Most people contacted in a University of Saskatchewan survey agree that discrimination has made it harder for Aboriginal people to escape poverty.
But a majority don’t think Aboriginal people should get special treatment to improve themselves.
About 72% of those phoned said other immigrants to Saskatchewan had to work their way up, and Aboriginal people should do the same.
Dr. Michael Atkinson, a member of the survey team, says those are two opposite ideas:
“We puzzled over that, because how can you, on the one hand, declare that there’s been a real struggle — and I think people recognize that — and at the same time say: ‘Well, that doesn’t earn you anything — you have to do the same thing as everybody else’.”
Meanwhile, 71.3% of people phoned in the study don’t think Aboriginal people should get a separate deal on resource revenues.
That was a major plank in the NDP’s platform in last November’s provincial election.
Atkinson says the higher the respondent’s education, the more they disliked that idea:
“It could be that people who have a bit more education are a bit more concerned about things like precedent, and so on.”
The survey was organized by the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the U of S.