Editorial - Effort falls flat

It's tough to get attention when billions of dollars are being spent to bail out banks around the world and the stock market at home is heading south faster than a goose in winter and Joe-average Canadian is fretting about the rot that is about to set into the tidy little nest egg he's built in his home equity.
Who could expect Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine to find a crack in that wall of woe to insert himself and the concerns of First Nations people into the federal election dialogue? Who really could expect it?
Except for the fact that the first few weeks of the election campaign was a race about nothing. There wasn't a reason to have an election, except that Mr. Stephen Harper was jonesing for a majority government.
"To everything, there is a season and a time to every purpose," Prime Minister Harper quoted Ecclesiastes in his victory speech in Calgary on Oct. 14. But what he failed to mention was that there was no real purpose for Canada to spend $300 million to go to the polls. Yes, $300 million to get the same answer to the question that was asked only two years ago, when another $300 million was spent. The only question was in the Conservative leader's mind.
What was in it for the Canadian public? Nothing. And that's where Mr. Fontaine and his "Change Can't Wait" campaign failed First Nations people. Nature hates a vacuum and there was plenty of nothing waiting to be filled in with substantive issues, including First Nations poverty, overcrowded housing, unemployment, over-representation in Canadian jails, under-representation in Canadian universities. The list of concerns is long, but the effort to get that list to the folks sitting 'round Jack Layton's kitchen table, or Harper's board room table or the soon to be former Liberal leader Stephane Dion's shifting green table fell sadly short.
The Change Can't Wait campaign failed even to find allies among the traditional left -leaning brigade. Oh sure, the NDPers have been able to talk a good game in the past, but since they were the ones that brought down the Paul Martin Liberals to effectively kill the Kelowna Accord as Canada held its nose to vote in the Conservatives in 2006, even the high horse Jack Layton was riding in on was coming up lame.
Layton wagged his finger across the election debate table at Mr. Harper, cluck-clucking about Aboriginal issues until Dion reminded Jack of the fact that it was his party's political ambitions that tanked the Liberal-led Kelowna deal. That moment in the sun that the whole Change Can't Wait initiative was progressing toward, the glow of national attention, was over in less than 30 seconds as Layton went on to safer subject matter.
It was his sad, sophomoric jab about Harper's now notorious blue sweater, as seen in the Conservative's election ads, that captured Canada's attention, albeit briefly, not the desperate needs of the Aboriginal peoples of this country. What a sorry statement that is.
Approximately $600 million has been spent since 2006 on elections that Canadians didn't need or want. Can we remind people here that the Kelowna Accord was to invest in such areas as health and education and housing and capacity development and all of those things that would close the socio-economic gap between the Canadian mainstream and Aboriginal populations? It was $5.1 billion over five years that was being proposed, and the Conservatives balked at such an expenditure for desperate people. It was these same Conservatives who just announced a $26 billion expenditure to shore up the Canadian financial system that Harper insisted during the election was secure and able to withstand the U.S. banking meltdown.
The AFN's 'Change Can't Wait' effort was, one bets, expensive , with ads taken out in a number of newspapers around the country urging First Nations to vote. There was some effort made to engage the Aboriginal youth with press releases sent out encouraging young people to just do it. No matter who they were inclined to vote for, they were told to just get out and vote.
But where was the fist shaking? The saber rattling? The speeches that inspire and inflame? The Conservatives didn't present a platform until the end of the election, and didn't speak at all to an agenda on Aboriginal issues. That surely was grist for that mill.
Where was the stumping, the prodding, the poking? Where was the fury that most people need to make up their minds that change must occur? Well, that's never been Mr. Fontaine's style. His is of the quiet way of diplomats, and diplomacy has never been a game of urgency or emotion.
So now we have another minority Conservative government that is burdened with the distraction of a global economic crisis and a certain deficit. Choices will be made to reduce that deficit, and we all know who ends up suffering when difficult decisions need to be made about reducing budgets. Yes, it's the Aboriginal people in Canada that are destined to take it on the chin again.
"First Nations have been ignored during good economic times and now upcoming tough times may be used as an excuse for more of the same," Fontaine even prognosticated in yet another of the press releases he relied on to motivate the media during the campaign. "It can't be news to our political leadership that any downturn in the economy will punish the poor the harshest. Those who are most vulnerable can't be an afterthought, or worse, completely neglected."
Well, we'll see, but we know one thing for certain.
Apparently change can wait.