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Aboriginal and Inuit Non-Mining Issues

Idle No More: A chance to repair a sad legacy – by Jim Coyle (Toronto Star – January 13, 2013)

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

The truth about stories, says the author and son of a Cherokee Thomas King, is “that that’s all we are.” It’s a notion at least as old as the Psalms. “We spend our years as a tale that is told.” And in our lifetimes, we’re shaped and guided by the stories we hear about who we are, where we come from, what we might be.

But stories can also be dangerous, King said in his Massey Lectures of 10 years ago. “So you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories you are told.”

As much as anything, Idle No More — born of a rally organized in Saskatoon in November by four aboriginal women — seems to be an attempt by Canada’s First Nations to insist that their story be reclaimed and heard, to galvanize their people and the wider public into addressing a long-standing national disgrace.

To get lost in the diet particulars of one hunger-striking chief in Ottawa, or the accounting idiosyncracies of one reserve’s band council, or a decision in Attawapiskat by a people grown wary of media to ban a TV crew, is to miss the larger and legitimate point of Idle No More and the opportunity it presents for essential change.

That drastic change is needed — at a time when the northwestern Ontario community of Pikangikum is called the suicide capital of Canada, and an inquest is soon to be held in Ontario into the deaths of seven native young people who died after leaving their remote home communities to pursue education in Thunder Bay — is beyond question.

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A new Canada is at hand [Aboriginal issues] – Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal Editorial (January 10, 2013)

The Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.

WITH so much riding on Friday’s meeting between the leaders of two of Canada’s “nations,” there is a danger that the drama of Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence could detract from it. Spence is so the wrong person to be seen to be speaking for First Nations in general and the Idle No More movement in particular. Her hunger strike in a teepee — interspersed with a visit to a nearby hotel and some slumber time in a car — has been marked by shifting demands and her disingenuous response to the leaked audit of her impoverished band’s finances.

A chief who drives an Escalade while most about her scramble for basic shelter; who calls the absence of basic accounting for $100 million in public funds, largely intended for housing, a ruse to discredit her; and who questions the skills of a major financial institution for revealing the breathtaking irregularities of her own band management, does not deserve to be given credence at this crucial juncture in the life of Canada.

Who, then, does speak for First Nations in Friday’s meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and several of his ministers? Some First Nations leaders say that Shawn Atleo’s Assembly of First Nations, which convened this important meeting, does not speak for them. There are 617 First Nations in Canada, most of which are part of regional organizations like Nishnawbe Aski Nation here in the Northwest. First Nations and their umbrella groups all have chiefs. Hopefully, the select few chiefs present Friday are representative of most if not all of the more than 700,000 First Nations people.

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The real story behind Attawapiskat’s problems – by Thomas Walkom (Toronto Star – January 9, 2013)

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Making sense of Attawapiskat is not easy. The James Bay native community is synonymous with poverty. But it sits next to a diamond mine. Its chief, Theresa Spence, has become famous across Canada because of the hunger strike she is waging on an island in the Ottawa River.

She insists she’ll only consume liquids until Prime Minister Stephen Harper meets with her (which he has agreed to do). But what does Spence want from that meeting? This is less clear. She talks vaguely of a new relationship between aboriginal first nations and the federal government.

We now know, thanks to a detailed audit of Attawapiskat’s finances commissioned by Ottawa, that the first nation’s bookkeeping leaves much to be desired.

Auditors from Deloitte and Touche concluded that roughly 80 per cent of the detailed spending transactions they investigated came with little or no paperwork, making it unclear how the monies were spent.

Yet oddly enough, another auditing firm — this one based in Timmins — has regularly been okaying the band’s annual financial statements, all of which are available on the Attawapiskat website.

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Six lessons from a brilliant, scathing year-old CBC report on Attawapiskat’s mismanagement – by Jonathan Kay (National Post – January 8, 2013)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

CBC News made headlines on Monday by publicizing a scathing audit report on Attawapiskat, the impoverished northern Ontario Cree community led by hunger-striking chief Theresa Spence.

Yet you’ll find an even more searing indictment of Attawapiskat’s leadership in a televised report from the CBC’s Adrienne Arsenault. That segment is a year old, but it’s getting a new life on the internet thanks to a Twitter-based resurrection campaign led by blogger Richard Klagsbrun.

Watch the video: It’s shocking how many important lessons from Attawapiskat Ms. Arsenault manages to pack into just eight minutes.

1. The idea that the destitution of far-flung First Nations such as Attawapiskat is a result of Ottawa’s neglect is wrong. Ms. Arsenault’s quick tour of Attawapiskat — a place that then was supposed to have been in a housing crisis — shows a half-dozen well-constructed houses with no one living in them. When questioned about this total waste of resources, Chief Theresa Spence has no real answer.

