An Important Article on Native Indians

The National Post today has an important article, "All The Squalor Money Can Buy", on Canada's policy of encouraging natives to remain on 'isolated, impoverished reserves."

Ric Dolphin does a fine job in going over all the problems facing the native communities today - the poverty, drug abuse, violence, suicide, unemployment, etc. Much of these problems stem from keeping natives on reserves and by not encouraging them to assimilate. Dolphin quotes Pierre Trudeau from 1969,

We can go on treating the Indians as having a special status...adding bricks of discrimination around the ghettos in which they live...Or we can say you're at a crossroads -- the time is now to decide whether the Indians will be a race apart in Canada or whether they will be Canadians of full status.

Unfortunately, the current response of various governments in Canada is to coddle the native community.

Seasoned Canadian politicians, like Trudeau before them, are fully aware of the pitfalls presented in taking on the Indian industry and have generally embraced ease. We have seen it in British Columbia, where the Campbell government's initital hard line on native treaty demands has morphed into a give-'em-what-they-want policy; we are seeing it in Alberta, where the Klein government is giving Indian bands a sweetheart deal on casinos (to the detriment of non-native operators and the community charities that receive a portion of the proceeds); we are seeing it in Manitoba, there the government is exempting Indian casinos and bingo from the provincial smoking ban; we are seeing it in Quebec, where the government has taken a largely hands-off approach to the corruption rampant in the Kanesatake reserve; and we have seen it in the Maritimes, where aboriginal fishermen are permitted to catch more lobster and shrimp than their White competitors.

And this week, we just saw it in the report on the Fraser River disaster where Native over-fishing has destroyed the salmon stock.

Pick up a National Post today and read the whole article. Unfortunately, the whole article is not online for free.