Trust. Integrity. Reputation.
December - 2002 All this time, and this is the answer?
November - 2002 Equal under the law? Not even.
October - 2002 Extinguishment or not extinguishment?
September - 2002 We see some smoke but is there a fire?
August - 2002 Meaningless political buzzword of the month-Reconciliation
July - 2002 Raise the bar please Calgary Herald
June - 2002 What does $10 million buy?
May - 2002 Accountability for all
April - 2002 Decisions decisions
March - 2002 The politics of gutlessness
February - 2002 Drink deep, the water's fine?
January - 2002 Gauntlet thrown, Indian Affairs
2001 Editorials 2000 Editorials
1998 Editorials
All this time, and this is the answer?
Will somebody please explain to us what the fuss is all about? Why call a special chiefs' assembly in November in order to pass a resolution that basically says First Nations want the right to have the financial institutions legislation apply only to the First Nations who want it?
The draft legislation was already optional. Isn't that what optional means?
All the political scheming and plotting of the last 18 months gets us here?
This November special assembly ended almost exactly three weeks before the regularly scheduled annual December Confederacy of the Assembly of First Nations is set to begin. It couldn't wait three weeks?
Yes, the legislation was due to be introduced in the House of Commons for first reading the following week. It still will be. The resolution didn't change a thing in that regard.
We understand the AFN wisely decided it would not pay the travel costs of the delegates. That means it spent approximately $10,000 for the best rental hall in Canada for two days. Ten grand ain't much compared to the $500,000 it could have cost, but 10 grand is still 10 grand.
The Indian Affairs department is having a field day with this one. Already the not-so-subtle sub-text of every comment gleefully delivered by every official in the department is that the AFN is irrelevant. Less than one-sixth of the chiefs in the country cared enough to go to Ottawa for this one, they say, sniggering delightedly behind their hands.
The mainstream press stayed away in record numbers this time. Reporters we talked to say editors are tired of all the noise accompanied by very little news.
One legitimate bit of actual news emerged from the gathering. Matthew Coon Come will run for a second term. If the AFN doesn't get its act together there may not be an organization to lead in the next three years. We can't help but wonder what all the time and energy and money is being expended for.
We've said this before but it looks like it needs repeating: Remember the people!
You know, the ones who would get the benefit of all the money if it wasn't being spent on expensive consultants and first class plane fares and five star hotels and hefty per diems.
The resolution accommodated the "diversity" of viewpoints within the AFN, inside sources say earnestly. Diversity is a nice word for division and yes, factions of chiefs are divided over the financial institutions. So, in the end after all this jockeying and flying to Vancouver for this meeting and Saskatoon for that meeting and Ottawa for yet another meeting, they decide that the answer is that everybody gets exactly what they wanted from Day 1.
That's leadership? Is that decisiveness? Is that working together and bashing out the issue and deciding the best course for the future of First Nation people?
One more question. Why couldn't this compromise have been decided on 18 months ago when all the rhetoric starting flying? You know, a million or so dollars ago.
We're all for working out win/win solutions, but this one was lying there staring at the chiefs every step of the way. Why did it take so long?
We can't help but wonder if some leaders haven't used this issue to raise their political profiles. This decision makes the whole issue look like a straw man raised up for the personal benefit of a few chiefs who want to make a power grab within the organization.
If it's not that then, as we said before, we just don't get it.
November - 2002Equal under the law? Not even.
Windspeaker Staff
A false rumor that a Native political activist was stockpiling guns led to the mobilization of a fully equipped tactical unit from an elite RCMP anti-terrorist squad on Vancouver Island in September. Less than a few weeks later, young non-Native people charged with a hate crime for shooting up a reserve school and homes have those charges under the Criminal Code of Canada reduced dramatically by the Attorney General of Alberta. What's wrong with this picture?
John Rampanen is a young family man who has had the courage to stand up for the rights of his people in a country where even government officials will admit (when the tape's not running) that Native people have been getting the short end of the stick for more than 130 years. He's not a criminal that we can see.
