a legend as you can find in the music industry.

…I’m talking about the internet.

But that’s just one facet of the technology of music. Music has been aligned with technology for a long time. The model of records and record selling is a very complex subject and quite boring, to be honest.

But your view is valid because you have a huge catalogue, which is worth a lot of money, and you’ve been in the business a long time, so you have perspective.

Well, it’s all changed in the last couple of years. We’ve gone through a period where everyone downloaded everything for nothing and we’ve gone into a grey period it’s much easier to pay for things – assuming you’ve got any money.

Are you quite relaxed about it?

I am quite relaxed about it. But, you know, it is a massive change and it does alter the fact that people don’t make as much money out of records.

But I have a take on that – people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

So what does this have to do with copyright? Well, remember, the record labels and other content distributors (not creators!) keep saying how artists will starve unless there is copyright. But understand that for the entire 110-year period that Mick Jagger is referencing there was copyright… and yet artists were paid to record LPs and records for only a small fraction (less than a quarter) of that period. During the rest of the time, the way they made money was by performing. There is nothing about a stronger copyright regime that ensures artists (the creators!) will receive for more money or compensation.

So when the record labels say that without stricter copyright legislation artists will suffer, what they really mean to say is one specific business model – one that requires distributors and that they happen to do well by – will suffer. Artists, who traditionally never received much from the labels (and even during this 25 year period only a tiny few profited handsomely) have no guarantees that with stricter copyright they will see more revenue. No, rather, the distributors will simply own their content for longer and have greater control over its use.

This country is about to go into a dark, dark place with the new copyright legislation. I suspect we will end up stalled for 30 years and cultural innovation will shift to other parts of the world where creativity, remix culture and forms of artistic expression are kept more free.

Again, as Lessig says:

  • Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
  • The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
  • Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
  • Ours is less and less a free society.

Welcome to copyright reform. A Canada where the past controls the creativity that gets built upon it.

Prediction: The Digital Economy Strategy will fail unless drafted on GCPEDIA

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So I’ve finished up at Canada 3.0. I’ve got a copy of the Consultation Paper on the Digital Economy Strategy and hope to write about it shortly (when, I don’t know since I’m traveling between Ontario and BC twice this week, and 5 times in the coming 5 weeks…). I also hope to post some deeper thoughts and reflections about the conference since… no one is saying much and there is much to be said. Some sneak peeks: 1) It is telling that it seems no one was live blogging the conference, 2) The conference was a little heavy on commercialization and how the internet can work to save the current crop of content distributors and 3) the gap between my colleagues and friends and those – particularly senior leaders – is stunning.

In the meantime, my post from Monday has gotten good traction but I wanted to repost the last section since the post was long (and I know few people read long posts) – and, frankly, the point needs emphasizing:

A networked economy can only be managed by a government that uses a networked approach to policy development.

An agrarian economy was managed using papyrus, an industrial economy was managed via printing press, typewriters and carbon copy paper. A digital economy strategy and managing policies were created on Microsoft Word and with email. A Network Economy can and only will be successfully managed and regulated when those trying to regulate it stop using siloed, industrial modes of production, and instead start thinking and organizing like a network. Not to ring an old bell, but today, that means drafting the policy, from beginning to end, on GCPEDIA, the only platform where federal public servants can actually organize in a network.

Managing an industrial economy would have been impossible using hand written papyrus, not just because the tools could not have handled the volume and complexity of the work but because the underlying forms of thinking and organizing that are shaped by that tool are so different from how an industrial economy works. In short, how you do it matters.

With that said, I’m going to predict this right now: Until a digital economy strategy is drafted using online but internally-connected tools like wikis, it will fail. At the moment, this means GCPEDIA. I say this not because the people working on it will not be intelligent, but because they won’t be thinking in a connected way. It will be like horse and buggy users trying to devise what a policy framework for cars should look like. Terrible, terrible decisions will be made.

To manage a network you have to think and act in a network. Painful? Maybe. But that’s the reality of the situation.

On Journalism & Crowdsourcing: the good, the bad, the ugly

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Last week the Vancouver Sun (my local paper) launched a laudable experiment. They took all of the campaign finance data from the last round of municipal elections in the Lower Mainland (the Greater Vancouver area in Canada) and posted a significant amount of it on their website. This is exactly the type of thing I’ve been hoping that newspapers would do more of in Canada (much like British newspapers – especially The Guardian – have done). I do think there are some instructive lessons, so here is a brief list of what I think is good, bad and ugly about the experiment.

