Dr. Russell Evans PhD

Winner of Best Paper Contest – Category: Emerging Scholar (Sponsored by CPA Canada)

Dr. Russell A. Evans is an Oji-Cree scholar from Matachewan First Nation who has recently completed his PhD in Social and Behaviour Accounting at the Smith School of Business at Queen's University. He is now an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the Odette School of Business at the University of Windsor. His research focuses on the effects of external accountability demands and budgetary controls on the attitudes and actions of First Nations community members. He employs qualitative field methods, including interviews and observations, to conduct his research work. The paper presented at the CPA Ontario Symposium is the second paper to emerge from field work conducted in the summer of 2016 and a version of it will be presented at the Inter-disciplinary Perspectives on Accounting (IPA) Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland this summer.

Paper Abstract

This study examines how budgets and budgeting in the Canadian government’s Grants and Contributions Program govern the financial transfer of money to Indigenous recipient groups. The study indicates that budgeting practices allow government agencies to reinforce a dominant-subordinate social relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups in the specific colonial setting. The budgeting structure retains characteristics of historic colonial forms, originally intended to contain, control and assimilate the Indigenous population of Canada. Two key outcomes of the study are that Indigenous populations have little choice but to cooperate with government imposed budgeting requirements, but that they retain their sense of agency through small acts of calculated resistance.

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