I have an issue with people being singled out for special treatment in the charter and constitution for purely arbitrary reasons. Why are ‘Aboriginals’ any different than any other Canadian? When do I become an ‘Aboriginal’? When do they become a Canadian? If this reserve grows to 10,000 people, or 10,000,000, is the rest of Canada obligated to support them still? When does it stop? What is the transition plan for everyone to finally be equal? In 10 year will be still be arguing about this? 100? 1000? There is no end date on those special rights.
Well, that is what they need to do IMO. They want it both ways. The wanta sorta live like their ancestors but they want all the good stuff the modern white mans ways provide. But guess what? White men live where the jobs are and provide for themselves.
If they want to REALLY live like their ancestors did I suspect they are allowed to do just that.
Assimilate or starve. If I don’t go to work, I starve. If you don’t go to work, you starve. Now, we both have the opportunity to get social assistance, but unless we have some form of handicap it shouldn’t continue forever. Why are Natives different? Why should they be?
They are babies because they cry even when they have their bottle.
This is a pretty gross oversimplification of the problem. The truth is that remote reserves AREN’T holdouts of people who’re convinced they want to live by their ancestors.
The problem is that the system is designed to trap someone there. If you’re born in Attawapiskat, you have essentially nothing in your entire world that doesn’t revolve around reservation life, which consists, to a frightening extent, of doing nothing, drinking, and sniffing gas. Most of the adults you will ever meet are unemployed and an amazing percentage are alcoholics or binge drinkers. You have effectively no exposure to anything else; you live in a place that is not just hundreds of miles from any city, but isn’t even connected by a road to anything; it’s effectively like being on an island in the middle of the ocean. The quality of education is shit, and you’re brought up speaking a language spoken almost exclusively in similar shitholes. And you’ll probably never be exposed to anything else. There is no “economy” of any sort in the sense of a functioning system of working to produce things of value, and there is no hope there ever will be.
And the government is financing it. So many things you could do to escape are not actually economically logical.
This isn’t an issue of a lifestyle choice; if you put anyone in this sort of situation, substance abuse, chronic sloth and depression are inevitable results. You may as well be in prison.
Then why in world should the government keep subsidizing it? Evacuate the people to somewhere where they can actually live, learn and get a job, hand em some money for rent and education, maybe some career and life counciling and send them on their way.
For all the money they have spent on these 2000 people they could have trained every one of them to have useable jobs skill and moved them.
Or heck, lets say these people will never support themselves and the government just has to take care of them. Fine, but WTF do that in some expensive ass middle of nowhere place? I am sure the wrong side of the tracks in Toronto has some spare space. It would be cheaper and at least they wouldnt be in the middle of nowhere.
Of course I am sure some would label such a thing genocide or some such.
Who signed the treaty without a sunset provision?
Actually it’s my understanding that they’re limited from hunting by that same treaty.
Do people with a large inherentance have to work or starve? That’s basically what this is. The treaty is their inheretence.
You speak true words about dependence cycles. How much would full ride scholarships (including housing), ESL courses (or French courses so the francophones don’t get pissy), and substance abuse help for upto 2,000 people cost?
Bet it’d be less than $90 mill, and a good start for those who want hope. IIRC a top tier school I looked at up there was $24,000 including room and board. So it ought to get cheaper from there. Devoloping the option into being practical and communicating it are defenitly part of the solution,
They are limited by the treaty from hunting enough to sustain themselves? That would surprise me. But let’s say that IS the case. Thats just all the more reason for them to move whether they like it or not. They can’t live off the land like their ancestors and they can’t get a modern world job because none are magically going to appear there.
Natives aren’t a big concern. Their lobby is likely inexistent, they likely don’t vote much and likely vote for the same party. Poor, uneducated, isolated people, of any ethnicity, are usually not a big concern of political parties.
Doing what you propose (and with which I broadly agree) about it would bring legal and electoral (“racists!”) challenges which the party in power doesn’t seem to think if worth it. If I were in their place, I too might think that changing the situation is a high effort/low payoff scenario.