The Good:

That it is being done at all. For newspapers in Canada to do anything other than simply repackage text that was (or wasn’t) going to end up in the newsprint sadly still counts as innovation here. Seriously, someone should be applauding the Vancouver sun team. I am. I hope you will to. Moreover, enabling people to do some rudimentary searches is interesting – mostly as people will want to see who the biggest donors are. Of course, no surprise to learn that in many cases the biggest donors in municipal elections (developers) give to all the major parties or players… just to cover their bets. Also interesting is that they’ve invited readers to add “If you find something interesting in the database that you want to share with other readers, go to The Sun’s Money & Influence blog at vancouversun.com/influence and post a comment” and is looking for people to sniff out news stories.

While it is great that the Vancouver Sun has compiled this data, it will be interesting to see who, if anyone uses their data. A major barrier here is the social contract between the paper and those it is looking to engage. The paper won’t actually let you access the data – only run basic searches. This is because they don’t want readers running off and doing something interesting with the data on another website. But this constraint also means you can’t visualize it, (for example put it into a spread sheet and graph) or try to analyze it in some interesting ways. Increasingly our world isn’t one where we tell the story in words, we tell is visually with graphs, charts and visuals… that is the real opportunity here.

I know a few people who would love to do something interesting with the data (like John Jensen or Luke Closs), if they could access it. I also understand that the Vancouver Sun wants the discussion to take place on their page. But if you want people to use the data and do something interesting with it, you have to let them access it: that means downloading it or offering up an API (This is what The Guardian, a newspaper that is serious about letting people use their data, does.). What the Sun could have done was distribute it with an attribution license, so that anybody who used the API had to at least link back to The Sun. But I don’t know a single person out there who with or without a license wouldn’t have linked back to the Sun, thanked them, and driven a bunch a traffic to them. Moreover, if The Sun had a more open approach, it could have likely even enlisted people to to data entry on campaign donations in other districts around the province. Instead, many of the pages for this story sit blank. There are few comment but some like these two that are not relevant and the occasional gem like this one). There is also one from John Jensen, open data hackathon regular who has been trying to visualize this data for months but been unable to since typing up all the data has been time consuming.

At the end of the day, if you want readers to create content for you, to sniff out stories and sift through data, you have to trust them, and that means giving them real access. I can imagine that feels scary. But I think it would work out.

The Ugly:

The really ugly part about this story is that the Vancouver Sun needed to do all this data entry in the first place. Since campaigns are legally required to track donations most track them using… MicroSoft Excel. Then, because the province requires that candidates disclose donations the city in which the candidate is running insists that they submit the list of donations in print. Then that form gets scanned and saved as a PDF. If, of course, the province’s campaign finance law’s were changed so as to require you to submit your donations in an electronic format, then all of the data entry the Sun had to do would disappear and suddenly anyone could search and analyze campaign donations. In short, even though this system is suppose to create transparency, we’ve architected it to be opaque. The information is all disclosed, we’ve just ensured that it is very difficult and expensive to sort through. I’m sadly, not confident that the BC Election Task Force is going to change that although I did submit this as a recommendation.

Some Ideas:

1) I’d encourage the Vancouver Sun to make available the database they’ve cobbled together. I think if they did, I know I would be willing to help bring together volunteers to add donation data from more municipalities and to help create some nice visualizations of the data. I also think it would spark a larger discussion both on their website, and elsewhere across the internet (and possibly even other mediums) around the province. This could become a major issue. I even suspect that there would be a number of people at the next open data hackathon who would take this issue up.

2) Less appealing is to scrape the data set off the Vancouver Sun’s website and then do something interesting with it. I would, of course, encourage whoever did that to attribute the good work of the Vancouver Sun, link back to them and even encourage readers to go and participate in their discussion forum.

