Well, I don’t think August will happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they go till the very end of June this year.
It’s actually more that he doesn’t agree with my perspective while having no solution of his own.
These remote communities are not sustainable. They need to be eliminated and those living on reserves need to be compensated to move to non-reserve settlements (read: white cities and towns) by providing them with housing and education to become employed and self-sufficient.
It makes no sense for them to be their own nation if they cannot sustain themselves. I get it, we took the good land and now they cannot live their traditional way of life. That’s just the way it is.
For 200 years, my family were fishermen in Newfoundland. Guess what? That was unsustainable and was a hard life. Now, almost all of us have moved west (for us that means to Ontario) so we could find work. We abandoned our traditional ways in order to be able to live in a more modern society.
Unless we plan to give up the good land and repopulate the area with game, etc., the indians are never going to be able to live their traditional way of life. They can practice their religion, etc but they must integrate with Canadian culture at large. Flushing money continuously into a system that does not work, especially when many Canadian governments are already in fiscal crisis just does not make sense.
Yeah, I have no heart.
An awful lot is being made of this audit leak.
Many (on Twitter) accuse the Federal Government of misdirection tactics, and believe that the PM is being underhanded and unfair. Idle No More supporters and participants alike apparently choose to ignore what really fucking stinks:
Over a 6-year period, a community of ~2000 (according to Wikipedia), spent over ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS, cannot prove where the hell it went, and are currently crying poor?!
And this is* ONLY ONE* of the countless “nations” at which gobs of money have been hurled for many years.
$100M over 6 years for 2000 people is $8300/person/year. While I wouldn’t object to receiving $8300/yr in excess of my wage, I wouldn’t think of that as gobs of money.
We probably all did the math on this one, and no one would argue it’s gobs of money, but there is a lack of documentation on what it was actually spent on. If you’re a family of four that’s $33K a year. The money was supposed to be for housing, sewage, education and other services, but there’s no traceability. How much went into the pockets of the Chief and council while the people didn’t receive any benefits, that’s the question being asked, I believe.
We were just watching the CTV News at lunch, and Gregory Thomas of the Canadian Taxpayer’s Federation was talking about how Theresa Spence has a six-figure salary, and investments worth over nine million dollars. No, the math really isn’t adding up.
I’m glad that is sort of stuff is getting out to the public, not because it makes First Nations look bad, but because illuminates a very significant part of the puzzle that all of us – First People and the ROC – must figure out if we are to mitigate the remote reserve poverty problem, for the problem is far greater than just insufficient funding.
Here’s what stood out to me when I looked at Chief Spence’s reserve’s financial statements a year ago (you can look at them on the band’s website):
Good questions, Muffin.
I watched the CTV noon news today, and the media were interviewing some sort of spokesman for Attawapiskat and Chief Spence. When he was hit with questions about the audit, the best he could come up with was that it was somehow the federal government’s fault. When it was pointed out to him that Deloitte (which performed the audit) was a private firm, and not governmental, he wasn’t sure what to say.
And it seems that a CBC report from a year ago has resurfaced. It is an interesting look at the state of affairs in Attawapiskat: empty houses while people live in shacks, the Chief and her co-manager partner seeing nothing wrong with the place, while another man says that he plans to move his family away, as there is no hope there. See the CBC news report here.
Thanks for that, Muffin - you’ve put into words what I’m thinking and can’t find the words for. I don’t want Natives to live in poverty, but I don’t think the solution is to throw more money at the reservation system. I don’t know what the hell the solution is.
And in other news, Theresa Spence is no longer talking to the media because they aren’t reporting the story right.
Ha ha!
Idol no more.
ETA: Damned. I should get a job writing newspaper headlines! I made myself laugh on this one. 
A further problem is that some of these bands councils are filled with people (and drawn from a populations) unfamiliar with or incapable of dealing with detailed financial management.
An interim solution might simply be allocating the reserve funding to the individuals and then have the council impose taxes on residents. It would definitively clarify funding allocations and few things get people to pay attention like taxing them. 
If I see it as a headline tomorrow, I’ll know where it came from. Good one!
Just checked but nothing yet Leaffan.
But an amazing number of people can’t spell idle.
From Cat Whisperer’s link:
Do we hear from too many Chiefs, and not enough Indians?
When my sister-in-law told me she saw an Idle No More protest, I actually thought it was people complaining about Canadian Idol for some reason.
I thought it was something about not idling your car - greenhouse gases & stuff.
For a reservation that is having problems because apparently the chiefs are taking all the money and doing nothing for the people, they don’t seem to realize how the optics of not letting any band members talk to the media are looking.