Are all our politicians
heartless racist liars?
    Federal officials are visiting Attawapiskat to assess the need for help in the isolated Cree community on the shore of James Bay. Assess the need? They’ve known the need for decades.
    Three years in a row Attawapiskat has declared a state of emergency and pleaded for outside help. It has people living in uninsulated tents, without heat, hydro or plumbing. Ontario and the feds do as little as possible and haggle over jurisdiction.
    Federal Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Minister John Duncan says he’s taking the crisis seriously but is waiting to be sure that funds already provided are being used effectively. Ontario Aboriginal Affairs Minister Kathleen Wynne says Ontario’s waiting for Ottawa, but “there haven’t been specific requests or proposals, and that’s why it’s taken some time to get clear as to what needs to happen.”
     Meanwhile there are people have become permanent residents of overcrowded emergency shelters, people using buckets for toilets and oil drums for wood stoves, children still lacking a proper school since theirs was bulldozed 11 years ago as a health hazard.
    And politicians are waiting to find out what needs to happen?
    We airlift vast relief supplies almost immediately to earthquake victims in Haiti and Afghanistan. When Winnipeg has a flood threat — or even when a snowfall spooks Toronto  — we call out the army. But for the neediest among us — the aboriginal people our governments have oppressed, cheated, lied to since Confederation and before — we have only red tape and doublespeak.