In short, this just sucks.
Does it matter? Change it. Anytime they want to negotiate their treaty again, such a clause should be added.
If they squander it away, they do.
ENOUGH!
Back off from the accusations of lying and the accusations of accusations of lying.
Stop making this fight personal.
Further, while calling a group “babies” is probably no worse than any number of third party insults indulged in this forum, repeated use of that and similar terms has begun to look a lot more like trolling than an actual part of the discussion.
Stick to the facts of the case and drop the efforts to take shots at other posters or to rile them up without actually addressing the discussion.
[ /Moderating ]
As a point of clarification, I originally said ‘act like babies’, not that they were babies. Granted not a big distinction, but there none the less. And only to emphasize that adults take responsibility for their actions whereas in this situation it seems to be sadly lacking.
The issue is “is” vs “acted like.” It is the repetiton of a phrase known to incite an emotional reaction.
$90 million divided by 2,000 is $45,000 a head. In Canada that isn’t peanuts, but it’s not that much. Practically speaking I doubt that’s enough to completely change two thousand people’s lives. Relocating people, training them, finding them housing… you’d burn through that money awfully fast.
Good post. The main point being, they don’t have a choice no matter how much money is handed to them. Someone raised on dependency can’t suddenly become independent, and when they don’t, calling them “lazy” and “babies” worsens it for them. If we don’t like them being a financial drain, we’ll have to stop ignoring them and pay some attention to figuring out how to break the cycle of dependency.
We already know how to break the cycle. Stop paying them.
I wonder before they had western style houses to live in, did they just freeze to death in the snow? What part of their ‘culture’ are they hoping to retain by staying on the reserve? Certainly not the part that means they have to live in a yurt (or whatever it is they lived in before the Europeans arrived).
Look everywhere and every country has been plundered and taken over at one time or another. Natives used to plunder other tribes and take land etc… When is all the nonsense going to stop. when are people going to take responsibility for their own existence. Take a look at this vidoe…it’s priceless…makes you wonder how many towns are like this … I don’t want my tax dollars being given away anymore…time to change these situations and move forward…native must start taking care of their own situation and start acting like regular canadian people.
Listen to this video
Under Construction sunnewsnetwork.ca
From what I come across, it is common for northern Ontario reserves to be controlled by families through the reserve’s band council. These families take care of themselves before taking care of the general populace, so whoever has the largest extended family wins the election, while those outside of the family that is in control are left to their own resources, which usually are negligible, given that there is very little independent economic activity on reserves. Most of the funds that enter a reserve are controlled by the band council, which pays itself and which also pays the salaries of employees that the band hires. If a band councillor wants to stay elected, that councillor must see to it that his support base – his family – receives the benefit of the funds. This leads to bands usually having very large, very well paid band councils, and a disproportionate portion of funds going to administration and employee expenses along family lines rather than program delivery. Now let’s have a look at Attawapiskat’s numbers.
In Attawapiskat, $2,031,007 is allocated to the housing program, of which $60,512 actually goes to housing program delivery, while $403,342 is spent on administration and $1,374,128 is spent on wages and employee benefits. Why does only 3% of the housing program go to housing program delivery? http://www.attawapiskat.org/wp-content/uploads/2011-Non-Consolidated-Schedule-of-Programs.pdf
In Attawapiskat, $607,364 is allocated to the Chief and Band Councillors, not including travel. In Manitouwadge, an economically struggling non-native northern Ontario bush town that is a few hundred people larger than Attawapiskat, $94,200 is allocated to the Mayor and Town Council, including the election costs. Why are the Attawapiskat Chief and Council costs six and a half times higher than those of a comparable non-reserve community? http://www.attawapiskat.org/wp-content/uploads/2011-Consolidated-Schedule-of-Salaries-Honouraria-and-Travel-Expenditures.pdf http://www.manitouwadge.ca/uploads/documents/By%20Laws/2011%20Budget.pdf
How did a temporary band manager run up a transportation tab of $68,397 in only two months? http://www.attawapiskat.org/wp-content/uploads/2011-Consolidated-Schedule-of-Salaries-Honouraria-and-Travel-Expenditures.pdf
Why is a band co-manager the spouse of the Chief? http://www.attawapiskat.org/wp-content/uploads/20111205NoticeQuestionsAboutAttawapiskat.pdf
Why does Attawapiskat not even have a budget, despite INAC (the Federal government agency that provides Attawapiskat with most of its funds) requiring it? http://www.attawapiskat.org/wp-content/uploads/2011-Management-Letter.pdf
All in all, I think that there needs to be better oversight of funds given to reserves, with specific targets for deliverables, and specific consequences for failing to meet the targets without good cause. There is no reason why the bulk of a program’s fund should be bled away rather than be used to actually deliver the program.