If convicted, the three non-Native teenagers who have been accused of driving onto the Blood reserve in Alberta and opening fire with paintball guns will be criminals. No doubt about that. Destruction of property is covered by the Criminal Code of Canada.
So who got the break? The non-Native people accused of a destructive rampage on a reserve, that's who. That doesn't add up.
Last month Native leaders in Toronto complained about the simultaneous under-policing and over-policing their people are subjected to. Under-policed in that their complaints to police often fall on deaf ears (don't ever forget the 911 calls in Winnipeg that went unanswered until two women were dead). Over-policed in that Native people can expect to be pulled over for DWI-driving while Indian-or questioned by police for just walking down the street.
A recent report shows that visible minorities are much more likely to come in contact with police in Toronto. If 13 people give statements to the police that they saw two uniformed police officers punching, kicking and stomping on someone who had apparently done nothing to provoke those actions, the least we'd expect would be an arrest or an announcement that the police had a legitimate reason to act that way that wasn't perhaps obvious to the observers. We wouldn't expect that it would take almost four months to lay charges or respond to the accusations of the eyewitnesses.
We know the two police officers have not been convicted, just charged. They, like the three teenagers charged with vandalism, are innocent until proven guilty.
But why, we must ask, can a false rumor circulated against a Native man trigger a hugely expensive raid by an elite police force with much better things to do when allegations against two non-Native police officers triggers a slow-as-molasses, reluctant-appearing investigation by a far less imposing and much less specialized collection of peace officers?
The unequal application of the force of the law always seems to work against Native people and it's time somebody said it out loud.
When is it going to stop? Who's going to take the lead and force change?
The Aboriginal Peoples Council of Toronto and the Blood Tribe chief and council have done their part. But shouldn't somebody in the government of Canada take the initiative and get to work on this problem?
October - 2002Extinguishment or not extinguishment?
Windspeaker Staff
We're expecting that the big brains in Indian Country will soon be wrestling with the question of whether the certainty model employed in the Northwest Territories in the Tlicho (Dogrib) self-government agreement is really extinguishment in disguise. A rose by any other name still smells, wrote Shakespeare, and many surrounding this agreement already think that is the case here.
We tried to contact John B. Zoe, the chief negotiator for the Tlicho people, to see what he thinks. His phone was busy for two straight days (that happens in northern and remote communities quite a bit), but we sent him an e-mail message well in advance of our deadline and did not hear back from him.
So we asked Robert Nault. The minister of Indian Affairs tells us it's not extinguishment, but the "reverse" of extinguishment. Of course, he'd have to say that considering Canada's promise to the United Nations to not extinguish Aboriginal rights.
We can't help but look at the issue through a writer's eyes, with a plain English common sense approach. If you tell someone they have to promise not to ever assert or exercise their rights, then those rights are gone forever. It doesn't matter how many lawyers you hire to say the opposite. It's obfuscation and it worries us.
If you look to the story on page 8 about the U.S. judge that found the American equivalent to the minister of Indian Affairs in contempt of court for what the judge described as covering up the department of the Interior's "disobedience through semantics and strained, unilateral, self-serving interpretations of their own duties," you might wonder if this certainty model might not be another example of such tactics.
Just before deadline a negotiator for the Akaitcho people of Treaty 8, a group that insists the Tlicho agreement encrouches on its territory, told us the First Nations Summit in British Columbia rejected the same certainty model. It was too late to verify that so it isn't mentioned in the news story, but we can put it here for you to think about.
We also get to wondering when we hear government officials (and the First Nations leaders that work closely with government) talk about the rights-based agenda in derogatory terms. You can almost see them sneer when the term is mentioned, even when you're talking on the telephone a thousand kilometres apart.
Other First Nation leaders say it's all about rights. Anything that seeks to undermine rights is a needless compromise and a huge and terminal step backwards.