2. In fact, Ms. Arsenault’s reporting suggests that the real problem in Attawapiskat is Ms. Spence’s own incompetent leadership — in which capacity she is aided by her live-in boyfriend Clayton Kennedy, who serves as the community’s manager. Neither apparently can be bothered to fill out the paperwork required to get needed resources from Ottawa, or even supply basic accounting information.

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Audit nightmare: The RCMP, not Harper, should be meeting with Chief Spence – by Ezra Levant (Toronto Sun – January 8, 2013)

http://www.torontosun.com/home

A new audit of the Attawapiskat Indian reserve was released Monday. It was shocking. The accounting firm of Deloitte randomly chose 505 financial transactions, between April 1, 2005 and Nov. 30, 2011, to review. They found “81% of files did not have adequate supporting documents and over 60% had no documentation of the reason for payment.”

A lot of that money was supposed to go to housing. Attawapiskat is the reserve where some houses have leaky roofs, poor insulation, broken plumbing and are generally unfit for habitation. But Deloitte wrote, “There is no evidence of due diligence in the use of public funds, including the use of funds for housing.”

Deloitte can’t find where the money went. But maybe the long list of people on the band’s rich payroll might know, starting with Theresa Spence, the chief, or her boyfriend, Clayton Kennedy, who just happens to be the town’s financial manager. He bills the band $850 a day to manage their finances.

In fact, there are 21 politicians on the band payroll. Plus plenty of full-time staff. But Deloitte didn’t find that reassuring: “Attawapiskat First Nation did not provide us with any job descriptions for individuals who are involved in the financial management of funding agreements.”

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Reserve squalor isn’t about funding, but where the money goes – by Lorne Gunter (Toronto Sun – January 6, 2013)

http://www.torontosun.com/home

Cash not the answer

Back in the fall of 2011 when Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence was first in the news, Mark Milke of the Fraser Institute produced a fascinating comparison of her reserve’s budget versus budgets for similar-sized non-aboriginal communities across the country.

Milke pointed out that Attawapiskat, a settlement with fewer than 1,600 residents, had an annual operating budget of nearly $32 million. Meanwhile, Atikokan, Ont., near Thunder Bay had almost 3,300 inhabitants — more than double that of Attawapiskat — and yet spent just $8.4 million providing municipal services. That’s one-quarter the budget for a town with twice the population, or $20,140 per capita in Attawapiskat versus $2,550 in Atikokan.

Spence’s complaint back then was that her reserve had too few houses for residents because Ottawa was giving it too little money. Milke’s point was that there was no shortage of funds, so the cause of Attawapiskat’s problems must lie elsewhere.

There are legitimate reasons why a reserve such as Spence’s might have to spend significantly greater amounts providing services.

For instance, while Atikokan is hardly central, Attawapiskat is truly far away from industrial civilization. What’s more, in Attawapiskat much of the employment is based on jobs created by the band government, whereas in Atikokan the private sector is the big employer. Plus the band is nearly the sole source of housing and health care.

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A map of the future [Northwestern Ontario/Ring of Fire] – economically speaking – by David Robinson (Northern Ontario Business – January 2013)

Established in 1980, Northern Ontario Business  provides Canadians and international investors with relevant, current and insightful editorial content and business news information about Ontario’s vibrant and resource-rich North. Dr. David Robinson is an economist at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada.  drobinson@laurentian.ca

As minister of northern development and mines, Rick Bartolucci has published the most important development map of Northern Ontario. It isn’t a map of what he is doing, or even what he plans to do-this map shows what others have stopped doing. But with a bit of imagination the map also shows Northern Ontario’s future.

Strange to say, the map didn’t get into the Northern Growth Plan. Maybe the team that wrote the plan didn’t realize what they had. After all, why do we care where all the abandoned mines in Northern Ontario happen to be? It’s just one of the many neat maps available on the Ministry Northern Development and of Mines website.

It is the unsurprising information in this map that matters. The map shows that there are a lot of abandoned mines. We all knew that, although we probably didn’t know just how many. The map shows that mines tend to be found close to railroad lines and major highways. That isn’t very surprising either. The third, not very surprising but important fact, is there are only four abandoned mines in the northwest quarter of the province.

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Female Newsmaker of the year [Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence] – by Lenny Carpenter (Wawatay News – January 3, 2014)

Northern Ontario’s First Nations Voice: http://wawataynews.ca/

Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s national spotlight for her fight to remove the third party manager assigned to her First Nation and her decision to go on a hunger strike last month makes her Wawatay’s female newsmaker of the year.

