OTTAWA — Canada's largest native organization is urging the Prime Minister to leave Indian Affairs alone as rumours of a looming cabinet shuffle circulate on Parliament Hill.
Assembly of First Nations national chief Phil Fontaine told The Globe and Mail in an interview he would be annoyed at having to deal with a fifth Indian Affairs minister in less than four years.
There have been recent reports that Prime Minister Stephen Harper will replace Rona Ambrose at Environment with Jim Prentice, the Indian Affairs Minister. Mr. Prentice currently chairs the influential cabinet committee on government operations.
Mr. Fontaine said that Mr. Prentice's years of experience working on native land claims make him perfectly suited to stay put.
"We want some consistency and some continuity and shuffling Minister Prentice out of the ministry would in our view not be a good decision," he said, noting that the department's deputy ministers have also changed frequently.
New Indian Affairs ministers often take several months to grasp the many complex and sensitive files, said Mr. Fontaine, but Mr. Prentice was already familiar with the issues.
"His experience is an important consideration here. One of the biggest challenges is land claims, and there's no one in the country, at least in terms of elected officials, who knows the land-claims file as well as Mr. Prentice," he said.
Mr. Fontaine has not often had kind words for Conservatives, whom he has attacked for not implementing last year's $5-billion Kelowna plan for aboriginals.
Generally, Mr. Fontaine said, he supports Mr. Prentice's moves to have the Canadian Human Rights Act and divorce and property laws apply on reserves. However, he expressed concern that public debate on the measures paints native leaders in an undeserved negative light.
"What concerns me here, and I'm not accusing Mr. Prentice of engaging in this, is this 'blame the victim' approach," he said.
The main reason for poverty on reserves is not corruption or a lack of accountability, he said, but rather a decade-long freeze in federal spending in spite of population and inflation growth.
The AFN also wants land-claim talks accelerated so that more native communities have financial control of natural resources in their traditional lands.