EDITORIAL : THE DAILY NATIONAL POST, CANADA

Suffer the children

The health of any society is reflected in the fate of its children. The most successful communities tend to be those where children learn their values in stable, safe households led by regularly employed, well-educated parents. When this formula breaks down -whether because of substance abuse, domestic violence or parental abandonment -children are put at greater risk of ending up on the street, or on drugs. All this is well known: The link between parental dysfunction and negative childhood outcomes has been the subject of generations of social-policy research in both the United States and Canada.

And yet, when it comes to Canada's defining policy failing -the squalor and hopelessness that characterize many native reserves -we pretend that none of this research exists. It is imagined that what native children truly need to prosper are not the standard building blocks of successful families, but rather some uniquely aboriginal, government-funded solution fashioned by autonomous native leaders acting on their own culturally authentic principles.

The geographical manifestation of this folly is our country's massively subsidized reserve system, which -through welfare and tax policy -encourages natives to remain in what are essentially ethnically segregated villages run on Soviet economic principles, rather than integrate into urban, multicultural job centres. The human manifestation of this folly is the piteous state of many native children, a massively disproportionate number of whom end up in foster care every year because their own biological families are incapable of caring for them.

Acting on the belief that culture trumps all, Canadian child-care workers generally are mandated to find native homes for these children, even if white households are available, with the result that many children spend years in needless limbo. In no other policy context do we permit such overtly racist practices to interfere with the clear material well-being of a fleshand-blood human being.

We have occasion to recite all this because Ontario's Minister of Children and Youth, Laurel Broten, has just convened the province's first ever summit on native child welfare in Fort William First Nation, an Ojibway reserve near Thunder Bay. According to a Toronto Star report, Ms. Broten heard about the litany of problems facing native communities in Ontario, including mouldy schools, polluted water, and sub-standard housing. Worse is the human toll: prescription-drug addiction, alcoholism, broken homes and even teen suicides. Many local activists are taking heroic measures to address the problem: Star reporter Tanya Talaga spoke with one woman, Cindy Bannon, who has taken in four foster children. But their efforts are not nearly enough to cope with such widescale problems.

The activists Ms. Broten heard from wanted the government to do something about all this -and there apparently was much discussion about whether Ottawa or Queen's Park should be taking the lead in bankrolling this project. But the question is moot: This country already spends on the order of $10-billion for on-reserve programs -an amount in excess of the operating budget of the City of Toronto, despite the fact there are only about 400,000 people living on reserves. Even the most generous government handouts cannot build functional societies in places that lack an educated workforce or any sort of self-sustaining private economy or civil society. Indeed, more billions may even make matters worse by deepening natives' collective welfare trap.

This description does not apply to all native communities, of course. Some, especially those close to cities, truly are developing into business-friendly middle-class enclaves. But many remote communities such as Yellow Quill, Kashechewan and Natuashish -the ones we tends to hear about in the news when something especially terrible happens -harbour far more than their fair share of human misery.

The best way to create healthy children is to create healthy families -which can only be accomplished in communities that offer real jobs and the prospect of a productive life. As we know from studying inner cities, welfare-trap policies strip away the social function of adults, especially men. Absent the discipline of workaday life, too many fathers drift away into street life and addiction. Many mothers follow suit, or stay at home and are overwhelmed by the pressures of parenthood in communities that offer little in the way of social support.

Laurel Broten is to be applauded for examining the problems faced by Ontario's native communities. Not many politicians are willing even to cast a glance at this issue. But the longterm solution must be to empower individuals to find their potential, not to simply prop up failed communities for their own sake. Until integration -not race separation -becomes our goal, native children will pay the price in tragic ways.