After 20 years of lawsuits.....

 ....The Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and Indigenous Services Canada finally reached a whopping settlement of $48 billion -- yep, that's billions, folks -- for on-reserve child-care and welfare reform.

This transpired because the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, headed by an enthusiastic activist named Jennifer Khurana, ruled that Ottawa discriminated against on-reserve services through under-funding.  So, the remedy was $48 billion, up from the original $23 billion awarded in 2022.  But true-to-form, it's not enough.

The ever-financially-vigilant Cindy Blackstock, director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, has publicly intervened, calling for the agreement to be re-negotiated.  For more money.  Of course she did.  Then AFN chief Cindy Woodhouse-Nepinak decided to make a real cat fight out of it at the recent AFN conference in Calgary and piled on.  "There's no getting around the fact that this agreement was too much of a threat to the status quo of the industry built on taking First Nations children from their families."

Bingo.  That's what Blackstock does.  That's how she gets her funding.  Taking kids from their families.  "Stop the discrimination against First Nations children now and forever.  Canada should not hurt children ever again," railed Blackstock.  But Cindy, if it all stopped, you'd be out of a job.

Cindy's gang gets $3.8 million a year -- 40 percent of which goes to administration and fund-raising.  It doesn't all go to helping children, so let's get that straight. 

Ms. Blackstock with a teddy for the kids.

Discrimination?  Hurting children?  I'd say the ones hurting children must be the parents who have their kids taken away, no?  Wouldn't they be the ones to blame?  I mean, kids aren't taken from their families for no reason because it's very expensive.  But of course, no one ever mentions this inconvenient fact.  Except me.

I'm with minister Patty Hajdu, who said she was disappointed the deal was rejected because the final, 20-years-in-the-making settlement would have provided transformational change.  Now they'll just start all over.  And who benefits from the re-do?  Rhetorical.  What a colossal waste of time and money.  Will any amount ever be enough for natives on any file?  The chiefs themselves weren't even in agreement.  My question is, what's the AFN for if chiefs question everything its elected leaders negotiate on their behalf? 

And then we have the demonstrations about natives being killed while in police custody, or while violent and dangerous in the public thoroughfare.  They want a public inquiry into the whole thing.  Led by supporters of Edith Wells, whose son was killed during a fight in the lobby of a Calgary hotel, the group says the inquiry must be held "immediately".  Really?  To what end?  

The facts are already on the table.  Jon Wells was out-of-control on drugs and alcohol.  The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team was called and Wells died at the scene.  We don't even know from what at this point, but apparently it's all racist and unfair.

Perhaps these women and mothers could look in the mirror to learn how their kids go so wrong.  Perhaps they might also shed a tear for the female victims of intimate partner violence killed or injured by an Indigenous male partner.  The Supreme Court ruled that trial judges must take into account the offender's "background, intergenerational trauma, systemic discrimination and the residential school system" when passing sentence.  

This has meant that appeal judges have overturned, or greatly reduced, sentences in Indigenous cases.  In one, the BC Supreme Court gave the offender just five years after he pled guilty to killing his partner.  Five years because he was Indigenous.

In another, an Indigenous man who brutally abused his Indigenous partner, who had to have her teeth extracted and jaw wired shut, was given no jail time at all.

Perhaps the mothers decrying the fate of their sons could spare a moment to consider that it is Indigenous women who are paying the price for a particular effort to right historical wrongs.

Frankly, if you're out-of-control in public and threatening the lives of police and others, you can expect anything to happen -- regardless of your race.