The root causes....

....are the parents.  All the talking heads blabbing about the partial gun ban are completely missing the point.  One young woman-of-colour said youth gun violence was the result of the cutbacks to social programs aimed at young men, who then join gangs and kill one another.

No.

As I just said, the "root causes" are the parents.  Period the end.  Does it occur to no one but me that the parents have been delinquent here?  If you're a responsible, law-abiding parent, you would make sure your kids didn't buy guns and join gangs.  It's the same with the natives.  They all blame "the government" for the sad state of Indian reserves, but it's the families living there and their leaders who are the root cause and the problem.  G-d knows "the government", i.e., you and me, give them lots of money because they insist on staying there...to get the money, by the way....but they completely mis-manage it causing their people to live in squalor simply because they insist on managing the money themselves.  Duh!   

Remember Tina Fontaine? (See "With their faces hanging out," Sept. 24, 2014)  Everyone and their brother -- including her parents, who were living in the same city at the time and went on tv  -- blamed "the system".  What was she doing in care in the first place?  Ya, right.  That was a rhetorical question.

Now celebrity native Jodi Wilson-Raybould has penned an OpEd piece in 'The Globe and Mail" which made my eyes bulge.  "The key reason I ran for office was the desire to help create the legal and political space for Indigenous peoples to be self-determining, including self-governing," she writes.  Really?  No society can be self-governing and self-determining while pocketing billions from an outside source.  How could you miss that obvious truth, Jodi?  Ah, but Jodi only speaks "her truth," sorry I forgot.      

Frankly, I can't think of another group funded by the taxpayer that gets off as scott-free as the natives.  Accountable to no one, they also expect to follow none of the rules the rest of us do -- like generate their own wealth, defend their borders, raise an army, raise their own children, etc., etc., etc.  In other words, they're not actually "nations".  It's all getting a tad tiring, but I did expect a little more intelligence from Wilson-Raybould. 

Seems all natives spout the same complaints.  Do none speak for themselves?  I guess if they don't go along with Perry Bellegarde and his gang of merry men they wouldn't dare say it out loud in the public thoroughfare.

And don't even get me started on Cindy Blackstock.................!!  (See "She's done it again," Sept. 8, 2019)