Friends of the Lubicon
PO Box 444 Stn D,
Etobicoke ON M9A 4X4
Tel: (416) 763-7500
Email: fol (at) tao (dot) ca
www.lubicon.ca
March 10, 2006
Attached for your information are copies of recent newspaper articles on an announcement made by the new Canadian Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice that he will be proceeding on an emergency basis to deal with the problem of unsafe drinking water and sewage disposal on 15 selected Indian reserves in Canada. In the next couple of weeks Mr. Prentice will be announcing which 15 Indian communities (out of over 600) will be receiving this urgent emergency attention.
The Lubicons have no water treatment facility or sewage treatment system at all. Neither do they have any community health services and Lubicon housing conditions are terrible with as many as three or four generations living in a poorly insulated 900 square foot bungalow with no running water or indoor toilet facilities. All of the traditional Lubicon sources of drinking water have been contaminated by resource exploitation activity and the Lubicon people have to go 100 kilometers one way to buy bottled water despite the fact that many of them have been forced onto welfare by destruction of the traditional hunting and trapping economy; there is no public transportation serving their community and many of them don't own vehicles. Travelling over 100 kilometers to buy bottled water and getting to an outdoor toilet unassisted is particularly difficult for some of the older Lubicon people, especially during the harsh northern Alberta winter where temperatures can drop to -40 degrees C. As you can imagine, Lubicon medical problems are rampant with widespread asthma and skin rashes among the children so severe as to cause permanent scarring, a tuberculosis epidemic in 1987 which infected a third of the Lubicon people, near epidemic respiratory and stomach problems, cancers of all kinds and reproduction problems which during one 18 month period resulted in 19 still born Lubicon babies out of 21 pregnancies.
If the new minority government includes settlement of Lubicon land rights in the list of priority items they will be announcing in a couple of weeks, and the new Minister sends negotiators to the Lubicon negotiating table to negotiate all outstanding Lubicon settlement issues in good faith, there is a decent chance that a settlement of Lubicon land rights can be negotiated in the next several months. There is also a decent chance that such a settlement would be supported by the opposition political parties.
If there is no movement on the Lubicon issue in the fairly near future, however, it is likely that the minority Conservative government and the Canadian Parliament will both devolve into non-productive internal bickering making it extremely difficult if not impossible to get much of anything accomplished. If that happens any movement on the Lubicon issue will probably be put off until a new federal government is elected. When that election would occur and who might win such an election is unknown. Needless to say, putting off any hope of settlement in the foreseeable future would be very difficult for the Lubicon people.
The Lubicon people are therefore asking supporters to write the new Indian Affairs Minister urging him to give urgency and priority to settlement of Lubicon land rights and to send negotiators to the Lubicon negotiating table with a mandate to negotiate all outstanding Lubicon settlement issues in good faith. With the announcement of government priorities expected as early as next week, it would be good if these letters could be faxed or emailed to the new Minister as soon as possible.
Please write to:
The Hon. Jim Prentice
Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs
Government of Canada
Ottawa, ON K1A 0H4
Canada
Fax: (613) 996-9955
Email: prentice.j@parl.gc.ca
Please send noted copies of your letters to:
Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
Government of Canada
Ottawa, ON K1A 0H4
Canada
Fax: (613) 947-0310
e-mail: Harper.S@parl.gc.ca
Please send copies of your letters to:
Friends of the Lubicon
P.O. Box 444, Stn. D,
Etobicoke, ON
Canada, M9A 4X4
Email: fol@tao.ca
Canadian residents can also assist the Lubicon Nation further by:
1. Joining the national Lubicon petition campaign. Copies of the petition and downloadable information you can hand out to friends, co-workers and others is available here.
2. forwarding this email to your friends and colleagues.
Don Martin
Calgary Herald
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
OTTAWA -- He'll announce a cleanup of tainted drinking water on 15 native reserves in two weeks.
He'll take policies designed to kick-start the $7-billion Mackenzie Valley pipeline project to cabinet next month.
Then Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice plans to revamp the Indian Act and ensure a $5-billion pre-election goodie loosely targeted on improving aboriginal health, education and housing doesn't disappear into a black hole of missing First Nations accountability.
This much Prentice knows for sure after just two weeks on the job: Enough talking native issues; it's time to start walking.
"The Liberals did consultation for the sake of consultation. They used it to defer difficult decisions," he says, sipping an evening beer in a local club this week.
"We have a clear sense of what we are doing and we will make tough decisions, because the status quo isn't working."
Perhaps it's no surprise Prentice is bursting out of the starting gate, unleashing an aggressive agenda to shake up the status quo before his office is unpacked. He's got a major advantage over his parade of predecessors, having spent 10 years inside the department as law commissioner of the Indian Claims Commission.
So while the other rookie ministers are immersed in briefing books with dictionaries to help them decipher the bureaucratese, Prentice has been doing the briefing for officials on what he wants done.
The Calgary MP's first priority is to avoid a Kashechewan II, the Ontario reserve which had to be evacuated in chaotic haste last fall after an E. coli outbreak which, in the end, was traced to local mismanagement.
