A very scary number

Since 1946, Canadian taxpayers have given natives $3,300,000,000.  That's more than three trillion dollars and where has it landed us?  Nowhere -- not for the natives and not for the rest of Canada.  It's tragic and a scandal of gargantuan proportions. 

An article in The Calgary Sun contained so many depressing facts I could barely finish it.  But people need to know what's going on with natives in this country -- especially as leaders are meeting in Regina as I type.  And especially amid the floundering of the 'Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women' commission which has hit the rocks hard.

• Every chief of the 600-odd reserves in Canada makes more than the prime minister;
• One of Trudeau's first acts was to cancel the Accountability Act, introduced by Harper, which would have forced chiefs to tell their people where the money was going;
• According to RCMP stats, there are 6,420 missing persons in Canada;
• 1455 are women, 164 are natives;
• 88% of murders of native women have been solved;
• 89% of murders of non-native women have been solved;
• 83% of native victims were murdered by a close relative;
• The overwhelming majority of native murderers had already been convicted of a violent crime;
• A two-tiered justice system gives native perpetrators lighter sentences, or none at all;
• 40-50,000 years ago, native ancestors came from Asia across a land/ice bridge;
• They were neither indigenous nor homogenous;
• They killed each other and the Iroquois actually completely wiped out the Huron;
• They practiced violent slavery, to which European settlers put an end.

I could go on.  What is needed is to get these people off reserves and into mainstream Canada.  The answer to the youth suicide epidemic is not to send in more mental health workers.  The answer is to get off the bloody reserves, get properly educated and get jobs.  Sadly, this will never happen because The Indian Act is the mechanism by which the chiefs get their money and that means the reserves and their destitute inhabitants stay put.

Don't believe them when they say we need to revise the act.  That will never happen.