Charities get rated on how much money they spend on programs compared to how much they bring in. The higher the percentage spent on programs and services, the better the rating.
Using that measure, if the sa国际传媒 Ministry of Children and Family Development were a charity, it would get a zero rating for its efforts to improve services to aboriginal children and youth.
Does that sound harsh? Not when you consider that $66 million spent over the past 12 years produced no benefit to those the money was supposed to help.
That鈥檚 the blunt conclusion drawn by Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, sa国际传媒鈥檚 representative for children and youth, after her office analyzed the provincial government鈥檚 attempts to reform the aboriginal child welfare system.
鈥淭he story may read more like fiction than truth, but the numbers speak for themselves,鈥� said Turpel-Lafond in her report, When Talk Trumped Service.
鈥淣early $66 million has been spent without any functional public-policy framework, no meaningful financial or performance accountability, and without any children receiving additional services because of these expenditures.鈥�
She describes a mishmash of aboriginal-governance endeavours without goals, oversight or financial accountability. Huge amounts of money were spent on talking about initiatives that went nowhere.
In 2008, the sa国际传媒 Liberal government introduced legislation to create regional aboriginal authorities to deal with child welfare, but that initiative was dropped after, Turpel-Lafond noted, 鈥渘early $35 million was spent discussing regional aboriginal authorities, including large expenditures on paying people to meet, hiring consultants to facilitate those meetings and producing materials of questionable practical value following such meetings that almost never addressed the actual difficulties children and youth were experiencing in their life.鈥�
This wasn鈥檛 a scheme to defraud the public purse of millions. It is not a deliberate conspiracy to siphon off government funding 鈥� 鈥渃onspiracy鈥� denotes an ability to plan and organize that seems lacking in this issue.
This is a perfect storm of misguided good intentions, bureaucratic confusion, policy vacuums and failure to follow through. No one is to blame; everyone is to blame.
Progress is slow through the minefield that is the relationship between government and First Nations. Aboriginal representatives approach negotiations with understandable mistrust and animosity; government is cautious to the point of paralysis for fear of giving offence. Pressure builds from critics 鈥� including Turpel-Lafond 鈥� who vociferously demand engagement and solutions, intimidating everyone into indecision.
Add to that mix the emotional dimensions of dealing with vulnerable youth and children, and it becomes difficult to establish firm policies, realistic goals and a clear direction.
And without goals, direction and accountability, little progress is made.
Turpel-Lafond鈥檚 report should not prompt a witch-hunt for culprits, but a careful examination of programs and processes to ensure they are effective. That seems to be the effect on government, as Children and Family Development Minister Stephanie Cadieux notes: 鈥淲e鈥檝e strayed and need to get back to delivering service and we鈥檙e absolutely going to do that.鈥�
It鈥檚 painful to think of how the wasted millions could have been used on the front lines to help children and youth, instead of feeding a bureaucratic jungle of fine-sounding concepts and lofty theories that produced no fruit.
Good can be harvested from this mess, if it brings about careful scrutiny of how money is spent and results in more action and less talk, if it brings about an awareness that the targets of the programs are real people with acute needs, not merely abstract statistics.
And it also raises a question: Would similar analysis of other government programs uncover the same sort of waste?
