MORGAN: It's time to defund the Assembly of First Nations

The Assembly of First Nations (AFN) recently met for their annual shindig in Ottawa, and the outcome was predictable. They offered nothing but anger, indignation, and demands. It’s an organization overrun with a sense of entitlement and suffers from a chronic oppositional disorder. It’s time that taxpayers stopped paying for it. Taxpayers funding a lobby group whose primary output is demands for more funding creates a self-reinforcing loop detached from broader Canadian fiscal reality or voter consent.Something many Canadians don’t understand about the AFN is that it is just a lobby group. It’s not a formal form of government. It doesn’t have any legislative authority; it’s not bound by the sorts of controls that elected authorities have, and it has no accountability to the people it purportedly serves. Due to decades of indulgence from politicians and the media, people have assumed there is some sort of legitimacy within the group to make policy demands upon the government. On top of it all, the group costs taxpayers upwards of $55 million per year. Nearly 90% of the AFN’s revenue comes from government agencies.Most of the top lobby groups in Canada receive little or no tax funding, and they operate on much less than the AFN does. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce is one of the largest lobby groups in Canada. Its budget is around $18 million, and it gets nearly none of it from tax dollars. The Canadian Labour Congress has around $20 million in annual revenues, and it comes from union dues. Not taxpayers.So where does all the money the AFN takes in go? Unsurprisingly, salaries are the top expenditure at $21 million per year. Some folks are making some healthy paycheques within the group. Of course, they don’t break down exactly who makes how much, and they certainly don’t lay out the job duties..The next largest expenditure of the AFN is on travel. They blow $16 million per year on this. Member chiefs travel to assemblies and live it up first-class on a regular basis. Why do a Zoom meeting when you can fly across the country, stay in top hotels, and enjoy fine dining on somebody else’s dime? The travel expenses for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce are less than $500,000, though it has branches nationwide and holds conferences. The Labour Congress combines travel and “employee expenses” for a total cost of $1.4 million.The next area of spending is on “professional fees.” This nebulous category eats $7 million per year. Doubtless there are some plum contracts to the well-connected to be found in there.After that, there is a line item for “regional service delivery” that runs over $6.2 million. Considering the AFN doesn’t deliver any services, it’s hard to determine what that means. Perhaps it’s the cost of regional offices to house the folks eating up that $21 million in salaries.Speaking of offices, office expenses cost $2.8 million per year. That’s a lot of paper clips. Considering what the organization actually does, they could probably outsource nearly all of that to a travel agent and save a couple of million.Most lobby groups do research and have policy departments. They conduct polling and offer educational services about the industry or people they represent. The AFN doesn’t appear to spend much on such things. Aside from travelling and collecting salaries, the only other notable expenditure is $625,000 on advertising, promotion, and publications. That’s just over 1%..The AFN is little more than a terribly expensive social club for well-connected chiefs and activists within the indigenous industry. Their statements are marked by petulance and a lack of realistic policy depth.At the last Ottawa gathering, they demanded that the government criminalize speech regarding the child burial hoax at the former Kamloops residential school and came out in almost blanket opposition to all forms of economic development being proposed by the federal government. Maybe if a few of them ever had to pay their own bills for a change, they would garner a glimmer of understanding about the importance of economic development.There is a role for a group to organize and speak collectively for indigenous bands across Canada. This kind of group can never be representative of the people it claims to represent unless it gets its funding from the people themselves. The AFN should be going cap in hand to every reserve in the country and explaining why these reserves should contribute to them. You can bet that in such a circumstance, the leaders in the AFN would suddenly start paying attention to how much they spend and on what.For now, the AFN is just a group of well-heeled whiners who take their salaries from the productive to lobby against the industries that generate the funds in the first place. It’s time to treat them like any other lobby group in Canada and defund them. Let’s do it in the name of equality.

MORGAN: It's time to defund the Assembly of First Nations

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