I also think that personal property ownership combined with property taxes based on assessed property values would help bring some of the misdirected funds back into the community.
Ultimately, however, I think that very small, isolated communities that are nearly entirely economically dependent on government assistance are neither economically viable nor socially healthy. I do not think that there is a solution to this overarching problem, for the culture of people who live on these reserves will be destroyed through generation after generation of poverty just as certainly as it will be destroyed if there is a diaspora into the mainstream non-aboriginal Canadian communities to the south.
All your rhetorical questions are answered in your own post:
[QUOTE=Muffin]
Most of the funds that enter a reserve are controlled by the band council, which pays itself and which also pays the salaries of employees that the band hires. If a band councillor wants to stay elected, that councillor must see to it that his support base – his family – receives the benefit of the funds.
[/QUOTE]
It’s a “community” in which effectively all money is a handout given over to one extended family. You could not come up with a system more prone to corruption and ineffectiveness if you tried.
If the Cree want to live there that’s their business but they need… a business in order to live there. As far as I can see, the only thing there is a recent diamond mine and unless they all work in it and bring home a real paycheck it’s not a going concern. The cost of living is prohibitive without advanced planning and that would mean hauling a winter’s worth of stuff up their by land transportation.
$45,000 a person isn’t going to buy much over the course of several years. It’s a lose/lose situation for everybody concerned unless they are capable of paying their own way.
That’s where it gets messy. The various bands ranged (and to a much lesser degree some individuals still range) over significantly more lands than their present reserves. The terms of the treaties are often disputed, for a number of different reasons. This has led to a recognition of not only treaty based reserve land, but also of traditional lands that sit outside of treaty based reserve land. Bands have hunting and fishng rights on traditional lands, bands have a constitutional rights to be consulted in a meaningful way prior to and during resource development on traditional lands, and bands expect to share in the economic development that accompanies resource development. The rights and expectations of band are not things that are going to go away, so any proposed solutions must take these into consideration.
The good side of development is that it offers training and employment opportunities to people who live on reserves (in Attawapiskat’s case, about a hundred people). The bad side of this is that both individuals and bands are often neither consistent nor reliable, resulting in employees who do not show up for work (which often leads to people being kept on the payroll but not being scheduled for work – essentially ongoing pay-offs), and bands making memoranda of understanding and agreements but then later reneging and attempting to block development (e.g. another northern Ontario mining exploration project: "On August 30, 2005, KI wrote to Platinex stating that: “It was decided that effective immediately, August 30, 2005, all previous Agreements and Letters of Understanding between all affected parties…related to your proposed work around the above mentioned area, both verbal and written, will be null and void.” ).
Added to this are the underlying problem of the instability to negotiations that result when one family comes into power and another family goes out of power (note that elections are held every two years), and the underlying problem of the bulk of the funds received courtesy of development being controlled by band councils, which results in the councillors’ extended families benefiting, but those outside such networks being left out in the cold.
What it comes down to is that for the bands that are fortunate enough for there to be near-by resource development, then there is the possibillity of economic development for those bands, but the path to such economic development is extremely difficult, and still may not be broad enough, deep enough, and prolonged enough (most mines get mined out eventually) to eventually result in a balanced and prosperous community. For bands that are not fortunate enough for there to be near-by resource development, then there is, in my opinion, no hope of escaping poverty.