03) STILL NO SOLUTION TO ABORIGINAL HOUSING CRISIS IN MANITOBA
By Darrell Rankin
For one and a half years, more than 2,000 members of the Lake St. Martin First Nation have been without homes and split up. The life of an entire nation is forever damaged by imposed provincial flood control and federal government/corporate‑caused climate change. This is genocide in Manitoba today.
Hundreds of children will "celebrate" their second Christmas without a real home, in hotels or essentially in a foreign land.
The federal and provincial governments have failed to respond in a meaningful way, although the scale of the disaster is monumental. To put this in perspective, the Lake St. Martin First Nation represents 1 out of 604 people in Manitoba, or about 1 of 272 Manitobans living outside of Winnipeg.
It is another stark example of the inequality of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Rather than respect the treaty signed with the Lake St. Martin First Nation, pro-corporate governments are rejecting this nation's choice of location to establish a new reserve.
The Manitoba NDP government is making unilateral decisions where the First Nation must live "temporarily." The government even secretly bought some neighbouring land, a location rejected as unsuitable by the First Nation.
Deliberate flooding since 1961 has made the First Nation's land uninhabitable, ending with the forced, emergency transfer of people in 2011. Roughly the same number of people are still displaced from other First Nations after the historic 2011 Manitoba flood.
Stephen Harper, Greg Selinger and their corporate backers are responsible for the gross injustice. Instead, the Harper government is accusing members of the Lake St. Martin First Nation of "fraud" and dropping people from evacuation lists to cover up its racist inaction.
The federal government also cut its meagre evacuation allowances on November 1. "Before, each adult evacuee received $23.40 a day and each child $18.70 a day. Now, Ottawa will pay rent or hotel charges, as well as $3.20 a day in living allowances for children and $4 a day for adults." (Winnipeg Free Press, November 21, 2012). Try to eat on that!
Evacuee costs for Aboriginal people make up about 7 per cent of the total spent to recover from the flood. Yet the federal government cut the allowances because it says the nation is in "recovery." There is no recovery, because no solution is in sight!
A town of 2,000 non‑Aboriginal people would be relocated and rebuilt by now. Last year's Slave Lake, Alberta fire displaced 700 people. Three‑quarters of private homes are rebuilt; all apartments will be completed within another year. When 100,000 people lost their homes to the 1871 Chicago fire, the large majority had new homes in two years and the city doubled in size by 1880. Ontario supplied forests of lumber.
What is the hold‑up now in Manitoba?
The 2011 flood never directly touched most people in Manitoba, yet governments are "warehousing" the unresolved problem of displaced Aboriginal peoples. Compared to Hurricane Sandy in the eastern U.S., this was a major climate catastrophe for our small province of 1.2 million people.
The City of Winnipeg, other communities and farmers downstream owe a great debt to the Lake St. Martin First Nation, yet public gratitude by these communities is lacking. One Winnipeg City Councillor is hesitating to express thanks and a wish for a solution because it might create a "legal or financial obligation" to the First Nation!
This is plain cruelty and ingratitude to people who sacrificed their homes and ancestral homeland. The labour movement and every group that supports justice for Aboriginal peoples clearly needs to step forward and demand a solution to this national housing crisis, and soon.
Enough is enough. Justice delayed in justice denied.
(Darrell Rankin is the Manitoba leader of the Communist Party of Canada.)
(The above article is from the December 1-31, 2012, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)