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The skyrocketing amount of federal taxpayers’ money being funnelled into government programs ostensibly designed to improve the lives of Canada’s Indigenous people, with little to show for it, is a national scandal.
One that never gets addressed despite literally years of highly critical reports by the two independent, non-partisan financial watchdogs of federal taxpayers’ money — the auditor general and the parliamentary budget officer.
In a report released Tuesday the fiscally conservative Fraser Institute estimated that during the Justin Trudeau era from 2015 to early 2025, inflation-adjusted federal spending on Indigenous issues exploded from $10.3 billion to $40.8 billion annually.
That was seven times faster than the rate of overall federal spending during that period and excludes the additional costs to taxpayers of Indigenous lawsuits and court settlements, estimated at $76 billion in 2023.
From 1969/70 to 2014/15, federal inflation-adjusted Indigenous spending grew by an average of 4.3% annually, the report says.
But from 2015/16 to 2024/25, when the Trudeau government was in power, it increased by an average of 17.1% annually.
No standard of living improvements to show for it
Despite this massive outlay of public money, the federal government’s community well-being index which measures education, labour force activity, income and housing, shows only a small uptick in the standard of living for First Nations in recent years — and a downturn for Inuit.
Overall, the standard of living for Canada’s 1.5 million First Nations, Metis and Inuit people remains well below that of the general population, including shorter life spans, higher rates of unemployment, poverty, suicide, drug addiction, mental illness, incarceration and as victims of homicides and other crimes.
Meanwhile the federal government’s Indigenous affairs bureaucracy has more than doubled in size from 4,684 employees in 2015 to 9,429 this year, after the Trudeau government split the old Indigenous and northern affairs department into two separate government ministries in 2017.
They’re exempt from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s edict that some federal departments must cut their spending by 15% over three years. They only have to cut it by 2%.
Lack of accountability for funds spent
“Ottawa’s Indigenous spending has skyrocketed in recent years, even more so than general federal spending which has increased substantially,” said Tom Flanagan, co-author of the Fraser Institute study on the cost of federal spending on Indigenous people.
“Canadians need to understand the magnitude of Ottawa’s Indigenous spending in recent years if they’re ever going to properly assess what that additional spending is achieving in terms of results for Indigenous people.”
When Trudeau came into power in 2015, he stopped enforcing the First Nations Financial Transparency Act passed by the Stephen Harper Conservative government in 2013, requiring First Nations to publish their audited financial statements and salaries and expenses for chiefs and councillors.
In 2022, then parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux said that while the federal government was spending more than ever on Indigenous Services, it was accomplishing less.
In 2025, auditor general Karen Hogan, reporting on the Liberal government’s failure to remove all long-term unsafe drinking water advisories on reserves by March 2021, concluded: “Indigenous Services Canada has made unsatisfactory progress in addressing long-standing issues related to drinking water, emergency services, and a range of other programs important to the health and well-being of First Nations communities.”
Three auditors general since 2005 have described decades of government failures to improve the lives of Canada’s Indigenous people that predate the Trudeau government as “unacceptable” (Sheila Fraser), ”incomprehensible” (Michael Ferguson) and “honestly disheartening” (Hogan).
And yet year after year, nothing changes.