so get off your butts, and do something!

Don’t you just hate it when politicians see something going on in society, something they’ve ignored for years and years, maybe even stonewalled attempts to ameliorate the situation, perhaps even cut funding for programs that might have helped groups working to improve lives, yet here they are trying to take some credit for doing something when they’re actually doing sweet F-A!

Why that’s it!  Why not have an award for yolks like this?  How about the “Sweet Eff-Ay Award“? Hmmmm…. where to begin?

Why not with this news release?

ivison blows

Do as I say, not as I do. That’s the message I get from Chuck Strahl and the Conservative Government in Ottawa these days.

John Ivison’s column in the Irrational Compost a couple of days ago illustrates that, though I doubt that’s what the writer intended. I genuinely think Ivison fell for the government’s sweet talk about improving lives, cleaning up corruption, and demanding accountability.

 

Bushwah.

Ivison writes (Tories plan First Nations overhaul, June 3) that Strahl is set to “unveil a new approach” in the way it funds status Indians and their reserves. Those with “good prospects of economic success” will get more money. Those deemed “bad prospects” won’t get any more money than they do now. Nothing in Ivison’s column or Strahl’s words excludes possible cuts to seriously under-funded communities if Indian Affairs decides they need to be taught a lesson in obedience because it really doesn’t like their attitude.

So what’s new in this approach? Ever since I remember, the federal government has rewarded Indians and organizations it considered “good,” and punished those it didn’t like or agree with. “Bad Indians” found themselves on the Indian Affairs’ shitlist. Good little Indians found themselves appointed to the Senate.

T’was ever thus. Ovide Mercredi was “Gandhi” one day, a shitty ass frozen out by Indian Affairs the next. Matthew Coon Come stepped out of line and found the funding to his Assembly of First Nations slashed in half. You have similar examples in Canadian mainstream. Talk to Danny Williams in Newfoundland or the folks down in Nova Scotia. What makes you think that this same type of coercion and patronage doesn’t happen in Indian country too?

Strahl & the Plan

Boss, da plan, da plan

If Indians dared ruffle the feathers of GR8 White Faddah ™, riled his anger by choosing an MP from an opposing political party, went to the news media to complain about the lack of any coherent funding policies at Indian Affairs in Ottawa, the complete lack of consultations and accountability at Indian Affairs, idiotic or incompetent civil servants, and so on… they might find repairs to their schools denied, contaminated water systems ignored, decrepit housing left for another government to deal with. And they got away with it, time after time.

 

Why? Because journalists like Ivison actually believe it when an Indian Affairs official like Chuck Strahl shows up saying he’s there to help. Wake up, Ivison. Indians have been hearing that bs for more than a hundred years. You can’t be that gullible. If so, I have this bridge in Manhattan I think you’d be interested in.

Indian Affairs and Indian Affairs’ ministers get away with this form of government-sanctioned bribery/coercion because too many journalists become deaf, dumb and blind at the strangest times.

On the one hand, there’s this community that’s limping along because it’s funding has been kept at pre-Confederation levels. They’re plugging holes in the walls of homes with newspaper. Kids are almost strangers to their parents because justice officials think that Indians of a certain age should get a criminal record.

On the other hand, there’s Chuck Strahl. He looks like the reporter. He talks like the reporter. He comes from the reporter’s community. So when Strahl says that the reserve described above isn’t making the grade, that they aren’t pulling themselves up by their bootstraps quickly enough or high enough to suit him… reporters believe him. They actually get sucked in.

Are there rich reserves that could be doing more? Sure there are. Just as there is an emerging Indian middle class that could be doing more to help their own communities, but prefer the latte at Starbucks. But that is not most reserves, nor the day-to-day reality of most Indigenous peoples in Canada. It’s time for Indian Affairs, and the minister, to stop blaming the victims of s system they devised and keep chugging along.

uppity Mohawks and their bridges

Then there are those uppity Mohawks. They won’t accept the rules that say they’re supposed to live in poverty. They see a loophole in economic development regulations, the ones that stipulate they must go cap in hand for approval from Indian Affairs before anything gets done, and they ram a truck through it. They actually build their own economies. Traders and merchants that they are, they have the timerity to then flip the bird at GR8 White Faddah ™.

Sovereignty? My ass, says the minister. Bad Indians. Baaad Indians. We’ll need to teach them the “rule of law.”

Is this the same as “Honour of the Crown?” Respect for treaties? Upholding legal commitments and Agreements passed by the Parliament of Canada? That “rule of law”? Or the one used only when it’s convenient to hammer down uppity Indians?

Educate yourself, John Ivison. You’re writing from a position of ignorance about issues that you seem to know next to nothing about. This leaves you open to manipulation by politicians who have engaged in these types of abusive behaviours for decades – and getting away with it thanks to writers like you. Your readers deserve better. Indians deserve better.

we stole your land fair and square

 

I once heard a former minister of Indian Affairs, Warren Allmand I believe, describe the Canadian Government’s so-called “land claims policies” in just those words. Legalized theft.

 

For a Google page full of: “We stole your land, fair and square.”  (WARNING: be prepared to woof your cookies.)

Chairman Chuck

The federal government’s refusal to end this form of state-sponsored theft makes a mockery of numerous court decisions affirming Indigenous rights to land and a share of resources, and all but condemning the same to continued dispossession and poverty.

