Finger-pointing at Attawapiskat more than a little hypocritical

One need not agree with Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence's attempt to coerce others' behaviour by harming herself to be disgusted by the reactions she has received.

Her claim of a witch hunt has credibility when one examines the more venomous criticism. It ranges from contemptible comments about her weight to the nasty cud of racism in the form of regurgitated statistics carefully selected to distort perceptions.

Take, for example, the unsolicited email purporting to reveal endemic corruption on Indian reserves, in particular the administration of Attawapiskat under Chief Spence.

First, let's examine an assertion that the federal government has spent $90 million in Attawapiskat since 2006. This spending works out to about $10,000 per resident per year, notes the faith group Kairos, which has been crunching the numbers. A community like Attawapiskat differs from Vancouver in that the federal government has responsibility for all those services that in other communities are provided by both municipal and provincial governments.

So let's turn to Statistics Canada and see what the spending is per individual in other cities, where it is spread across three levels of government. Gosh, according to the federal government, average spending per person is more than $12,500.

In other words, that exorbitant spending in Attawapiskat actually lags spending on those of us living in, say, Shaughnessy, by $2,500 a year.

The difference can be much higher in major urban centres where voters live. Spending on the average Torontonian, for example, is estimated by blogger Lorraine Land of the Toronto law firm Othuis, Kleer, Townshend, to be about $24,000 per year. In Vancouver, add federal expenditures per person to provincial and municipal spending and the basic arithmetic yields about $20,000 per year per person.

Please, a little less quacking about gross over-spending on First Nations.

Well, why don't First Nations members relocate from reserves to find jobs? Um, they do. About 75 per cent of people who define themselves as First Nations now live off-reserve.

Next, the accusation that corrupt chiefs line their pockets, an assumption propelled by that audit of Attawapiskat posted by Ottawa earlier this month.

The received wisdom is that accounting practices were in shambles and the federal government was forced to insert a third-party manager to regain control.

Unmentioned is the fact that the band's finances were being co-managed by Ottawa. Or that the audit also says that so much progress had been made that the default situation was considered remedied by early 2012.

Then there's the Federal Court ruling last August that "financial management was not the problem" at Attawapiskat, that the band was making progress on the implementation of a 2011 remedial management plan brought in by Spence, and that the federal government's appointment of a third-party manager was "unreasonable in all the circumstances of this case."

Furthermore, the judge notes that in the rush to impose the outside manager to sort out the alleged financial mismanagement he said wasn't the source of the problem, federal authorities could produce "little in the way of any contemporaneous notes in the record" showing how or why the decision was reached.

Shoddy record-keeping, it appears, is not merely a problem for small First Nations communities with less expertise than Ottawa.

In addition, the auditor-general reports that over the past decade, federal government agencies responsible for managing First Nations finances "have not made satisfactory progress in implementing our recommendations." It appears that even as the accounting practices were improving at Attawapiskat, they were deteriorating in Ottawa.

Meanwhile, if one wants inept government, try B.C. Over the last 20 years, we've had one premier resign in a conflict of interest with developers, another after skimming charities was uncovered, another after a scandal when somebody associated with a gambling application provided personal services, and yet another was convicted of drunk driving. Federally, we've had improper practices revealed in campaign finances during the 2006 election, scandals over awarding of contracts and so on, and a large investigation into alleged election irregularities is still underway.

In Vancouver, we've had a convention centre that came in at six times its originally estimated cost of $100 million or so. Taxpayers forked over $600 million to replace the roof on a football stadium that keeps 30,000 fans dry about nine times a year (based on average attendance, that's about $220 a ticket per game over the next decade).

Not to mention a murky government decision to pay the legal bills of a couple of former government apparatchiks whose guilty pleas coincidentally meant high-ranking politicos wouldn't have to testify in court.

Are there some crooks on Indian reserves? Undoubtedly. Are there more than there are elsewhere? Highly debatable.

Meanwhile, that lax (but improving) accounting at Attawapiskat looks pretty trivial next to what goes on in the mainstream.

Original Article
Source: vancouver sun
Author:  Stephen Hume