Public Policy Sources #38:
Small Governments, Large Powers

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Third Order governments as visualized by the Indian Industry have tremendous powers. On a world scale, these "tremendous powers" are trivial. Yet from the point of view of an Indian subject to a Third Order government, the powers are indeed overwhelming.

Imagine you live in a municipality where the Mayor and Council have an absolute veto over whether you have a house or not, whether your plumbing gets fixed, whether you have access to the transportation pool, whether your child can get a scholarship to university, and whether you have a government job when such jobs are about the only ones available.

Imagine that the Mayor and Council can really run the education system rather than the professionals if they so chose. Imagine this same group has total control over business licensing (including paramountcy over all federal and provincial powers, which no municipality has) and over property zoning. Imagine all of this with essentially no outside appeal, no matter what might be said.

Imagine, most frighteningly, that most of the money that flows through your community is controlled by politicians.

Imagine further, that the system is set up to deliberately minimize citizen contact with other governments, in terms of services or financial payments and receipts.

Imagine that elections are decided by a few handsful of people voting basically along family lines, the "ins" versus the "outs."

This is what can happen with small governments wielding large powers. This is the fact of government on many reserves today. The unhappy results have absolutely nothing to do with ethnicity or culture. People are people all around the world. Power corrupts. That is why free societies always seek to control power in designing governance systems. We should not be so blind as to ignore the possibility that pervasive treaty-conferred power might not corrupt its aboriginal recipients just as surely as if they were non-aboriginal.

When governments are given power over the people to the extent that those governments can control elections by controlling voters, "democracy" ceases to have meaning.

The model treaties before us today would constitutionalize such powers and cast them in concrete. By contrast, the standard municipal model, well understood throughout British Columbia with its limitations on power and institutionalized checks and balances, makes such a nightmare scenario impossible.

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