It flies in the face of too many royal commissions and judicial inquiries to list here recommending that governments respect decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada upholding Indigenous rights.

The federal government’s refusal to heed mountains of reports prepared by their own officials, reports that underline all of the above, is proof of inept and incompetent ministers who prefer to waste money and lives…. and for what?

This much is certain: lands and resources continue to be ripped out from beneath the feet of Indigenous peoples, denying them benefit, despite too many pious statements from the mouths of folks like Robert Nault, Jim Prentice, and now Chuck Strahl that such travesties will never, ever happen again. Hypocrites one and all.

 

Indigenous “land claims” are adversarial, needlessly drawn out and lengthy, hugely wasteful and expensive to everyone. So why do Canadian governments adhere to a policy that is morally and ethically wrong, would be illegal if put to an international tribunal, and costs all sides – wastes – hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees each year?

 

For more from the latest the highlights reel on official idiocy in Canada, take a look at the always lovely and talented balbulican’s write up over at the equally lovely StageLeft.

 

For more from that same reel (Idiots Gone Wild?), there are on-going attempts by some lunkheads in parliament to keep the status quo, or even go back to the good old days when white was right, black – step back, and better dead than red. Head on over to read John Cummins, an MP from British Columbia, in the National Post (a former journalistic publication). Cummins apparently wants everyone from judges to politicians to remember what side of the colour line they belong. 

 

Strange that Cummins would try to sabotage Campbell’s campaign, a fellow conservative, for re-election in British Columbia. The Libs are over on the right-hand side of the political quad in BC. But then, these race-based political parties really confuse me.

 

(update: I should add that Allmand used the sentence to condemn Canada’s record on land claims)

canadian cynic …

… sums it up nicely:

“… a Foreign Minister who doesn’t care about Canadians in foreign countries, we have an Indian Affairs Minister who doesn’t give a shit about Indians. And let’s not forget the Science Minister who doesn’t believe in evolution.”

nuts

 

If they lived in the south, they would have a decent school - not a health hazard.

That’s right: “Nuts!”  

 

Nuts to the idiots at the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (INAC) for their continuing denial of reality at Attawapiskat school.  Nuts to Health Canada for allowing INAC to get away with a situation that is clearly a threat to human health. If these students were white, if this school was in the south, if this country had a conscience….

Canadians should send the Ministers of both of these departments to spend a week’s worth of detention in that school.

[h/t to PP 2.0 - Dispatches by Northwestern Lad (aka The New Incarnation Of Peterborough Politics)]

uh… who’s looking at your books?

I try to keep an eye on announcements by the federal government of Canada. Yes (sigh), even the announcement that the feds have launched BizPal in Muskoka. But there was nothing on my computer about Son of Chuckie’s latest.

Chuck Strahl, the Minister of Indian Affairs, announced new “value-for-money” audits which will, according to Sue Bailey at Canadian Press, “better track how Indian Affairs spends billions of dollars will catch misappropriation, lax reporting and – in rare cases – fraud.”

The emphasis here, of course, is not on Indian Affairs but on those pesky Indians their danged mai-tai sipping lifestyles.

Let us ignore for a moment that one of the biggest frauds in recent years in Indian country was actually organized and perpetrated by a senior civil servant in Ottawa’s Health Department.

Or that the Auditor-General of Canada slammed the Indian Affairs Department in 2002 for lack of or bizarre funding policies, and of ham-stringing band councils and Aboriginal organizations with multiple layers of audits that had some bands filing as many financial reports as days in a year.

Which raises interesting questions amongst we poor folk in the bushlands. We were just wondering how much the Federal Government wastes with its bizarre arrangements for program funding, in outstanding interest payments, or where the “value-for-money” is in such idiocy.

Y’see, this is how federal funding usually (often?) works in Indian country, and keep in mind that this applies for both new and continuing (year-to-year) programs:

• bands and organizations understand and rush to submit applications for funding on deadlines often set toward the end of the calendar year (around Xmas) for funding that should be approved and kick in by the beginning of the new fiscal year, April 1.
• Federal departments, though, sometimes (even often) change the program criteria and funding requirements even after the bands and organizations have had to submit their applications. The bands do so on assurances from Federal program officers that changes in policy likely, probably, hopefully will not affect their submission. No guarantees, of course.
• the Federal departments then consider the program and grant applications sometimes (perhaps often) without knowing what changes will be made to policies, program criteria or funding requirements. This process may take months, and months, and more months, while they wait for the highest levels of government to decide what to do.
• in the meantime, homes need to be built, schools need to operate, salaries for any number of people need to be paid, and this comes from lines of credit and loans that need to be arranged so ambulances continue to run and clinics keep operating. Who pays the interest on these loans and lines of credit? Sometimes this item is buried in the “miscellaneous” column, but often it must be taken out of regular program funding which may mean one less home or ambulance ride. But it certainly means more money to the banks.
• it is not unusual for programs to receive their “new” funding six, eight, ten months into the fiscal year. One group I’m familiar with received its funding one month before it was required to submit its final report at the end of that fiscal year.

So here are some questions:

1. this example deals only with Indian programs, and only in general terms. Does this or similar shenanigans take place in other federal departments as well?
2. how widespread do you think this problem is?
3. how much does the federal government’s idiocy (constantly changing funding requirements and late approval for funding) cost the Canadian taxpayer — not to mention the Aboriginal organization and programs?