Is the Truth and Reconciliation and Land Acknowledgment grift coming to an end? I always thought that once Murray Sinclair died it would end. However, a lot of milking of the taxpayer still to be done.Every single department in the federal government, meanwhile, has been ordered to spend five per cent of its contracting budget on Indigenous service providers, a system highly prone to abuse. Parks Canada, following B.C.’s lead, is movingtowards a model of “Indigenous stewardship.” Objections to major projects on the basis of Indigenous spirituality have been given the cloak of secrecy.
And in the fisheries, the feds have been giving hundreds of millions of dollars to First Nations for fishing equipment, while also pulling quota from non-Indigenous fishers and handing it to their Indigenous counterparts as a matter of equity.
Canada has paid billions upon billions to rectify past wrongs — figures that supersede what we spend on the military, and yet are still not enough.
Here’s a partial list: $23 billion to settle the lawsuit for the government not adequately covering the costs of Indigenous children in care; $1.72 billion to cover the cost of farming equipment that was promised to Saskatchewan First Nations 150 years ago but wasn’t provided; $14.9 billion to resolve special claims since 1973; $1.1 billion to settle a lawsuit by patients of federal Indigenous hospitals; $1 billion to an Alberta First Nation to adjust 19th-century treaty payments to modern dollars and $10 billion to another in Ontario, opening the doors to other nations doing the same.
And there are many more on the way. Some Manitoba First Nations are suing Manitoba Hydro for a share of the energy company’s profits, some Ontario First Nations are seeking $95 billion and the power to halt all development in Treaty 9 land without Indigenous consent. It all adds up to complete economic stagnation.
The Liberal government’s attitude of pulling punches and paying claims out the nose — and appointing judges who are open to the idea of more and more compensation — has swelled this into a problem of scales hard to comprehend. Oh, and when anyone points out the sheer cost of all this, they can expect to be accused of perpetuating the “colonial mindset.”
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