NOVANEWS
Left – “Idle No More” has launched blockades of roads and railways.
Canada’s Indian leaders openly threaten
violence but they’re not “terrorists.”
“Idle No More” says new laws undermine their treaty rights but most Canadians view their protests as a demand for still more special privileges and handouts. Canada now spends in excess of $10 billion annually on Native services. Much of this is siphoned off by the Chiefs who earn exhorbitant salaries. Paul Fromm’s article below reflects the frustration of ordinary Canadians.
Makow Comment: No mass protest movement gets started these days without the hidden hand of globalists who wish to destabilize a country or prevent resource development. Illuminati backing is reflected in the sympathetic coverage this movement has received from the left-liberal media, especially the government-run propaganda service, the CBC.
by Paul Fromm
Director, Canada First
(Abridged/edited by henrymakow.com)
Any Canadian who has witnessed the intolerable buffoonery of the past month can only shake their heads as Canada’s indulgent, special-privileges Indian policy comes apart at the seams. Even some of the pro-minority media are exposing some of the hypocrisy and nonsense as the Canadian taxpayers are being set up to be fleeced once again.
Consider:
* On Idle No More Chief Spence’s Attwapiskat reserve, with its population of 1,500 living in Third World poverty on Hudson Bay, a recent Deloitte audit reveals more than 400 of the transactions it reviewed lacked proper documentation.
‘There is no evidence of due diligence in the use of public funds, including the use of funds for housing,’ wrote Deloitte. “In our opinion, having over 80 per cent of selected transactions lacking any or proper supporting documentation is inappropriate for any recipient of public funds.’
The Attawapiskat band council has received approximately $104 million from the federal government between April 1, 2005 and Nov. 30, 2011 for housing, infrastructure, education and administration.” The Toronto Star (January 7, 2013)
That works out to over $11,000 per year for every Indian on the reserve. Where has the money gone? So bad are Spence’s records that the audit cannot say there was been corruption or theft. There is so little documentation that no one seems to know where most of the money went.
This is a problem not just for the Canadian taxpayers but for the impoverished Indians in the Attawapiskat band who do not seem to be benefitting from the taxpayers’ largess.
Here’s an idea. Instead of hotdogging it for media publicity with her hunger strike, Theresa Spence ought to haul her backside to a community college and take a course in elementary bookkeeping.
* Police confirmed that the Indians were within their rights to ban the media from the Reserve as theirs is “sovereign territory.” This is utter fiction. Attwapiskat is part of Canada. A sovereign nation — say Russia, France, the U.S.A. — supports itself on its territory. The pathetic Attawapiskat band are nothing but parasites. Authorities have too long indulged the native “sovereignty” fiction.
* A CTV (January 8, 2013) reported: “Spence’s …common-law partner and co-manager of Attawapiskat, Clayton Kennedy, said there are no allegations of ‘misappropriation or anything like that.’ Kennedy defended his and Spence’s reported combined household income of about $250,000 a year, saying: ‘I think it’s adequate for the job that is being done.'” Adequate? The couple earn $250,000 between them to manage the finances for their band in such a way auditors can make neither head nor tail of it and the people remain in poverty.
(Spence,left, recently ended hunger strike. She said money was spent on lawyers and consultants. Obviously it wasn’t spent on accountants or housing.)
* When the story of the Attawapiskat substandard housing hit the headlines over a year ago, … many Canadians spontaneously sent aid packages as well.The National Post (January 8, 2013) writer Jonathan Kay describes a CBC investigative report by Adrienne Arsenault: “Perhaps the most pitiful scene in the whole piece is the one in which Ms. Arsenault examines the masses of boxes containing (apparently useful) donations from concerned Canadians.
Yet until Ms. Arsenault came around, no one had even bothered opening them up: Ms. Spence complains that she couldn’t get “volunteers” to do the job. That in itself is a damning indictment of the state of civil society in Attawapiskat.
We are always told that the preservation of reserves is a great way to maintain First Nations culture. But the opposite is true: The best way to destroy a group’s spirit of civic solidarity is to turn the economy into an outsider-funded cargo cult; whereby the locals’ only “job” is to sit around waiting for handouts — to such extent that apparently even rousing themselves to rip open cardboard and plastic is seen as too taxing.
METIS JOIN THE PAYROLL
* Finally, as a further bit of lunacy, a Federal judge earlier this month just added another million special people, declaring Metis and non-status Indians to be “Indians” under the law and, therefore, the responsibility of the federal government. The decision will almost certainly be appealed. Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail(January 9, 2013) noted: “As there are 400,000 people who identify as Métis, the financial obligations on the federal and provincial governments could be extremely heavy, indeed.”
Back when the Charter of Rights was being negotiated in the early 1980s, it was obvious that the status Indian leadership and that of the Métis were superficially polite to each other but deeply distrustful. The Indians did not consider the Métis to be fully Indian (as, indeed, they were not and are not), and the groups’ treatment experiences within Canada had been different. The Métis, however, saw similarities where status Indians did not, and were anxious that the status Indians not receive constitutional protection that eluded them.
(Manitoba Metis leader, David Chartrand, with flag.)
And now the Federal Court says, in essence, that the two groups were treated sufficiently the same, and were lumped together by governments many decades ago, so they should be considered in a similar fashion today.
Which will mean endless negotiations, considerable litigation and, if the Métis are ultimately successful, a huge additional financial obligation on the government that status Indians can only hope doesn’t come from what they’re receiving. If, indeed, the government owes the Indians “hundreds of billions” of dollars, according to one of their lawyers, what might Métis lawyers demand?”
So, now there will be demands for non-status Indians and Metis to be “equal” to the Indians in terms of not paying HST or income tax, having university tuition paid by the taxpayers for their children and being exempt from fishing and hunting laws. More special privileges in the pursuit of equality!
Will there be “compensation” for who knows what historical slight? Only Canada’s activist judiciary can tell and the losers will be the non-Indian taxpayers.
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