Halfway into his term, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shows every sign of breaking his much-vaunted promises to repair relations between the Canadian governments and the indigenous peoples of Canada: from the pipelines he's forcing through their sovereign territories to the endless and opaque reshuffling of the ministry that is supposed to carry on the "nation to nation" negotiations to make reparations and establish a new relationship to the ongoing, catastrophic discrimination against indigenous children in the child welfare system.
Tens of thousands of First Nations kids are in a child welfare system that gets nearly 40 per cent less funding than their provincial counterparts. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal first ordered the feds to remedy this gross inequity in a landmark 2016 ruling.Little has happened since, despite three more orders to comply.
"Canada is saying it's above the law, it doesn't owe First Nations children equality in this country," said Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, which launched the nine-year legal action along with the Assembly of First Nations that led to the ruling.
Even with this track record, Justice Minister and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould still stood before her former colleagues at the Assembly of First Nations bi-annual meeting in July and extolled the virtues of her government, while asking for patience.
Trudeau's promise of a renewed relationship with Indigenous Peoples seems to be all talk
[Tim Fontaine/CBC]
(via Naked Capitalism)
(Image: Mark Klotz
, CC-BY)