Early next month, Prentice plans to reveal an emergency response plan to deal with any future water problems and a 45-day blueprint to bring 15 communities suffering acute water treatment failure up to safe standards. They'll be given the proper training and equipment to deliver the clean goods, he says. If they fail, future funding could be cut.
"Aboriginal Canadians are not going to live at risk as long as I am the minister," Prentice declares.
Words to die by for a minister, perhaps, given that hundreds of millions have been invested by earlier federal governments with little evident progress. But let's give Prentice a few months to perform before he's disillusioned by a reality check.
The minister is also big on revamping the Indian Act to deal with the failure of aboriginal education programs administered by the federal government. Education exists in a "legislative vacuum" which doesn't deliver the curricula, protections and services afforded students in the regular school system.
The Harper government also wants to deal with the 800,000 off-reserve Indian, Inuit and Metis who don't receive the bucks or the benefits afforded those in their First Nations territory.
But the top Prentice assignment in the "mandate letter" all ministers received at their swearing-in ceremony is to jackhammer away obstacles hindering progress on the massive Mackenzie Valley pipeline.
"It's not just a pipeline, but a spine of northern development. It will change the east-west axis of oil and gas development northward from the Alberta border to the Arctic Ocean. When it's finished, the Northwest Territories will be a driving engine of our economy," he insists.
But there are plenty of migraines waiting for Prentice before the first kilometre of pipe is buried.
The militant Deh Cho First Nations, whose disputed land claims bisect the pipeline route, remain a daunting obstacle. A $1.2-billion subsidy demanded by lead partner Imperial Oil is a hard-sell handout. And loan guarantees sought by aboriginal partners seem to clash with Conservative opposition to political cash supporting business endeavours.
There are dozens of other native issues which suggest Prentice has inherited a $6-billion department where survival is the only hope and political suicide is a distinct probability.
Improvement, if any, is measured in decades, and demands for more money never cease. It's almost impossible to strike the right balance when it comes to federal intervention. If Prentice is too hard on native leaders, he'll be accused of heavy-handed paternalism. Go too soft and history suggests band mismanagement and corruption will block progress. Getting it just right is something Prentice will seek but may never find.
Even so, Prentice seems to relish swimming in a departmental cesspool which routinely drowns even good ministers. It's an oddly positive reaction for a guy who seems to know what he's doing.
Don Martin writes for the Calgary Herald
© The Edmonton Journal 2006
Sue Bailey
Canadian Press
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
OTTAWA -- Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice is set to announce the first-ever national water standards for native reserves within two weeks.
But meeting the new federal guidelines will require millions of dollars in upgraded equipment and training. "There's a lot of work to be done," Prentice said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
"But we're going to change the way the system operates. We're going to identify people at risk and we're going to deal with them immediately."
Just 40 per cent of water treatment plant operators on reserves are certified. And 76 of 615 First Nations across Canada are under boil-water orders, says Health Canada.
Some communities have dealt with related hazards for years.
The issue made searing headlines last October when 1,000 residents of a remote northern Ontario community were evacuated. Many needed treatment for skin rashes and illness blamed on dirty water and poor sanitation.
"Like all other Canadians, I was appalled by what I saw at Kashechewan," Prentice said.
"As long as I'm minister, I intend to do everything within my power to try to make sure that we identify situations where communities are at risk, and that we take action."
He'll consult native leaders about what they need to reach national water-quality targets, he said.
Ultimately - he hopes within five years - those benchmarks will be enforced as a prerequisite for related federal support.
"If we're going to be funding improvements and remedial action plans, we would expect that people would work toward the national standards."
Bureaucratic ineptitude and general neglect have been blamed for the fact that dozens of First Nations still can't trust what comes out of the tap.
Canada's Environment Commissioner Johanne Gelinas rapped the former Liberal government last September for dragging its heels.
Indian Affairs in 2001 found a significant risk to the quality or safety of drinking water for three-quarters of reserve systems. Despite the looming threat, there were still no federal standards four years later.
Gelinas also noted that about $1.9 billion spent to upgrade water services between 1995 and 2003 achieved little.
The federal government announced another $1.6 billion in 2003 to be spent over five years.
"There's adequate resources," Prentice said, adding that what's needed is a methodical plan to help reserves that are most at risk.
Prentice said independent consultants for Indian Affairs have cited about 15 First Nations that fall into that category.
"The factors that you use to judge whether it's a community at risk depend on a number of things," he explained. "The source of the problem, the nature of the system, the extent to which the system is current or out of date, and the ability of operators, etc."
Indian Affairs is also crafting an emergency response plan to define duties should another Kashechewan occur.
Stan Louttit, grand chief of the Mushkegowuk Council representing James Bay reserves, said he knows of up to 20 communities in Ontario alone that desperately need help.
"Canada is way in the dark ages. We're in 2006 and here we are talking about . . . basic potable water for communities. It never fails to amaze me that governments fail to act or don't recognize a situation until disaster strikes."
The Canadian Press 2006
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