Article content continued

“Our people are constantly being accused of not being accountable and transparent. If the National Chief feels that he can hire his girlfriend and pay her a salary out of the AFN coffers, this would serve only to heighten criticism that is often levelled at our people,” Chief Ava Hill of Six Nations is quoted in the Toronto Star as telling Bellegarde. She is right.

APTN has published her letter and Bellegarde’s response.

The AFN is a publicly funded organization. These taxpayer dollars are meant to pay for the important work the AFN does on behalf of First Nations, and putting the national chief’s partner on the payroll is not one of them. Bellegarde’s inappropriate behaviour feeds into the perception, rightly or wrongly, that some aboriginal leaders play fast and loose with public funds.

As national chief, Bellegarde should know better, and what’s particularly disappointing is that even after acknowledging the hiring was a conflict of interest, his solution is to direct that his partner report to the organization’s CEO, and not directly to him, as if that changes anything about the conflict of interest at the heart of the hiring.

Hiring your partner on the public dime is a form of personal aggrandizement that should not be tolerated in any public institution, especially one with so many critical eyes on it like the AFN. It was not too long ago that revelations about some aboriginal chiefs paying themselves obscene salaries shocked and alarmed many Canadians. Having a chief of a reserve of 85 people for instance, earning more than $900,000 in one year thanks to an economic development bonus structure, left the impression that some of these are actually in it for the money, and not the welfare of their people.