We're not going to close our minds to any of the possibilities, but we, like you, feel the need to ask the questions and examine the answers.
We expect the Tlicho people will be doing the same thing during their agreement consultation period over the next couple of months.·····
Last month we mentioned that the chiefs who organized the push to pass a resolution rejecting the First Nations governance act broke the rules of the Assembly of First Nations charter, but we didn't spell out how they did that and that was a mistake that we regret and will remedy here and now.
Article 11 of the AFN charter states that " one representative for each region plus one representative for each 10,000 First Nations' citizens of that region" can vote at Confederacy of Nations meetings. The meeting in Ottawa where the governance workplan was defeated was a Confederacy of Nations meetings and far more than the allowed number of delegates from British Columbia voted on that resolution-and all the votes were counted.
AFN staff members were aware of this irregularity, but bowed to the will of their political bosses and did not enforce the rules.
Many sources tell us it's not a new problem at the AFN and it's one that causes many senior officials within the organization a certain amount of worry.
September - 2002We see some smoke but is there a fire?
Alain Jolicoeur became the third deputy minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development in three years under Minister Robert Nault on Aug. 12. That's not the way it's supposed to be.
Deputy ministers tend to outlast ministers; the bureaucrats stay as politicians come and go.
Some Ottawa insiders say the rapid succession of chief bureaucrats within the department is a sign that something's not right.
Jolicoeur succeeded Marc Lafrenière who succeeded Shirley Serafini.
Given the secrecy that surrounds the decision-making process regarding appointments at this most senior level of the Canadian government, speculation is the closest we can come to figuring out what it all means. And there's a lot of speculation going on right now.
One man who knows more than most people about such matters is Hugh Winsor, a Globe and Mail political columnist.
He wrote a column last month where he suggested such changes are usually an indication that the prime minister is cracking the whip on a minister who is not delivering.
Winsor believes there could be friction between the minister and his department.
"I remember my discussion with [Nault] in which he said that INAC saw AFN as their client and were not sufficiently impartial," Winsor told Windspeaker.
First Nations leaders may agree. They say the minister is driving the deputy ministers away with his hard-nosed style, that he's rolling over top of his own people just as he's steamrolling First Nations. They suggest the ever-prudent, long-view-taking senior mandarins are aghast at the recklessness the minister is bringing to the department.
Others, less inclined to slag the minister, suggest he is knocking over a lot of little bureaucratic empires within his department by shaking things up severely.
In short, we're not sure what's going on with the minister and his deputies. It could be any of the above. Something's up and we'll keep an eye on it.
·····
We were amazed this month to see the coverage of the illegal salmon fishery on the West Coast where jovial fisheries officers boarded the boats of the non-Native fishermen who opted to dip their nets into a salmon run, despite the Department of Fisheries and Oceans ban on fishing. Where were the heavily armed paramilitary officers? Did you notice that not a single boat was rammed by the DFO? And no angry mobs of vigilante Native fishermen descended on the non-Native fishermen with mayhem on their minds. What must the Burnt Church people be thinking? No mob violence or repressive enforcement tactics? How un-Canadian.
·····
And we take note that the Haida people have won another court victory. The British Columbia Court of Appeal confirmed its February decision that Weyerhaeuser has to consult in good faith with the Haida Nation before logging on the Queen Charlotte Islands.
After the original decision, Weyerhaeuser returned to court, arguing the government, not themselves, had responsibility to consult with First Nations. The company was supported by the Cattleman's Association and the Council of Forest Industries.
But the three-judge panel disagreed. We wonder how many years it will take before somebody complies with this latest legal victory for an Indigenous people? The fifth anniversary of the Delgamuukw decision is coming up.
August - 2002Meaningless political buzzword of the month-Reconciliation
To the casual observer, British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell doesn't sound like a heartless Indian fighter and oppressor of his province's Indigenous minority, even though that's what practically every First Nation leader, and a surprising number of non-Native observers in B.C., is saying he is.
