We spent billions on Indigenous programs. Where did all the money go?

Indigenous spending soared under the Liberals, but First Nations have little to show for it

Interview requests

Winnipeg-Centre MP Leah Gazan went viral recently for rattling off the acronym “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” while lamenting that Prime Minister Carney’s budget provided “zero dollars to deal with the ongoing genocide.”

Those 16 characters stand for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual, Plus.

No one doubts Ms. Gazan’s sincerity. She has long championed Indigenous causes and she believes the federal government has failed her constituents. The evidence supports her, though perhaps not in the way she intends.

Federal spending on Indigenous programs has nearly tripled under Liberal governance, from roughly $11 billion in fiscal 2014-15 to more than $32 billion projected for 2024-25. In a single fiscal year (2023-24), Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations spent $63 billion, including a $23.3 billion child welfare settlement. That figure represented 12.3 per cent of the entire federal budget.

Since 1995, total federal spending rose by 75 per cent, while Indigenous spending rose by 592 per cent. Add class-action settlements, and estimated liabilities reached $76 billion by 2023. Tom Flanagan of the Fraser Institute and the Frontier Centre calls it “an avalanche of money.”

With that kind of spending, one would reasonably expect transformative progress on the markers that matter most: education, employment, housing, health and clean water. Behind the expanding acronym, then, lies the serious question that Ms. Gazan should demand an answer to: where did all the money go?

Start with education. From 2006 to 2021, the education gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians widened. The share of First Nations people with university degrees grew, but non-Indigenous attainment grew faster. The gap moved in the wrong direction.

Employment is worse. According to the most recent Census, in 2021, only 56.6 per cent of First Nations adults were employed, compared with 74.1 per cent for non-Indigenous Canadians. Labour Force Survey data through 2025, covering only off-reserve populations where outcomes are better, shows Indigenous unemployment still running at roughly double the non-Indigenous rate. The 15-point employment gap recorded in the Census is larger than the 13-point gap measured in 1981. Four decades and hundreds of billions later, the employment situation has deteriorated.

Regarding housing, Indigenous people are nearly three times more likely to live in dwellings needing major repairs. The Auditor General reported in 2024 that 80 per cent of First Nations housing needs remain unmet, with only seven years left until the government’s 2030 deadline.

Water? Justin Trudeau promised to end all long-term drinking water advisories by 2021. After $4.6 billion in water spending, 40 advisories remain. In 2025 alone, 11 new advisories were added, and only three were lifted. Nearly half have been in place for more than a decade.

Health? Life expectancy for Indigenous people sits at 74 years, a full 11 years below the non-Indigenous figure of 85. For Inuit, the gap stretches to 13 years.

Ms. Gazan’s outrage ought to find a different target. The one measurable improvement in Indigenous well-being over the past decade, the narrowing of the Community Well-Being Index gap from 19 to 16 points, was driven overwhelmingly by income gains.

And those income gains were attributable to the Canada Child Benefit, a universal program available to all Canadian families regardless of race, rather than to targeted Indigenous spending. The income component accounted for 56 per cent of the total improvement. Targeted programs had minimal impact.

Meanwhile, financial accountability has collapsed. Of 630 First Nations governments, only 260 filed audited financial statements for fiscal 2022 after Ottawa suspended enforcement of the First Nations Financial Transparency Act. No penalties, no reporting, no way to track where the money went.

Own-source revenue grew between 2018 and 2022, but government transfers grew faster, deepening dependency rather than building self-sufficiency.

Ms. Gazan is right to demand better for Indigenous communities. But adding letters to an acronym is not a substitute for demanding progress. The real scandal is not that Carney’s budget cut $7 billion. It is that the tens of billions already spent have so little to show for it. One cannot pretend that the problem is insufficient funding when the avalanche of money produced a torrent of acronyms.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the F225 articlesrontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).