ON THE LEVEL — High cost of native self-rule

Who’s kidding whom on the so-called inherent right to native self-rule. What does it mean? How would it work? What will it cost? And who will pay for it? It would simply be irresponsible to enshrine anything as serious as this into any new constitution until we know some answers.

Yet Constitutional Affairs Minister Joe Clark is apparently making commitments without tallying the major costs to the federal treasury — a fly-now, pay-later approach.

Already over governed and awash in debt, we need a new third level of government in this country like a hole in the head. Heaven knows the existing provinces are forever bickering with the central government as well as among themselves.

Now we have Ottawa caving in to aboriginal demands for some kind of provincial status over vast expanses of land with virtually no tax base to back their aspirations for autonomy.

Establishing a First Nations province looks to me like a leap in the dark which, before it is over, could see all Indians, Inuit and Metis — a million strong — getting further into this largess act.

These people pay virtually no taxes, yet any government must run on taxes.

Under any self-government scenario there could be scores of aboriginal communities and organizations trying to make separate deals to meet diverse demands. Would there be 600 mayors (chiefs), 600 police chiefs and scores of new administrators all paid by the Great White Father in Ottawa? Federal

funding allocated for the new Territory of Nunavut (half the Northwest Territories including mineral rights on 350,000 sq. km) should scare all taxpayers. Ottawa estimates it will cost the federal government an extra $185 million yearly to finance the operation of that one new government, plus many millions more to set it up. This is for a population of just 20,000. What southern Canadian town with that population has anything like a $185-million operating budget?

Admittedly there are serious social and economic problems plaguing many of those apartheid-like native communities, the most underemployed and destitute in the country. But they don’t have to live there. They have the same rights and privileges enjoyed by all citizens — and more. Indeed most of us would love to be granted no-tax status with virtually unlimited educational opportunities, all paid by the federal government.

When the outdated apartheid-type reserve system was set up by treaty in 1850 as government wards, those Indians were better off than they ever had been.

But times change and people everywhere must change with the times including aboriginals. Dog teams have been supplanted by the snowmobile. Nor is fur trapping and fishing what it was then. Perhaps it’s time the reserves themselves should be folded and the Indian Act abolished.

Administered by a huge bureaucracy in Ottawa, the $4.5 billion it spends annually goes only to the reserves, though three-quarters of the status Indians no longer live there. None goes to non-status Indians and very little to help the status Indians not on reserves. More and more of them are flocking to the large urban centres.

Before pouring out more billions of dollars for military helicopters and naval frigates, the Mulroney cabinet had better take a harder look at the cost of native self-government.

Already heading upward of $10 billion annually just for the status Indians, Canada’s taxpayers will likely end up absorbing at least the cost of training and financially assisting the 500,000 Crees, Metis and non-status Indians, as well as their rising health-care, education and welfare costs.

On paper it may look simple just to turn the whole north country over to the aboriginal peoples. But it just won’t work for there simply isn’t the tax base to support another level of government.

Countless projects have been set up with government funds over the years in an attempt to provide gainful employment there for aboriginals. With few exceptions, these have proved short-lived and indeed disastrous.

To assume that big new mines and/or oilfields will be developed to pay aboriginal royalties and the high cost of a new level of government with its myriads of new regulations and restrictions is but a pipe dream.