The premier talks about forging "a new era of reconciliation with First Nations, measured not in words or good intentions, but in positive actions and outcomes."
Sounds like the right approach, doesn't it? What could be wrong with that?
Well, let us tell you a story that was recounted to us by a veteran lawyer who has represented First Nations in land claim cases for many years. We think the story will help even the most naïve observer get the point that Mr. Campbell and his supporters can't seem to get.
It seems there were two boys, a small boy and a large, muscular boy. The small boy had a bicycle. One day, the large boy took the bicycle and made it his. The small boy was powerless to do anything. He was forced to watch as week after week the large boy rode his bicycle and often misused it, smashing and damaging it without a care.
Finally, many weeks later, the large boy approached the small boy and said, "Let's stop being enemies. Let's reconcile."
"Can I have my bike back?" the small boy asked.
"Oh, this isn't about the bike," the large boy said, "this is about reconciliation."
Well, it is about the bike Mr. Campbell. It really is. If you're using the positive and constructive definition of the word "reconciliation" as you so clearly are leading us to believe you are, you'd have to admit that.
There are two very different dictionary definitions of "reconciliation." We've been led to assume the premier means "to adjust or settle differences."
But there's another way the word is used and it seems to fit what the premier's doing more precisely: "to bring to acquiescence or quiet submission (to reconcile one's self to afflictions)."
That explains the bullyboy tactics and the arbitrary, unilateral narrowing of just what can be reconciled and what can't, as defined by the scandalously leading and biased questions on which British Columbians were asked to vote. Questions we believe were unquestionably designed to push hot buttons in the electorate and appeal to the least honorable impulses in people.
Montreal lawyer and Native law specialist Paul Joff wrote an opinion a year or so ago that advised First Nation leaders to demand that government officials spell out exactly what they mean when they use a word. Those who believe that language is designed to convey meaning rather than obscure it might wonder why such a step is necessary-a word means what a word means. But Joff is a seasoned, respected observer of how government lawyers and negotiators pervert the use of language for their own ends and if he saw a need to pin them down, we'll take his word for it. It fits with our own experiences, anyway.
Politicians do have strange ways of expressing themselves sometimes.
Former Finance Minister Paul Martin says he's not campaigning to replace Prime Minister Jean Chretien as he travels around the country talking to any group of voters who will listen to him.
Martin quite clearly is campaigning for something and if it was simply for re-election he wouldn't need to venture too far away from the Montreal area riding he represents. But he's been all over the country in the last few weeks. If the rest of us told the kind of whopper Martin is telling when he says he's not campaigning against the Prime Minister, we'd be called liars.
But Martin is a politician.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton told us he didn't have sex with Monica Lewinski, but she had sex with him! We were all thunderstruck by that brazen manipulation of the truth.
But Clinton was a politician.
And if Premier Campbell wants us to take a close look at the evidence and then still believe that he truly means to reconcile with his province's Indigenous peoples, well, just remember that Campbell too is a politician.
July 2002Raise the bar please Calgary Herald
It was a week that should have been a celebration of all that is good, worthy and important about journalism.
The 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in took us all back to the heady days of Woodward, Burnstein, Bradlee and the courageous battle by the Washington Post to hold a power-mad president accountable for his illegal and undemocratic actions.
Celebrations of those days were marked in many corners. But alas, it was during that week that the Ottawa Citizen's Russell Mills, the longest serving publisher in the Southam newspaper chain, was fired by the corporate owners at CanWest Global.
His crime? Printing an editorial that criticized the Prime Minister, who just happens to be a friend of the Asper family that owns CanWest.
Nixon could have used a few friends like that.
Then we were exposed to some low-brow, uninformed Indian bashing in another Southam jewel-the Calgary Herald-courtesy of one Ric Dolphin. It was one of the most base cases of ignorance disguised as journalism we've ever seen, and we've seen a lot of them.