Following the housing crisis in her community at the end of last year, Spence continued to oppose the third party manager imposed upon the community by the federal government.

In January, after Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development of Canada (AANDC) Minister John Duncan accused Spence and the leadership of Attawapiskat of withholding information so that the third party manager could release funds for essential services, Spence issued a reply indicating that the manager’s fees were billed to the First Nation at a rate of $20,000 a month.

“Why should my First Nation be paying $1,300 a day for some firm to issue payroll cheques for my First Nation with our already limited Band Support Funding?” Spence asked in her letter to Duncan. “We do not need a high priced manager to issue cheques, because we are capable of issuing cheques and managing our business affairs.”

After a federal court declined to remove the third party manager on a temporary basis in February, Spence said the decision did not affect the First Nation’s overall legal challenge. She had filed a court injunction against AANDC in December.

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When aboriginal conflicts aren’t stranger than fiction – by Christie Blatchford (National Post – January 4, 2013)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

I started to read Doug Bland’s novel Uprising in 2009, shortly after it was first published.

I didn’t finish only because I was then embroiled in my own non-fiction account of the native occupation in Caledonia, Ont., three years earlier. As always for me, this is a time of great writerly insecurity, and I was afraid both of distraction and of being intimidated unto paralysis by the excellence of someone else’s book.

I still haven’t quite made my way through Uprising’s almost 500 pages, despite an all-day effort, but reading it now is considerably creepy-crawlier than it was before, amid the widespread protests, hunger strikes, flash mobs and assorted other actions of the aboriginal Idle No More movement.

Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Bland, until 2011 the Chair of Defence Management Studies at Queen’s in Kingston, was already a respected author when Uprising was released, but not of fiction.

In fact, he says, he wrote the first draft “as a typical academic book,” realized afterwards that the only people who would read it were other academics, and did it again as fiction.

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To understand how we got to Attawapiskat, go back to the 1905 James Bay Treaty – by Jonathan Kay (National Post – January 4, 2013)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Attawapiskat First Nation chief Teresa Spence is not engaged in “terrorism,” as one Postmedia writer notoriously suggested last week. Terrorists blow themselves up. Ms. Spence, by contrast, is sitting in a snow-covered teepee on Victoria Island in the Ottawa River. Let’s not play the game of using the T-word to describe everyone we simply don’t like.

On the other hand, Ms. Spence isn’t a true “hunger striker” either, since she reportedly is drinking fish broth and various herbal potions. We don’t know how many calories she’s taking in on a daily basis, so we can’t discount the possibility that she really will starve herself to death. But she is not a true Bobby Sands-style hunger striker. Terminology is important, whether you’re talking about death by Semtex, or starvation.

Finally, Ms. Spence is not an icon of “grass roots” native rage — as some suggest. She is a band chief, with an office and salary paid for by regular Canadian taxpayers. Attawapiskat may be tiny and poor, but it has its own development corporation, airport, local services and homegrown management scandals. The band takes in millions from a local diamond mine. True “grass roots” organizations can only dream of such resources.

But even if Ms. Spence is not a terrorist, nor a true hunger striker, nor a genuine grass roots activist, I would argue that we still need to pay attention: The very real plight of Attawapiskat First Nation encapsulates everything that has gone wrong with aboriginal policy for generations.

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Misguided hunger strike is manufacturing dissent – by Peter Foster (National Post – January 4, 2013)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

The aboriginal plight is the legacy of failed policies past, and of resistance from native leaders to changes in accountability, transparency, education and property rights that would inevitably undermine their own power

Nobody would deny the desperate conditions on many native reserves. Most Canadians are genuinely concerned and frustrated at how little improvement has been brought by the billions spent. However, to imagine that problems of poverty, ill health and poor education are best addressed — let alone solved — by histrionic threats, social-mediated mob scenes or blocked roads or rail lines is dangerous delusion.

Chief Theresa Spence, who was previously best known for declaring states of emergency — arguably rooted in her own mismanagement — at her Attawapiskat reserve, is suddenly being treated as some combination of Martin Luther King and Aung San Suu Kyi. Celebrity moths, bleeding hearts and clamberers up the greasy political pole have sought to invest her “hunger strike,” which is now into its fourth week, with noble purpose.

In fact, her initial threat to starve herself to death failing a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Governor General David Johnston suggested either a bizarre degree of narcissism, or revealed her as a witless puppet. Perhaps both.

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The way to break the Northern Gateway logjam: aboriginal equity – by Brian Lee Crowley and Ken Coates (Globe and Mail – January 3, 2013)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Brian Lee Crowley and Ken Coates are co-leaders of the Aboriginal Canada and the Natural Resource Economy project at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa-based public policy think tank.