First Nations Renaissance: Or Why Canada's next First Nation debate won't involve you

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I wrote this post a year ago but, out of nervousness never posted it. Canada’s racial stalemate around First Nations-Non-First Nations issues makes it challenging to feel talk about this subject. But with conversation with and urging from First Nation colleagues, along with the release of the Urban Aboriginal People’s Survey (UAPS) has persuaded me that this conversation needs to be shared, and if not one talks about it, that would be a bigger problem. I don’t claim deep expertise as an observer of First Nation politics but I do follow it much more closely than the average person. What I’ve been witnessing is astonishing and, potentially explosive.

For the past few years I’ve become increasingly persuaded that First Nation’s Community is in the midst of a seismic shift. Pick up and read a copy of the UAPS. It is a dramatic document. One that shows the underlying demographics that are driving this shift. Want to know the two most important lines in the document? Here they are:

1) In 2006 half the First Nations Population in Canada lived in urban areas, with almost a third living in cities with 100,000+ people

2) Pursuing higher education is the leading life aspiration of urban Aboriginal peoples today.

For Canadian baby boomers – and possibly First Nations themselves – the conversation and identity of First Nations was focused on the reserve. The defining moment of the 80’s and early 90’s were Oka and the Meech Lake debates. Here the emphasis was (understandably and justly) on land rights and treaty obligations. The result was a conversation (not always civil, and not always using words) between First Nations and Canadians that helped define the identity of both groups.

For younger First Nation and non-First Nation (Xers and Millennials) I would argue this conversation has shifted. The defining issues in the conversation are less tied to place and tend to be broader in theme – residential schools, poverty and/or addiction. These reflect the demographic shift noted above. As First Nations have urbanized, so to have the issues. These issues are indeed a social crisis that Canadians need to address and that frequently do not receive much attention given the size and scope of the issue. Again, however, this conversation has certainly defined First Nations in the minds of Canadians – and in an often less than positive view – something that is both unfair and creating a new racial stalemate in the country.

But it is that second line I wish to zero in on. Less well understood by most Canadians is the sheer number (in both absolute and relative terms) of first nations attending college and university, or even working in high paying, knowledge economy jobs. There is a tsunami of young educated first nations young people who are radically changing the make up, complexion and identity of the First Nations community.

Why is this? Because a growing number of First Nations people have access to good jobs, urban communities, effective public services – in short to well managed economies and governments. This has numerous implications. The first is that “urban” is going to become a bigger part of the First Nation identity. Moreover, this process will not be an easy one, especially given that this group does not have an equal voice, either within the mainstream culture, or even within the First Nations community. The UAPS survey found that 40% of status and 50% of non-status First Nations felt no political organization represented them. No mainstream party and not even the AFN (or the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples

But there is a deeper implication. My conversation with First Nations colleagues suggest that increasingly, many looking home at their own reserves and wonder – why aren’t there effective public services, accountable governance and good jobs there? Everyone agrees that imperialism and government structures contribute to the problem, and many also conclude that first nations’ mismanagement is a significant contributor to the problem (see quote below). In other words highly educated First Nation millennials are increasingly wanting to challenge their boomer leaders who are the powerholders on reserve. My sense is that there is real tension between these two age cohorts, exasperated by an urban/rural and educational divide. In addition, a number of conversations have lead me to believe that, in many cases, the community elders, are siding with the millennials in this conversation. Thus, this is is not simply a youth uprising, it is a complex conversation that – in an overly simplified description – is pitting elders and young First Nations against many boomer powerholders.

This has important implications for first nations/non-aboriginal relations (also see quote below) but the real dynamic is internal. There is a First Nations renaissance occurring. Like a tsunami a large talented, ambitious, smart generation of First Nations is emerging from universities across the country and they are shifting the conversation, not with other Canadians (that will come) but within First Nations communities. Obviously this is a sensitive topic (as, again, Helin’s alludes to) and hence my nervousness around this post.

“Aboriginal people are reluctant to speak publicly about these issues [poor governance] because they do not wish to provide grist for the political right in Canada who many feel are racist, and have no real interest in actually trying to make the situation better (though often there is a sizable, but silent contingent that supports the publication of such issues in what might be considered right-of-centre publications, because they are regarded as only telling the truth and trying to make things better for the ordinary Aboriginal folks). Generally, non-aboriginal observers have been reluctant to raise this issue as well because, in the current climate of political correctness, they might automatically be labelled as racists. Even the many Chiefs and Councils that are running honest governments in the best interests of their members feel compelled to defend against such reported abuses, because they fear their activities may become tarred with a brush that does not apply in their particular circumstances. Usually when this matter is raised publicly, there are entrenched positions on both sides of the debate and little communications as to how to solve these problems.”

