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I guess the difference is if your town council wasn’t accountable, you would consider it a matter only for citizens if your town, and you would consider to be nobody else’s business. You definitely wouldn’t stand for Torotonians or or Wuebeckers sticking their noses in your business and shutting down your water treatment plant just because your town council has sloppy accountability paperwork.

Also we’re talking about basic necessities here. One of the FN communities in question has been under a boil water advisory for OVER TWENTY YEARS. The feds built a substandard water treatment plant in ‘93 and it broke down in ‘95 and was never repaired. I get that issues like nepotism and accountability are important but we’re talking about kids suffering third world diseases here. None of you would tolerate this type of treatment for your town just because your town council had accountability issues.

   

Do you REALLY think that all those roads, highways, water treatment plants, public sanitation, schools, hospitals, emergency first responders etc.that you enjoy are created and fundef by voluntary private sector donations? They come from predictable long-term taxpayer funding.

   

I see so the band is responsible for the behaviour of corrupt band councils,
and we should nothing to stop it, just throw mo' money, and never mind
the 'sloppy paperwork' blatant embezzlement.


[/quote]

What a wonderful appeal to emotion.
So teary and crybabyish.

Yes, whitey wouldn't tolerate it.
Whitey would vote the council out.
Whitey would vote for a council that would contact the Feds to get
things fixed.
Because whitey has democracy.

I guess that means the FNs just aren't ready for things like democracy and accountability.

Mo' money would solve this.
But checking up on them, well that's just racist.

   

It'll make a handful of chiefs and their lackeys rich and the rest of the people living in Bannock Republics/Bannockistans. More stupidity.

   

The Supreme Court has ruled, repeatedly, that the indigenous people have rights and title. It seems to be whitey that has the problem handing over title. They shouldn't need to be transferring money to reserves. The tax base from royalties should go straight to the reserves, since it's their land.

And if whitey don't like it, he can go back to Europe and cry in his beer.

   

Let me know when you get there, I'll come pay you a visit.

   

I'm not the one whining about lawfully recognizing aboriginal rights and title. You really should be thanking the First Nations for their forebearance as we inflict one horror after another upon them.

S'ok though--I hear they have a vibrant white nationalist movement in Germany these days. Fit right in.

   

Major differences here. Bands and reserves are funded by the Federal government, not via the usual property tax system in towns and cities around the country.

There is no excuse for sloppy paperwork. The money is there to hire a professional bookkeeper.



I know of an issue like this on Georgina Island (Lake Simcoe). It's a Chippewa reserve. This was on a website a few years back.

The government came in and built the island a treatment facility along with fire hydrants all over the island and provided training to one of the residence, tools and a vehicle to maintain the facility.

I believe it was a year or so later, the Band took the vehicle away from the repair person to be used for something else which means the guy had to ride his bike to the facility with tools/chemicals in a basket. Following that, the residents pillaged the property by removing the fencing to sell as scrap metal.

   

That approach doesn't work very well. I've seen it fail with First Nations here in Canada as well as aid sites in Africa and in nation-building in Asia. You need a more integrated approach. One firm, that is having some considerable success here in BC, hires young engineers with a sense of adventure. They move these young people onto the reserve for a few months during the entire process of design and build for the given infrastructure.

The young engineers inevitably get an appreciation for a different culture, and the First Nation gets a far more integrated design based on the local needs (as opposed to being thrown together off-site), and the training is much better because it's not just a couple of days, and the trainees get to see the facility being built.

   

And then what happens after the few months the engineer is on-site? Looks like the benefit here is to the external engineer and not the community as chances are, it will fall into disrepair when the band is left to maintain.

   

The idea is that the Nation gets proper training, as opposed to flying in a guy for two days to hand out a manual. Not everything left to First Nations falls into disrepair, and when it does we should look at the reason for it.

   

That's what happened in the case of Georgina Island. The individual selected to maintain the facility was sent off-reserve for extensive training.

Training is one thing. Having the necessary tools to do the job is another. When you don't have the support of the band and they take away your tools, there's not much left to do but let it fall into disrepair.

   

Bullshit. Corrupt/unaccountable/incompetent government was a fixture of whitey land too, right up until the early-mid 20th century and even later in some places . Somehow it never ended up with white townsfolk and children being subjected to deliberate collective punishment

[auote]I guess that means the FNs just aren't ready for things like democracy and accountability.[/quote]

Prosperity always comes first, rhe rest comes later. That’s how it was with whitey. First we created a middle class, then systemic corruption faded and professional administration was created.



There are few problems in this world that can solved without money. And what’s this “checking up on” stuff you’re talking about?

   

The human race everywhere has always been corrupt.

   

Billions of dollars=prosperity.

An abundance of natural resources=prosperity

The problem is that we and the Natives insist on maintaining the archaic Indian Act. There are so many opportunities for our Native communities to prosper.




First Nations Financial Transparency Act. The act that forced Bands to make their finances public and accountable to their own people. The act that caused a lot of questions to be asked once Natives saw how much the band was paying their own staff.

   

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