Frontier Centre for Public Policy
“Indian Industry” cronyism
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
So, if the huge marginalized and dependent indigenous underclass does not benefit from all that money that changes hands inside the Indian Industry who is benefiting?
Former Justice Minister David Lametti’s departure from government and immediate acceptance into an expensive law firm that makes millions from indigenous issues is a recent example of what has long been called “The Indian Industry” at work.
It is unknown who first coined the term “The Indian Industry.” Many indigenous and non-indigenous writers have used the term over the decades. Indigenous author, Calvin Helin made liberal use of the term in “Dances With Dependency” as did Cree writer, Harold Johnson, in “Firewater- How Alcohol is Killing My People”
However, it was Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard’s important 2009 book “Disrobing The Aboriginal Industry” that first examined the Indian Industry in detail.
The authors chose to use the term “Aboriginal Industry”, perhaps for reasons of politeness, but they are describing the Indian Industry. They tell in detail how extensive it has become in Canada. Entire universities, law firms and virtually all Canadian institutions have become largely dependent on the money sloshing around within it. Almost all of that money comes in one way or another from taxpayers.
But they note the supreme irony that the Indian Industry is not improving the lot of the very people it is supposed to be helping – Canada’s marginalized and dependent indigenous underclass:
“Despite the billions of dollars devoted to aboriginal causes, Native people in Canada continue to suffer all the symptoms of a marginalized existence – high rates of substance abuse, violence, poverty. Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry argues that the policies proposed to address these problems – land claims and self government – are in fact contributing to their entrenchment.”
However, “Disrobing” was written in 2009, and since the Trudeau Liberals took over in 2015 the money flowing into the Indian Industry has increased dramatically in volume. In fact, that money flow, and the enormous indigenous contingent liabilities that now total $76,000,000,000 are growing so quickly – seven times higher since Trudeau took over – that the parliamentary budget officer has raised the alarm. Canada’s economic future is being compromised.
It isn’t only indigenous contingent liabilities – money owed for indigenous claims – that have grown so alarmingly, it is all indigenous spending. Reports from the Fraser Institute keep track of the shocking increases in total indigenous spending since the Trudeau Liberals took power. It is fair to say that the truly frightening federal government deficits in recent years occurred largely because of this extra indigenous spending.
And it isn’t only the largesse of the Trudeau government that has dumped money into the Indian Industry. Since 2015 it has also been the residential school bonanza. Clever lobbyists have been able to extract tens of billions of dollars from taxpayers by making highly exaggerated claims that residential schools were places of horror, where priests tortured, murdered and secretly buried thousands of indigenous children. These claims are nonsense. Although it is completely true that the residential school system was deeply flawed, and that many indigenous children were badly hurt by their residential school experience, it is also true that many received educations they would otherwise have been denied. But, more to the point, there is no evidence that even one child was murdered, or secretly buried during the entire history of residential schools. Despite that, baseless claims of clandestine deaths and secret burials have worked very well for everyone involved in the Indian Industry. Residential schools have become the Indian Industry’s single biggest money earner.
But, as Widdowson and Howard noted years ago, the Indian Industry has done nothing to solve what has always been called Canada’s “Indian problem” – namely that the great majority of Canada’s indigenous people remain far behind the mainstream on every social indicator. They are the least healthy, worst educated, most incarcerated, shortest living of any demographic by far.
They were that way before 2015, and they remain that way now. The Indian Industry, and the astounding amounts of money poured into it since 2015 haven’t changed those depressing numbers one bit.
A recent CBC investigative report on the dismal conditions at the St. Theresa Point reserve in Manitoba is a case in point. It is one of Canada’s hundreds of totally dependent reserves. Families there of as many as 23 people per house live in dilapidated housing, in a community that is almost totally unemployed and dependent. The increased money flow since 2015 appears to have only made dependency and all of its related problems – addiction, crime, domestic violence – worse.
So, if the huge marginalized and dependent indigenous underclass does not benefit from all that money that changes hands inside the Indian Industry who is benefiting?
