Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to split Indigenous Affairs and Northern Development into two separate departments as part of his recent cabinet shuffle is cause for cautious optimism.

Ottawa will now devote one department to administering day-to-day services (like housing, education, food security, and health care), and another to establishing the legal frameworks for the relationship between the Crown and Indigenous peoples.

Recommended by the 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, this move signals a welcome willingness to recognize both of these policy challenges as pressing and, as Trudeau said, breaks Ottawa out of constraining structures that “looked at [Indigenous peoples] in a paternalistic, colonial way.”

This change in machinery should enable real progress, but the venture will ultimately be judged on the extent to which concrete action is delivered to close the troubling gap that has emerged between the government’s words and actions on Indigenous reconciliation.

After a dark decade of Conservative government neglect, Trudeau campaigned on the promise of a “renewed, nation-to-nation relationship” with Canada's first peoples. Trudeau called for the adoption and implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and an Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), and talked breezily about the need for “decolonization.” Little wonder historic numbers of Indigenous people came out to vote for his party.

In office, his government has taken some early steps that indeed signal a change. It signed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, launched the inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women, made budget allocations that would have been unthinkable under Stephen Harper, and have undertaken to consult with First Nations on what a nation-to-nation relationship should look like.

Yet 22 months into Trudeau’s tenure, there’s little evidence of concrete improvements in Indigenous communities or of a fundamental change in the relationship between Ottawa and First Nations.

Trudeau's MMIWG Inquiry has been a fiasco since the beginning, raising accusations from some of the family members of missing and slain Indigenous women that the Liberals’ lack of concern for their involvement is paternalistic and colonial.

Though the Trudeau Liberals have put in place a five-year plan to address the issue of clean drinking water on reserve, they budgeted 40 per cent less than the Harper Conservatives did for the same objective. The results of both governments’ attempts to address the problem have been similar: today, there are 102 First Nations south of 60 who have gone more than a year without access to clean drinking water.

Meanwhile, the government continues to refuse to obey the January 2016 decision of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (CHRT) that the federal government must cease discriminating against First Nations children on reserves by providing them the same level of child-welfare services available to non-Indigenous children.

The ugly practice of underfunding Indigenous child welfare was brought to the CHRT under Harper, whose Conservatives spent millions attempting to defeat the challenge, but the decision to defy the tribunal’s order to treat Indigenous children as well as non-Indigenous children has singularly belonged to the Trudeau Liberals.

First Nations child-welfare advocate Cindy Blackstock successfully spent nine years fighting the federal government before the tribunal. She said this week that the Crown needed to be willing to make significant investments in order to “develop something akin to what the Marshall Plan was after the Second World War” if they wished to begin truly addressing the many crises that have resulted from our history of neglecting and mistreating Canada’s Indigenous peoples. The government has given so signs of anything close to this level of ambition.

The challenge of living up to the Liberals’ rhetoric is nowhere clearer than on the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. On the campaign trail, Trudeau was effusive in his support of the declaration, but after signing it, he and his ministers have been evasive about its applications.

In particular, the declaration’s call on the government to obtain “prior and informed consent” from Indigenous groups before embarking on development projects raises a host of thorny issues, which Trudeau, like his predecessor, has so far seemed set on bulldozing rather than engaging with in good faith.

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The Trudeau government is right to have made Indigenous reconciliation and improving life chances in First Nations communities a top priority.

The positive signals made and early steps taken create a real opportunity for breaking out of a “failed, paternalistic” relationship. It may well be that the establishment of two Indigenous-affairs departments, as long recommended, will allow the Liberals to do just that. But if they fail to deliver concretely, this change will be nothing more than another broken promise.

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