Tax Free, Too

Well, how about that! To their great and surprised satisfaction the private member's bill seeking First Nations reserves accountability has passed. Thanks to the fact that it was a free vote and not whipped, there were enough Liberals to vote with the Conservatives, outgunning the Bloc and NDP who refused to support the bill.

Now, all First Nations bands will be obliged to publicly state the salaries of chiefs and councillors. One might logically assume that band members are freely given this information, but one would be wrong. These are figures traditionally kept close to the vest of the advantaged First Nations elite who run band councils.

And who feel entitled to extravagant salaries, trips and additional personally-deserved emoluments. The salaries, wages and other compensation earned by most public agents and government representatives, elected and unelected, are made public as a matter of course. People have a right to know what those who are paid from the public purse earn.

Only for First Nations bands was that information held to be secret. Which enabled too many chiefs and councillors to discreetly vote themselves hugely salubrious salaries quite out of whack with reality. Let alone too many exotic all-expenses-paid trips and other goodies not shared with the common folk who had to satisfy themselves with the leftovers.

The Assembly of First Nations did their utmost to decry this move from secrecy to open revelation of salaries. It was a matter of trust. First Nations trusted their chiefs and their councillors, their leadership was above reproach. On the other hand, band members of various groups openly criticized the fact that their chiefs refused to divulge their salaries.

The AFN claimed there was no practical need for the salaries to be disclosed, for most chiefs earned modest salaries in the range of $36,000. Most probably do. And that being the case, why the hesitation, why the protests against revealing those salaries relating to the various band expenses? If for no other reason than that band members are enabled to see that to be the case.

And those band members whose leaders choose to take for themselves disproportional amounts of the monies allocated by the federal government to band and reserve upkeep, are entitled then to protest and insist that a fair and just distribution of funding that enables everyone to obtain what they need to live decently be guaranteed.

This should represent just the first of a range of advances in open information-sharing. Resulting in an evaluation of how the funding provided could be better used for medical care, education and housing for the people who so badly need all of that and more.