The Liberal government has accepted both the recommendations
of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and more recently the
findings of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in terms of the discrimination that children in First
Nations communities have historically faced. It is certainly refreshing to have
a government that does not fight the obvious. However, such acceptance is, on
its own, worthless. People will want to see some action. If there are not clear
plans presented within the next few months, the government will been seen as
just one more Canadian government that makes promises when it has no intentions
to do anything.
The government's commitment to start to
address the sins of our forefathers, while it may have been made in good faith,
could not have been made at worse time in terms of the country's capacity to
spend more money on education and housing in the far north. Canada's economy is
caught in a geopolitical game of chicken for which it is poorly prepared to
play. As long as multinational companies or countries with either much larger
war chests or a lot less to lose are prepared to manipulate the availability of
resources (in particular oil), Canada assets will have limited value. Or rather
we will have little or no control over the value of those assets. While the
reduction of the once healthy tax base has many consequences, one of them is
that there is less to spend on social programs.
However, even if Canada had multi-millions of
dollars sitting in the bank, I convinced that no one knows the answer to the
complex series of social problems that confront both the First Nation
communities in the north and the large number of Indigenous citizens who live
in or near urban areas. The lack of obvious solutions is in a large part due to
the fact that while such issues as the need for better social service/support
sound like a consistent problem throughout the majority of First Nations
communities, the causes for the lack of services are not. There is not one
solution that will meet all needs.
Some of the
problem rest with geography. There are many communities that are just
too far away and far too small to be able to have access to some services. For
example it is unreasonable to assume that a community of six or seven hundred
people will have a school that provides everything that an urban school does.
The elementary school that both my children went to, while it was reasonably
close to major metropolitan areas, did not have a dedicated music, gym, or art
teacher. The school was too small. The situation is far more challenging the
further north one goes. It is not that those students do not need or deserve
all of the supports that all students need and deserve, but rather that the
cost is prohibitive. Even if the
grant-per-student were identical across Canada, it would not fully address the
lack of educational supports or programs in isolated First Nations communities.
We need to acknowledge that if we are committed to proving equal opportunities,
it will cost more per student to give them equal opportunities when that
student is in a small isolated community.
Similarly
communities in crisis have an enhanced need to have complex and comprehensive
mental health supports. But it is unreasonable to assume that the same small
community will have a few social workers and at least a consulting doctor. No
community of equal size in the south has their own mental health system. But
what those communities in the south do have is relatively easy access (at least
on paper) to the needed mental health services located in nearby urban areas.
Northern communities do not have major urban area anywhere near them. There is
nowhere to drive to. Most Indigenous leaders would argue that it has been
proven that "shipping" people in need to services 500 miles away has
been at best problematic and usually worse than useless. Clearly we need to
find a solution somewhere between every community having its own stand alone
mental health system and sending people out of their community for extended
periods.
Canadians need to have this discussion, not
out of guilt or out of anger but rather as a complex problem that will affect
all of our lives in the future.
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