It is people like David Lametti and Perry Bellegarde, and their law firms, universities, etc. – none of whom need special help.
And here is the second irony: The Indian Industry feeds on the human misery on display at communities like St. Theresa Point.
It needs that misery to continue to keep the money flowing.
This is not to suggest that any of the people and institutions that are part of it are deliberately perpetuating poverty, or doing anything illegal. They aren’t. They are simply picking up all of the free money our elected representatives and courts throw into the Indian Industry every day. They pick it up because we put it there.
It is probably not fair to single out David Lametti and Perry Bellegarde for their participation in this obscene waste of taxpayer money that is the Indian Industry. They are just two of many enterprising such people who have come before them, and many who will come after them. They probably convince themselves that they are doing something useful. They aren’t. They are part of an Indian Industry that fleeces taxpayers, while pretending to be solving the indigenous underclass problem, while making it worse. At a certain point, will Canadians grow tired of this game?
Because it has become abundantly clear that the federal indigenous policy that has developed over decades is a total failure. While privileged indigenous people who don’t need special attention are benefitting spectacularly, the indigenous people who do need the help are becoming more helpless and dependent all the time. The huge increase in the money dumped into uneconomic communities, like St. Theresa Point, is making things worse, not better. It is keeping young people, who should be moving to job centres, trapped in hopeless communities.
Renowned American economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell argues convincingly that simply giving money to chronically dependent people makes things worse, not better. I’m sure that Mr. Lametti and Mr. Bellegarde don’t want that to happen, but it is. And it is the Indian Industry that is making them wealthy that is doing it.
At some point the entire Indian Industry, with its racist Indian Act and brutal reserve system, will come to an end. Indigenous people living on Indian reserves now comprise only 1% of the Canadian population. Despite high birth rates on reserves, more and more reserve residents are moving away from them. By most measures only 25-40% of status Indians now live on reserves, and that percentage steadily falls.
Meanwhile, immigrants are steadily flowing into Canada. According to some estimates, Canada might have a population of 100 million by the end of the century. The percentage of the population living on reserves will become far less than 1%. Maintaining a completely separate system and bureaucracy for one tiny segment of the population will make less and less sense – especially to those millions of new Canadians, who don’t feel that they owe any special debt to indigenous people.
But while this natural process works itself out, the Indian Industry, now armed with the deeply divisive United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), is doing permanent damage to the country. We see that process now playing out in British Columbia, where their provincial version of UNDRIP- DRIPA – is wreaking havoc on their natural resources industry. It has become not only a virtual indigenous veto on any mining, pipeline or development project, it is now directly threatening basic landowner rights. In what is much like Chicago during the days of the Mafia, indigenous leaders all demand their “cut” before any project can proceed. This harmful process is spreading all across Canada, now that Canada has foolishly adopted UNDRIP.
And, in what is a perfect illustration of how the Indian Industry works, Perry Bellegard, as AFN Grand Chief, lobbied the government to bring in UNDRIP, David Lamerti, as Justice Minister, brought it in, and now Bellegrde and Lametti and their law firm benefit from it financially. Meanwhile, the taxpayer pays, and the marginalized and dependent indigenous majority remains marginalized and dependent.
Isn’t it time to end this farce? People who need education, and assistance to move to job centres should get that help. But pretending that making privileged people like David Lametti and Perry Bellegarde wealthier by dumping endless amounts of cash into Indian Industry cronyism is somehow good for indigenous people is nuts.
It isn’t. It’s bad for them, and it’s bad for Canada.
Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Scott McGregor warns BC Ferries’ contract with a Chinese state-owned shipbuilder reveals Canada’s failure to align procurement with national security. It is trading short-term savings for long-term sovereignty and strategic vulnerability.
BC Ferries’ recent decision to award the construction of four new vessels to China Merchants Industry (Weihai), a state-owned shipyard under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is a cautionary tale of strategic policy failure. While framed as a cost-effective solution to replace aging vessels, the agreement reveals a more critical issue: Canada’s persistent failure to align vital infrastructure procurement with national security and economic resilience.
