Reconciliation has been a headline word in Canada for the past several years. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples published an extensive report in 1996. The Prime Minister in 2008 apologized in Parliament for the abuses suffered in residential schools. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls reported in 2019. As a country we have put a great deal of energy into documenting how we got to where we are.
Where are we? Of the 1.8 million indigenous people in Canada in 2021, nearly 19% are “low income”, compared to just under 11% of the rest of the population. Unemployment rates are higher than in the rest of the population. For Indigenous youth aged 15-24 the suicide rate is between five and six times higher than the Canadian average; for Inuit youth it is 11 times higher. That is a hard indicator of despair and hopelessness.
Education is the great leveler. Fewer than two-thirds of Indigenous youth graduate high school, vs. 91% of the non-Indigenous population. Only 11% of the Indigenous population hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, vs. 35% of the non-Indigenous population.
It’s important to know where we come from. But we cannot change the past. What we can influence is the future. Part of the path forward with reconciliation must be to improve the education of Indigenous children.
The federal government is responsible for on-reserve education. Per-student funding is less than $7,000 on reserve. By contrast, urban school boards generally spend between $10,000 and $11,000 per pupil. Add to that the fact that many reserves have infrastructure deficits, and on remote reserves the cost of living can be significantly higher than in cities. It isn’t difficult to conclude that the federal government is short-changing Indigenous students.
A plan for addressing this issue would include increasing per-pupil funding on reserve. Not just to urban levels, but significantly higher, perhaps $15,000 per student. This funding would be tied to the individual student, as with a voucher system. Parents would decide where their child would go to school, and, accordingly, get the funding. The level of funding should be such that teachers could be provided with attractive living conditions on-reserve, that reserve schools could be adequately equipped, and so on. If the reserve schools failed to improve, parents could opt to send their child to an off-reserve school, where they would presumably be welcomed as they bring with them a higher level of funding.
Better education is not a short-term fix. It would take at least a generation for improved Indigenous education to make a difference. But it took more than 200 years to get where we are.