One of U of A Law's alumni has recently posted a lengthy dissection of the Federal Government's (sorry, "The Harper Government's") position on Attawapiskat. It is an excellent piece, with many links to related documents. You can see it here.
The blog post predates the government's announcement that it is removing control over band finances from the band council and into the hands of a private accounting company (see the Globe and Mail story here). Thus, the author does not directly address this response, but considering what she (and earlier audits have shown), the problem does not appear to be in the local allocation of funds provided, but in the lack of funds provided for housing in any case. The response is a nice bit of blame-shifting, asserting that the local government is obviously incapable of looking after its finances, and plays nicely into an anti-government ideology that assumes private control is better than public (or democratic?). One hopes, now that they've done this, the feds will at least not hire these guys to manage the community.
A large part of this atonement needs to be an acceptance that you can't carve your place in the sun without taking some risks.
Posted by: ugg australia | December 08, 2011 at 07:33 PM
Thanks for the links, very informative. I'm curious: Is the government's decision to strip the band council of its financial powers Legal, does anyone know??
Posted by: Marnie Tunay | December 12, 2011 at 02:10 PM