Post by WebsiteAdmin on Dec 27, 2012 12:05:51 GMT -5
Crises on reserves
It’s a short limo drive, maybe five minutes, from Parliament Hill to Victoria Island in the middle of the Ottawa River. Heck, you could walk it in 10. So would it kill Stephen Harper to get out of his office and go meet the chief of the Attawapiskat First Nation who is staging a hunger strike on the island to get attention for her community’s plight?
Remember Attawapiskat? It was all over the front pages a year ago when the Red Cross flew into the northern Ontario reserve to rescue people living in flimsy tents and shacks without running water as the coldest part of the year approached. The nation was shocked; politicians wrung their hands; ministers promised action.
Twelve months later, Chief Theresa Spence is in a cabin on Victoria Island, saying she won’t eat until Harper meets with her. She says the pain of watching her people suffer from lack of housing and inadequate water supplies is unbearable. “I am willing to die for my people,” she says, “because the pain is too much and it's time for the government to realize what it's doing to us.”
It’s easy, too easy in fact, to dismiss what Spence is doing as a stunt. And it’s easy to say that Harper shouldn’t bow to such obvious public pressure. If he meets with her, won’t he have to meet with every other desperate native leader willing to put her health or even her life on the line to draw attention to conditions back home?
The Conservative government is willing to do something for Spence. It’s ready to have the hapless aboriginal affairs minister, John Duncan, meet with her. But Spence is holding out for the top guy. So, memo to the prime minister: Don’t drag this out needlessly. Just do the right thing, make the grand gesture, and take an hour to visit with the leader of a community of Canadians who have suffered way too much.
Since the crisis in Attawapiskat erupted at the end of November 2011, progress has been heartbreakingly slow. New trailers were brought in to provide decent housing for 22 families, but others are still living in substandard conditions. Ottawa still badly underfunds education for native kids, spending thousands of dollars less on each pupil than the provinces spend on non-native children. The federal government’s response to Attawapiskat was to appoint an outside manager to oversee the community’s affairs, but that was harshly criticized in August by the Federal Court, which called the move “unreasonable in all circumstances.”
A much-heralded “summit meeting” on all this involving Harper and top First Nations chiefs last January led to nothing much specific. And now Spence is staging her hunger strike, in obvious frustration over the lack of progress on Attawapiskat and what she calls a lack of respect for native leaders by Ottawa. The prime minister should cut through the bureaucracy and sit down with the chief. It might not work, but nothing else has made an impact on this tragic and intractable situation.
It’s a short limo drive, maybe five minutes, from Parliament Hill to Victoria Island in the middle of the Ottawa River. Heck, you could walk it in 10. So would it kill Stephen Harper to get out of his office and go meet the chief of the Attawapiskat First Nation who is staging a hunger strike on the island to get attention for her community’s plight?
Remember Attawapiskat? It was all over the front pages a year ago when the Red Cross flew into the northern Ontario reserve to rescue people living in flimsy tents and shacks without running water as the coldest part of the year approached. The nation was shocked; politicians wrung their hands; ministers promised action.
Twelve months later, Chief Theresa Spence is in a cabin on Victoria Island, saying she won’t eat until Harper meets with her. She says the pain of watching her people suffer from lack of housing and inadequate water supplies is unbearable. “I am willing to die for my people,” she says, “because the pain is too much and it's time for the government to realize what it's doing to us.”
It’s easy, too easy in fact, to dismiss what Spence is doing as a stunt. And it’s easy to say that Harper shouldn’t bow to such obvious public pressure. If he meets with her, won’t he have to meet with every other desperate native leader willing to put her health or even her life on the line to draw attention to conditions back home?
The Conservative government is willing to do something for Spence. It’s ready to have the hapless aboriginal affairs minister, John Duncan, meet with her. But Spence is holding out for the top guy. So, memo to the prime minister: Don’t drag this out needlessly. Just do the right thing, make the grand gesture, and take an hour to visit with the leader of a community of Canadians who have suffered way too much.
Since the crisis in Attawapiskat erupted at the end of November 2011, progress has been heartbreakingly slow. New trailers were brought in to provide decent housing for 22 families, but others are still living in substandard conditions. Ottawa still badly underfunds education for native kids, spending thousands of dollars less on each pupil than the provinces spend on non-native children. The federal government’s response to Attawapiskat was to appoint an outside manager to oversee the community’s affairs, but that was harshly criticized in August by the Federal Court, which called the move “unreasonable in all circumstances.”
A much-heralded “summit meeting” on all this involving Harper and top First Nations chiefs last January led to nothing much specific. And now Spence is staging her hunger strike, in obvious frustration over the lack of progress on Attawapiskat and what she calls a lack of respect for native leaders by Ottawa. The prime minister should cut through the bureaucracy and sit down with the chief. It might not work, but nothing else has made an impact on this tragic and intractable situation.