"Birthrates, encouraged by child welfare benefits, are three times the non-Indian level and the progeny are typically fathered by several men, usually absent," was just one of Dolphin's insights.
Indian reserves "are a legacy of our well-meaning Victorian forbears who believed they were being humane when they gave the conquered tribes a place to call their own," he writes.
Dolphin takes a long list of social ills that informed people know are frequently attached to poverty and attaches them to being Indian. And he provides no sources to back up his loose and irresponsible imputations.
They're things everybody knows. At least the "everybody" he has talked to in his tour of the West "from the mayors of the cities to the drivers of the taxis and the cops on the beat."
Of course, who wouldn't seek out a taxi driver for his in-depth knowledge of Aboriginal issues? And we all know how sensitive a Saskatoon cop is to the Native condition.
He says there are no simple solutions to the "Indian problem," so he doesn't offer any. What is on offer, however, is the same old wretched rhetoric that passes for informed debate in some circles. Certainly, the Herald has more to offer than that.
When we saw this column in the Herald we wondered if the Aspers hadn't fired the wrong publisher. After all, if Mills can go for what was written against a single man, the words used to smear an entire people should count for at least that.
If you read Windspeaker regularly you know that Dolphin is not alone. His type of talk is a Canadian tradition that we hope will disappear in a few generations as more enlightened minds and attitudes push the poison of hatred out of this country. You also know that relying on as fact "common sense racism," a term coined by University of Calgary professor Elizabeth Furniss, may work with your right wing Indian-hating buddies, but don't try it in a court of law where real facts rule.
Ask author Thomas Flanagan about that one. He employed such unsubstantiated inferences in his book First Nations? Second Thoughts and was forced to recant after being cross-examined in a Calgary court. But the Herald wouldn't know about that, because it wasn't there.
If Southam journalists, editors and publishers want our sympathy as they battle for the right to free expression, they should start by treating their column inches like they're worth something. They should demand that the likes of Dolphin do more than pass off hate and intolerance as journalism. Why would we support that?
June 2002What does $10 million buy?
The proof is in the pudding, or so the old saying goes, and the Minister of Indian Affairs, Robert Nault, is preparing to serve up a heaping helping of governance initiative soon in Ottawa.
Once the prime minister gives the draft First Nations governance act legislation the once over, for the purpose of ensuring it's to his taste and serves his legacy issue requirements, no doubt, the country will see just how much $10 million in consultations buys.
Not that $10 million buys that much in Ottawa these days-a couple of recycled advertising reports would eat up a tenth- but we are curious to find out to what extent Nault's consultation process will flavor the results of legislation that will fundamentally change the Indian Act, and the way First Nations communities run, forever. The Indian Act offered up a steady bout of acid indigestion over the last hundred years, but it's familiar fare. What will come with this new dish?
Congress of Aboriginal People's National Chief, Dwight Dorey, whose organization bought into the consultation process and landed a cool $1 million in new money to take part, has gone on the record saying he'll be Nault's staunchest critic if the consultations turn out to be meringue, a lot of air and not much else. And there are other groups watching, pinning their hopes on being at the table over these last months to add their issues to the mix. We would hate to see them betrayed.
As for the Assembly of First Nations, the group that's supposed to have an eye on the brew bubbling at INAC, they are still scrapping over whether they are going to join in the process. Well, even if they decide to participate they are a day late and a dollar short on this round.
Perhaps, if the unity resolution the chiefs just passed in May at their confederacy in Ottawa actually sticks, they might be able to add their influence to the act in Consultations II. But with the AFN's track record of late, who knows?
May 2002Accountability for all
There are a lot of stories about accountability-or the lack of it-throughout this month's issue. It wasn't something we planned. It just worked out that way.
For every story we write on this subject there are as many as a dozen dead end leads we follow where there's smoke but no fire or no way to prove who set the fire. While there is no shortage of stories about band members (and land claim settlement members) complaining about not getting enough information from their elected representatives, we want to emphasize that this is not a First Nation specific problem.