In addition to trying to quietly challenge boomer powerholders this cohort of urban first nations faces additional challenges. On the one hand they are facing all sorts of abandonment issues – communities that are simultaneously disappointed that “they left” for urban centres, eager to have them return, and threatened by the knowledge and skills they have learned and could bring back. Indeed, I’ve talked to many who are struggling with raising issues of governance and building sustainable communities while sustaining a respect for authority that many want to adhere to, but that sometimes prevents them from voicing their concerns, accessing the levers of power, or contributing in ways they feel they are able. In addition, many are meeting and marrying other first nations (but often not from their band) or non-aboriginals and so are confronting (through their children) all sorts of identity issues about what it means to be first nation growing up off-reserve or with mixed heritage parents. Indeed, this is also a generation of First Nations that, with urbanization, is experiencing mulitculturalism for the first time. Canada’s major urban centres, with the diversity of backgrounds, is a far cry from the biracial world (with First Nations and mostly white non-aboriginal populations living side by side but segregated) that defines much of Canada’s rural space.

This is obviously a simplified narrative – one that does not pay tribute to the nuanced challenges and successes of many nations. But my readings and my conversations with first nations’ friends and acquaintances suggests this is all bubbling under the surface. I’m not sure if there is interest in the poll capturing what I think is an emerging intergenerational conversation within First Nations communities, but my sense is that this issue is becoming a more important driver of First Nations politics (one member, one vote in the AFN as an example), and in particular, urban first nations politics.

Hope this is thought provoking.

Parliament, Accountability and you

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Yesterday was not a good day for accountability.

Yes, the speaker has spoken. It turns out that the government is accountable to parliament. Everyone seems to be happy. Everyone that is, except me.

While some are understandably happy about the decision the fact is, this is lowest common denominator democracy. Presently the executive – one that ran on the notion of accountability – believes it is accountable to no one. Indeed, it is not even embarrassed to openly argue the case. The good news is that, thankfully, the Speaker has intervened and signaled that, in fact, the government is accountable to at least one group of people, parliamentarians. On the surface, it is more than a little embarrassing to all Canadians that, to avoid accountability, the present government would attempt to break centuries of parliamentary tradition and violate the very rules the sustain our democracy. Again, yesterday is not a high water mark, it is a low water mark for all of us.

But there is something still more disturbing in yesterday’s events. If this government is unwilling to be accountable to elected officials who have the power of tradition and rule of law… How responsive will they be any one else?

And here in lies the bad news. While our government may yet be held accountable to parliament, there is group of people the government has demonstrated it isn’t accountable to. And that is you.

Let’s assume that, like me, you have no parliamentary privilege. No legal team on your side. No access to the speaker of the house to arbitrate your request. What is the likelihood your request for government information – even something not-secret – will be responded to in a timely manner? How accountable do you think your government will be to you?

Sadly, we know the answer. And it is not good. Indeed, what is playing out in the house is a metaphor for what has happened across much of the Canadian government. With each government it becomes harder and harder to know how decisions were made, what has happened, or even the results of a government activity. That is unless the government decides it wants you to know.

In fact, it is not out of the ordinary for citizens to wait months to get information they requested. Of course, this means that by the time they get the information they requested the discussion has moved on or new more relevant information needs to be requested. In short, journalists, academics, businesses and ordinary Canadians remains stuck forever in the dark, their government out of reach, and unwilling to be accountable to the very people who elect them.

Indeed the only thing that is extraordinary about what is happening in parliament is that it is a profoundly ordinary experience for ordinary Canadian who might ask a question of their government. As the Information Commissioner noted in her report to parliament “Seventeen of the 24 institutions completed their requests in 60 days or more.” (The law requires a response within 30 days). And that was if they decided to fulfill the request at all. So far parliament has had to wait 4 months, if the government decides it will hand over the documents at all. And of course, the government may next claim it doesn’t know where the documents are – since apparently they are using a highly sophisticated filing system to manage the war effort.

So, members of parliament, what you are experiencing is what is actually pretty normal for the rest of us. Which is, pretty depressing.