The situation goes beyond transportation. It is a governance failure at the intersection of trade, security, and sovereignty.
Outsourcing Sovereignty
China Merchants Industry is part of a sprawling state-owned conglomerate, closely connected to the CCP. It is not merely a commercial player; it is a geopolitical actor. In China, these organizations thrive on a unique blend of state subsidies, long-term strategic direction, and complex corporate structures that often operate in the shadows. This combination grants them a significant competitive edge, allowing them to navigate the business landscape with an advantage that many try to replicate but few can match.
The same firms supplying ferries to BC are also building warships for the People’s Liberation Army Navy. That alone should give pause.
Yet BC Ferries, under provincial oversight, proceeded without meaningful scrutiny of these risks. No Canadian shipyards submitted bids due to capacity constraints and a lack of strategic investment. But choosing a Chinese state-owned enterprise by default is not a neutral act. It is the consequence of neglecting industrial policy.
Hybrid Risk, Not Just Hybrid Propulsion
China’s dominance in shipbuilding, now over 60% of global orders, has not occurred by chance. It is the result of state-driven market distortion, designed to entrench foreign dependence on Chinese industrial capacity.
Once that dependency forms, Beijing holds leverage. It can slow parts shipments, withhold technical updates, or retaliate economically in response to diplomatic friction. This is not speculative; it has already happened in sectors such as canola, critical minerals, and telecommunications.
Ordering a ferry, on its face, might seem apolitical. But if the shipbuilder is state-owned, its obligations to the CCP outweigh any commercial contract. That is the nature of hybrid threats to security: they appear benign until they are not.
Hybrid warfare combines conventional military force with non-military tactics (such as cyber attacks, disinformation, economic coercion, and the use of state-owned enterprises) to undermine a target country’s stability, influence decisions, or gain strategic control without resorting to open conflict. It exploits legal grey zones and democratic weaknesses, making threats appear benign until they’ve done lasting damage.
A Policy Void, Not Just a Procurement Gap
Ottawa designed its National Shipbuilding Strategy to rebuild Canadian capability, but it has failed to scale quickly enough. The provinces, including British Columbia, have been left to procure vessels without the tools or frameworks to evaluate foreign strategic risk. Provincial procurement rules treat a state-owned bidder the same as a private one. That is no longer defensible.
Canada must close this gap through deliberate, security-informed policy. Three steps are essential for the task:
Ottawa should mandate National Security reviews for critical infrastructure contracts. Any procurement involving foreign state-owned enterprises must trigger a formal security and economic resilience assessment. This should apply at the federal and provincial levels.
Secondly, when necessary, Canada should enhance its domestic industrial capabilities through strategic investments. Canada cannot claim to be powerless when there are no local bids available. Federal and provincial governments could collaborate to invest in scalable civilian shipbuilding, in addition to military contracts. Otherwise, we risk becoming repeatedly dependent on external sources.
Canada should enhance Crown oversight by implementing intelligence-led risk frameworks. This means that agencies, such as BC Ferries, must develop procurement protocols that are informed by threat intelligence rather than just cost analysis. It also involves incorporating security and foreign interference risk indicators into their Requests for Proposals (RFPs).
The Cost of Strategic Amnesia
The central point here is not only about China; it is primarily about Canada. The country needs more strategic foresight. If we cannot align our economic decisions with our fundamental security posture, we will likely continue to cede control of our critical systems, whether in transportation, healthcare, mining, or telecommunications, to adversarial regimes. That is a textbook vulnerability in the era of hybrid warfare.
BC Ferries may have saved money today. But without urgent policy reform, the long-term cost will be paid in diminished sovereignty, reduced resilience, and an emboldened adversary with one more lever inside our critical infrastructure.
Scott McGregor is a senior security advisor to the Council on Countering Hybrid Warfare and Managing Partner at Close Hold Intelligence Consulting Ltd.
