Chiefs should butt out of social agencies

Imagine that you live in a small town of, perhaps, 1,000 people and your neighbours (pretty much every house in the town) know not just your business but have known you and your family forever.

Not a lot of dispassionate, objective observation going on, and there are a whole lot of assumptions about who you are and why you are the way you are. It's that fishbowl kind of life that can make living in a small town a pain.

The flip side, as anyone who's lived in a small town can attest, is that when you're in trouble, you've got 1,000 people at your side.

That's all well and good until you disagree with your neighbours either about the trouble you're in, or the solutions to getting out, which is when you close your door with a "thanks, but no thanks." Everyone pretends to mind their business again.

Except for when it comes to some things of communal interest -- paying taxes, keeping the peace and feeding your kids, so they don't come knocking on a neighbour's door begging for a meal.

Most small towns have ways of divorcing the neighbours from the job of looking after communal interests -- they hire cops and have government agents to do the dirty work.

But that's not the way it is on some First Nations reserves, where your business can be everyone's business.

I remember being told a few years back that one band office distributed welfare cheques on a certain day and recipients en masse would go there and get their name checked off a list that sat on the counter, a list chief and council approved. No anonymity there.

It's tough to reconcile a traditional, communal life and its way of doing business in a fishbowl-like community with mainstream concepts of privacy and conflict of interest, concepts that are still evolving in mainstream Canadian society. That creates a discernible tension for the organization of public services, such as child welfare, on reserves where the need is evident and the structures in place still date to a time when services were rudimentary.

No Winnipegger would sit still for Sam Katz or a city councillor sitting on a board that told the child welfare agency what to do, but on some First Nations the chief and councillors sit on the board of directors of the child and family services agency.

In the 1980s, the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry found that aboriginal child welfare services were delivered by agencies often led by local politicians. The AJI found that the agencies were doing a good job, with heavy workloads and limited budgets and resources.

It did not delve into the issue of conflict or political interference, the pressure that can be brought to bear on a case worker or an agency executive director, for example, trying to insert themselves into a troubled family that might have political clout and, through the board, power over the agency.

On a reserve where a few family surnames can account for a large share of the population, the possibilities for such conflict are obvious. Boards hire executive directors of the agency and they get reports on how the agency is managed, and of a child welfare case when something goes very wrong. Even if conflict rules insist a person absents himself from matters that involve his family, how can he resolve that conflict to be able to sit in on subsequent discussions or votes affecting the job of an agency executive director?

The Cree Nation Child and Family Caring Agency, which provided services to seven First Nations, was led by a board entirely comprised of chiefs and councillors until the board was displaced following a damning review of the agency's operations.

The West Region Child and Family Services, serving nine communities in western Manitoba, is led by the chiefs of those bands.

At one point, the Opaskwayak Cree Nation CFS, was led by a board that had six members -- including three band councillors -- with the same family name. How does anyone even begin to reconcile even the appearance of conflict there?

A lawyer I spoke with Thursday who has worked for northern agencies for a very long time said that in her experience, on the infrequent occasions in which board members have conflicts with child welfare matters before them, they don't just step out of the room during the discussion, they resign. That can be disruptive to the board, and in a voluntary system, it only works when it works.

When four provincial authorities were established to take direct responsibility for the CFS agency operations, the act establishing them recognized the need to keep politicians away from the boards of those governing bodies.

No one yet has tried to tell the chiefs and councillors they should step back from that kind of direct authority over child welfare agencies and the work that's done. A discussion about new standards of governance between the province, the aboriginal political bodies and the agencies has begun, but whether chiefs and councillors will be told to butt out is still in question.

If I were a chief, I don't think I'd want the task of overseeing child welfare programs -- conflict cuts many ways and I wouldn't want to deal at the doorstep with political supporters, cousins or neighbours who want an agency to return their children to them.

The better idea is for some community representation at a regional, rather than reserve, level. Resolving the potential for political interference and conflict can only be done by banning politicians from the boards that govern child welfare agencies.

catherine.mitchell@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 27, 2009 A11