Lest the Indian Affairs minister decide to point to the content in this issue in an attempt to prove his point that First Nations need his governance act, we feel the need to remind him that there were a couple of major accountability stories about his government this month.
On April 17, Dr. Keith Martin, a Canadian Alliance MP, broke a hallowed tradition by picking up the mace and declaring in the House of Commons that "Parliament is not a democracy anymore."
He did that in protest of a government tactic that suppresses free speech and renders the people's representatives powerless. The Liberals added a "poison pill" amendment to his private members bill to decriminalize marijuana. The intent was to kill the bill by making it unpalatable to government members who might otherwise decide it was worthy.
We're not going to comment on the merits of the bill, but the idea of suppressing debate in private members business, one of the few areas where MPs get to speak their mind and vote their conscience without the restrictions of party discipline, is repugnant to us. We need more, not less free speech-that most basic building block of democracy.
Dr. Martin was suspended from Parliament for his transgression and used the opportunity and his sudden increased notoriety to drive home his point that Parliament needs to be reformed. The stranglehold of the Prime Minister's Office needs to be broken if the government can ever again be said to be truly representative of the people, he said.
The Victoria area MP will apologize to the Speaker and return to his seat in the green chamber, by and by, but we hope his message will penetrate at least a few Ottawa area skulls.
Canada has nothing to brag about when it comes to accountability. First Nations learned governance at the feet of Canadian parliamentarians and if there's trouble with accountability in some First Nations, that's no coincidence.
The Auditor General's report released this month also pointed out some glaring problems with the way the federal government operates. So please, let's not point the finger at First Nations.
We could all use a little bit more accountability and we'll be more inclined to trust the minister when his government walks the walk.
April 2002Decisions decisions
Two more huge court decisions in favor of Indigenous peoples this month met with instant appeals. Here we go again.
The Haida people caught the world's attention when they did the unthinkable and asked a British Columbia court to enforce Canadian law. The court obliged.
Gordon Benoit told us things were pretty lonely back in the early 1980s when he started his quest to force Canada to follow through on the terms of its contractual obligation to his Treaty 8 people. Even his own leadership in those days told him, "Don't rock the boat."
Wow. Maybe we should have put quotes around the word "leadership" in that last sentence. But, thankfully, Mr. Benoit provided his own brand of leadership and it paid off when Justice Douglas Campbell ruled-in remarkably quick fashion as court rulings go-that the Crown had made a promise and Benoit had every right to ask the Crown to keep it.
So what message is Canada sending when it appeals these two cases? Well, we've been here before, haven't we? The big question is this: Why do the Canadian people stand for it when their government refuses to obey its own laws or even live up to commonly accepted Canadian moral standards?
Canada, British Columbia and the Weyerhaeuser company had had a duty to consult the Haida before infringing on their Aboriginal title rights by logging ancestral lands. Who says so? Only the Supreme Court of Canada. So what were they doing in court on that one?
And a deal's a deal. Treaty 8 saw the settlers gain control of a huge chunk of Indian land. In return, the Crown promised the Native people living on that land that they and their descendants would be free from taxation, free to hunt and fish as if the treaty had never happened and free from enforced military service. As Benoit pointed out, it was a classic contract with both sides gaining and both sides making legally enforceable commitments. It could be argued that the Crown never began to perform its part in the contract and, as any business law student knows, the contract never took effect.
If it wasn't for the political considerations involved here, you wouldn't need to go to the Federal Court of Canada to get a ruling that Treaty 8 lands still belong to the Indigenous peoples. A justice of the peace could handle that one. It's that open and shut.
So why are the press and the public so up in arms about these decisions? They reflect basic Canadian legal and moral values. And why is the government appealing both decisions?
Somebody, please tell us it's not what we think.
March 2002The politics of gutlessness
There's a story in this month's issue and we want to emphasize an important point that's made between the lines.