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Madrid knew solar and wind power were unreliable but pressed ahead anyway
When a grid failure plunged 55 million people in Spain and Portugal into darkness at the end of April, it should have been a wake-up call on green energy. Climate activists promised that solar and wind power were the future of cheap, dependable electricity. The massive half-day blackout shows otherwise. The nature of solar and wind generation makes grids that rely on them more prone to collapse—an issue that’s particularly expensive to ameliorate.
As I wrote in these pages in January, the data have long shown that environmentalists’ vision of cheap, reliable solar and wind energy was a mirage. The International Energy Agency’s latest cost data continue to underscore this: Consumers and businesses in countries with almost no solar and wind on average paid 11 U.S. cents for a kilowatt hour of electricity in 2023, but costs rise by more than 4 cents for every 10% increase in the portion of a nation’s power generation that’s covered by solar and wind. Green countries such as Germany pay 34 cents, more than 2.5 times the average U.S. rate and nearly four times China’s.
Prices are high in no small part because solar and wind require a duplicate backup energy system, often fossil-fuel driven, for when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. The Iberian blackout shows that the reliability issues and costs of solar and wind are worse than even this sort of data indicates.
Grids need to stay on a very stable frequency—generally 50 Hertz in Europe—or else you get blackouts. Fossil-fuel, hydro and nuclear generation all solve this problem naturally because they generate energy by powering massive spinning turbines. The inertia of these heavy rotating masses resists changes in speed and hence frequency, so that when sudden demand swings would otherwise drop or hike grid frequency, the turbines work as immense buffers. But wind and solar don’t power such heavy turbines to generate energy. It’s possible to make up for this with cutting-edge technology such as advanced inverters or synthetic inertia. But many solar and wind farms haven’t undergone these expensive upgrades. If a grid dominated by those two power sources gets off frequency, a blackout is more likely than in a system that relies on other energy sources.
Spain has been forcing its grid to rely more on unstable renewables. The country has pursued an aggressive green policy, including a commitment it adopted in 2021 to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050. The share of solar and wind as a source of Spain’s electricity production went from less than 23% in 2015 to more than 43% last year. The government wants its total share of renewables to hit 81% in the next five years—even as it’s phasing out nuclear generation.
Just a week prior to the blackout, Spain bragged that for the first time, renewables delivered 100% of its electricity, though only for a period of minutes around 11:15 a.m. When it collapsed, the Iberian grid was powered by 74% renewable energy, with 55% coming from solar. It went down under the bright noon sun. When the Iberian grid frequency started faltering on April 28, the grid’s high proportion of solar and wind generation couldn’t stabilize it. This isn’t speculation; it’s physics. As the electricity supply across Spain collapsed, Portugal was pulled along, because the two countries are tightly interconnected through the Iberian electricity network.
Madrid had been warned. The parent company of Spain’s grid operator admitted in February: “The high penetration of renewable generation without the necessary technical capabilities in place to keep them operating properly in the event of a disturbance . . . can cause power generation outages, which could be severe.”
Yet the Spanish government is still in denial. Even while admitting that he didn’t know the April blackout’s cause, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez insisted that there was “no empirical evidence” that renewables were to blame and that Spain is “not going to deviate a single millimeter” from its green energy ambitions.
Unless the country—and its neighbors—are comfortable with an increased risk of blackouts, this will require expensive upgrades. A new Reuters report written with an eye to the Iberian blackout finds that for Europe as a whole this would cost trillions of dollars in infrastructure updates. It’s possible that European politicians can talk voters into eating that cost. It’ll be impossible for India or nations in Africa to follow suit.
That may be unwelcome news to Mr. Sánchez, but even a prime minister can’t overcome physics. Spain’s commitment to solar and wind is forcing the country onto an unreliable, costly, more black-out-prone system. A common-sense approach would hold off on a sprint for carbon reductions and instead put money toward research into actually reliable, affordable green energy.
Unfortunately for Spain and those countries unlucky enough to be nearby, the Spanish energy system—as one Spanish politician put it—“is being managed with an enormous ideological bias.”
Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “Best Things First.”
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