If Canada’s aboriginal peoples are ever to achieve true self-reliance and self-government, they simply cannot allow the INAC Loan Loss Reserve Initiative (LLRI) to go forward as offered. A court action as launched by AFI’s must proceed.
The recent double cross of aboriginal financial institutions (AFIs) by the federal Conservative government demonstrates how misleading they are in dealing with aboriginal interests. While extolling the virtues of AFI’s in public, they have been exposed at simultaneously plotting against those very same groups behind closed doors.
Chuck Strahl at the Empire Club touts the value of AFI’s. In his own words
“Going back 20 years, Aboriginal entrepreneurs had great difficulty getting commercial loans from conventional sources. Provisions in the Indian Act, which prevented these entrepreneurs from pledging assets, were largely responsible. These budding entrepreneurs also lacked track records as successful business people and had yet to acquire proven business expertise. Thanks to partnership, the situation is much different today. In addition to helping found AFIs, the Government of Canada has invested more than $200 million to capitalize them. The AFIs have done the rest. Using this capital and rolling it over many times, AFIs have invested $1.2 billion in the Canadian economy via more than 30,000 loans to Aboriginal entrepreneurs. This access to capital has been—and continues to be—critical to long-term Aboriginal economic self-sufficiency.” – May 15, 2008
http://speeches.empireclub.org/details.asp?r=vs&ID=65980&number=2 , The Honourable Chuck Strahl, Partnership, Consultation, Education, May 15, 2008
Yet INAC proceeds with launching the Loan Loss Reserve Initiative (LLRI) and offers it to non-AFIs only.
“Even as Canada showcases its native heritage at the Olympics, Alan Park, CEO of Tribal-Wi-Chi-Way-Win Capital, [TWCC] says his and other aboriginal financial institutions have been lopped out of a federal loan-guarantee program they helped design.”
http://www.intelligencer.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2449686 , Aboriginal lending program in jeopardy, Christina Blizzard, Belleville, Intellegencer, February 14, 2010
It is through the direct efforts of aboriginal business that success has been achieved while non-aboriginal small business loan programs have been a massive failure.
“Steve Morse, the chief operating officer of the National Aboriginal Capital Corporation Association, said its members have a very respectable loan loss rate of about seven per cent. It has recently been reported that a national, mainstream small business loan loss program has generated a loss rate of about 40 per cent over the past 10 years.
Morse said businesses the Aboriginal Capital Corporations (ACCs) lend money to have a 58 per cent success rate, compared to a national rate of about 33 per cent.”http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/business/loan-plan-irks-aboriginal-group-80885092.html Loan plan irks aboriginal group, Martin Cash, January, 7, 2010
The realization that aboriginal business development is a reliable and profitable sector of the Canadian economy, the federal government has sought not only to simply hijack it, but to do so in a way that would exclude aboriginal financial groups from fair competition in the marketplace. In brief, non-AFIs are guaranteed against loan loses by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada – using aboriginal money no less – while denying AFI’s the same guarantees.
Effectively this takes aboriginal funds to defeat aboriginal growth and business expansion.
Regardless of Strahl’s flowery presentation at an exclusive luncheon, his actions appear to portray a government intend on preventing the evolution of aboriginal self-reliance.
The basis of any self-reliance is the ability to develop and sustain an economic foundation. If aboriginal peoples continue to be manipulated economically, they can never hold a voice in their own future. Until now INAC has been able to limit the aboriginal peoples potential but the philosophy by which that control has been exerted is archaic. It still assumes that aboriginal peoples, like livestock, have no inherent ability to exist in society without continuous external management. This must be changed radically and preferably eliminated and replaced with full human rights recognition.
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