The story is about the process of adding regulations to legislation after the fact, a development that Canadian Alliance co-chair of the Joint Committee of Scrutiny of Regulations Gurmant Grewal has a big problem with.
He says the government is happy to keep as many of the really politically troubling aspects of new legislation as possible out of the bills that are debated in the House of Commons-read: where the public is watching.
The current scrap that Mr. Grewal's committee is embroiled in is a case in point.
It looks to us like the government of Canada doesn't want to introduce a legislative amendment that would enshrine the current regulations that give force to the Aboriginal-only fisheries on the West Coast. Yet the Liberal government was happy to have its bureaucrats (very well paid bureaucrats at that, as another story in this issue shows) quietly write those regulations well away from the public eye.
Sorry, but it looks to us like the Liberals don't want to stand up in the House of Commons and defend those fisheries. The government knows if they introduce such a legislative amendment to the Fisheries Act that the Alliance (hello John Cummins and Jim Pankiw) will go ballistic over this "race-based" fishery and score points with a lot of uninformed people who haven't bothered to think things out. The kind of people who prefer to decide that superbly well-educated jurists must be stupid rather than wrap their own minds around a challenging new idea.
Never mind that the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Aboriginal people had prior claim to the various lucrative fisheries on the West Coast and that Aboriginal interests in fisheries were ruled second in line behind conservation. That only makes sense. The West Coast Aboriginal peoples were there first, basing their entire way of life on sustainable fishing long before Europeans had any idea they wouldn't fall of the edge off the world just west of the Canary Islands.
Never mind that the concept of an occasional Aboriginal-only fishery is the right thing to do, the Liberals seem to be saying, it won't play well to the voters. The Alliance would be (forgive the outrageous pun) shooting political fish in a barrel.
So do it in the regulations, they say. Keep it off CPAC and away from the glare of the cameras. Let's be discreet.
And so the intolerance that plagues this country continues unconfronted and unabated. It would be an act of humanitarianism, of great political courage if the Liberals (or any party) stood up and told the voters it's time to purge the racial hatreds from the fabric of this nation.
"If you think Aboriginal fisheries are wrong, you're wrong and here's why," the government should be saying and they should be saying it in the House of Commons.
But no political operative in his right mind in this country would tell his boss that it's time to tell Canadians to give away their hate and intolerance. That's not the way to get elected. It's just not practical. It's not a smart political move.
But aren't we all starting to get just a little bit sick of a system that rewards dishonesty and gutlessness?
Isn't it time to do something about it?
February 2002Drink deep, the water's fine?
It's the eternal struggle in politics: "Yeah, it's a great idea. But how do we pay for it?"
In a perfect world everybody would have everything they need and lots of it. Those on the political left would like to work towards that ideal in this astral plane. Those on the political right, it seems to us, are more inclined to keep it all and share it only with their friends, and the heck with everybody else.
Yes, we're talking about the Mike Harris government and Walkerton. With markets all over the world hobbled by fears created by the Enron scandal, where well paid "watchdogs," supposedly on the lookout for financial impropriety appear to have been willing to tell the stockholders-the regular folks-anything the big guys wanted them to say in exchange for a piece of the action, we're seeing the bitter fruit of the free market system. Walkerton and Enron are what happen when self-interest and hard-hearted political ideology are allowed to go unchecked.|
We see some of that in the Indian Affairs approach to water quality. In big cities, where the "real people" live, according to Ontario Deputy Premier Jim Flaherty, another Harris inner circle member, there are highly trained people with good-sized staff and big budgets to keep microbial death out of the water. On First Nations, the person with responsibility may (or may not) have a bit of training but that person certainly doesn't have a lot of help and, as several of sources told us this month, the First Nation water quality system sure doesn't have much of a budget.
Nobody can argue that Native people have been marginalized and excluded from the pursuit of wealth in this country for a long, long time. The wealthy in this country are in that enviable position because resources were-and are being -removed from lands that belonged to the Indigenous people. It's time to share.