The bitter debate over the Northern Gateway oil pipeline project shows Canadian policy-making at its worst.

A piece of nationally significant infrastructure, the project is currently mired in a toxic mess, assailed by environmentalists, targeted by vote-hungry B.C. politicians and publicly challenged by many first nations. You could be forgiven for feeling a dreadful sense of déjà vu.

In the 1970s, an ambitious plan was mooted for a natural gas pipeline down the Mackenzie Valley. Aboriginal people and environmentalists protested. Justice Thomas Berger was named to head an inquiry that galvanized opposition to the pipeline, recommending that it be delayed until aboriginal people were ready to participate fully.

Eventually, companies created new aboriginal partnership models. Aboriginal communities and governments grew more familiar with the project and innovated by becoming equity partners. While some opposition remained, most in the region supported a pipeline that promised jobs for the North and revenue for aboriginal governments.

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Simplistic arguments from Theresa Spence, Idle No More could have tragic consequences for natives – by John Ivison (National Post – January 3, 2013)

 The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

“De Beers is investing $1-billion in the Victor mine near Attawapiskat. It agreed to pay
the band about $30-million over the 12-year life span of the mine. A further $325-million
in contracts has been funnelled through companies owned by the band, to supply catering,
helicopters, dynamite and the like. One wonders how Attawapiskat Resources Inc. has only
made profits of $100,000 on that level of revenue, but that’s for another day.” (John Ivison)

I made the observation on Twitter the other day that certain native leaders seem intent on conflict, and that they want the “hapless” Theresa Spence, the hunger-striking Attawapiskat First Nation chief, to become a martyr.

The reaction was venomous. One of the more considered respondents, Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, called me a “racist p—k” and threatened to kick my “immigrant ass” back to Scotland. And he’s a political science professor at the University of Victoria.

It brought home the power of what psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “the righteous mind” — the righteous certainty that those who see things differently are wrong, while being completely blind to our own biases.

The prospect of rational debate on this subject is slipping away — and may be lost entirely if Ms. Spence dies. Canada is facing a tumultuous moment in its history with its native people, such as we haven’t seen since the Oka crisis.

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Idle No More protests beyond control of chiefs – by James Bradshaw and Shawn McCarthy (Globe and Mail – January 2, 2013)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

TORONTO and OTTAWA – The Idle No More movement is broadening into a call to shake off apathy, absorbing a range of issues from aboriginal rights and environmental safeguards to the democratic process. And as it swells, organizers are warning first nations leaders that the movement will not be corralled by aboriginal politicians even as the country’s chiefs look to use the protests’ momentum to press Ottawa on treaty rights and improved living standards.

Hundreds of people gathered Tuesday afternoon in Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square, many of aboriginal heritage but nearly as many not, joining hands in round dances and lighting candles to honour Chief Theresa Spence, who was on day 22 of her hunger strike demanding Prime Minister Stephen Harper meet with aboriginal leaders.

The gathering attracted aboriginal peoples calling for greater consultation on changes to reservation land management and the Indian Act, but also environmentalists and government critics charging that the federal omnibus budget bill is bypassing vital public debate.

Started by four Saskatchewan women, the grassroots Idle No More movement has gone viral, with supporters across Canada and internationally holding protests, blocking rail lines and launching hunger strikes. While national chiefs support the effort, organizers are resisting any effort to hand over leadership to their elected representatives.

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Attawapiskat: Why don’t they just leave? – by Raveena Aulakh (Toronto Star – December 30, 2012)

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

ATTAWAPISKAT, ONT.—If she had a magic wand, Rosie Koostachin would change many things in her community. There would be better housing, health care and education. There would be more jobs and there would be no drug and alcohol abuse. Oh, and the reserve would be better run.

But there is no magic wand. Neither is one on its way. Koostachin, the wise 42-year-old mother of four and grandmother of one, knows that.

“Attawapiskat hasn’t changed in decades … I don’t think it ever will. It can’t. I was born here, I was raised here and I have raised all my kids here. The problems I saw four decades ago … they are problems we still face.”

Health care and education will always be a challenge. The dropout rate at the local high school will stay at more than 50 per cent. So will poverty. There will be no employment opportunities. Entertainment will at best be non-existent except around Christmas. The local cost of living will always be expensive (a single red pepper costs $3.99 and half dozen bananas $2.89).

It is the truth. Koostachin is not the only one who says so. She may be brave enough to talk openly about it but others say the same thing privately: Attawapiskat, home to about 1,900 people, can likely never be fixed. In the long run it is unsustainable.

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