Saying there's no money is no excuse for the less than optimal water management regimes on too many reserves. And bringing in the lawyers to make sure the government can't be held responsible if or when things go wrong with a marginally funded system is just sinister. Especially when you know the system is so rickety, it's just a matter of time.
Find the money. Fix the problem. Create budgets that ensure the system can sustain itself.
This is water. The stuff of life. Just because someone in a bad spot is forced to sign a legal disclaimer, that doesn't mean the people making the decisions are in the clear morally. And if a little morality isn't injected into the way this country is governed-and soon-we're going to have a lot more Walkertons and Enrons and, yes, Ipperwashes.
Windspeaker note:
We "threw down the gauntlet" last month and said we were going to look into just how much money the department of Indian Affairs is expending on the governance push. We didn't forget that promise, but the job turned out to be quite a bit bigger than we thought and . . . well, as many of us used to tell the teacher when our work wasn't done on time: the dog ate it. We'll get it too you soon, and we hope you'll find it worth the extra wait.
Note: Full context for this editorial is provided in an article in this edition of Windspeaker
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January - 2002
Gauntlet thrown, Indian Affairs
We got some help this month when some hard, verifiable financial information about the AFN was 'slipped under the door in a plain brown envelope.' Such leaks are the essence of journalism, because people in positions of power and influence will lie to us if they think they can get away with it. We've seen that. And without the kind of assistance we receive, there's no way we can ever know if we're getting the straight goods and all of those goods.
That said-and we're going to shock you-we feel the need to commend the AFN for their quick and forthright response to our inquiries. While we're not sure they would have answered the questions if we hadn't convinced them we had the information, the organization was quick to respond. Vice-chief Ken Young and CEO Dan Brant, especially, responded with integrity when we asked the tough questions.
Young put a very legitimate challenge to this paper: Go and do the same job on the government.
"If there's going to be transparency and accountability, fine. But let's have it both ways," he said.
The timing wasn't right for us to take that challenge up this month. That was our fault. We couldn't get the inquiries to the government in time to fairly expect them to respond. But, because we take a break for the holidays, too, INAC now has more than a month to prepare.
We will be asking who their consultants are, how much they make, what they do, and a lot of other questions that deal with the government's spending on the politics of Indian Act reform.
We hope you'll be ready, INAC, to answer our call. You can't say we haven't warned you.
On another front, we feel Professor Elizabeth Furniss has written a very important book. We believe she has put her finger on an aspect of Canadian culture that is all-too-rarely dealt with in any forum in this country. An editorial decision was made to join what would have been a simple review of the professor's book with a news story that swept through Indian Country in December-the Jonathan Kay piece in the National Post, "A case for assimilation."
Furniss argues (and we think proves, but buy the book and decide for yourself) that Canadians have deluded themselves into thinking they're benevolent and devoid of racism against Native people. She calls it an unexamined racism that is absorbed through the pores of all Canadians in very subtle, almost undetectable ways. After reading the book and Kay's article in the same week, we thought the latter helped dramatically prove the former's thesis.
We made another editorial decision not to contact Kay for the article for a couple of reasons: 1) he had his say in a gigantic piece (by newspaper standards) in his own publication, 2) Professor Furniss believes that confrontation will never bring Canadians to realize what they're doing. She preaches patient, gentle education. We figured arguing with Mr. Kay would mean we were ignoring that very good advice.
We saw Mr. Kay on APTN's Contact and saw that he was respectful and thoughtful, if a little too convinced of his complete understanding of a complex beat that's he's spent a mere eight months studying. We aren't calling him a raving, hate-mongering racist, although some will. He probably meant well but some of the material in his article makes us believe he's suffering from a uniquely Canadian malady. But we do invite him to look at the professor's ideas and see if he can come to grips with them-and then write another long, long piece for the Post.
Note: Context for this editorial is provided in an article in this edition of Windspeaker
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