Toronto Star Article: Status Indians In Canada Are Suffering Due To Politics.
A STAR INVESTIGATION
Status Indians are falling further behind other Canadians in quality of life. The Star investigates the gap, which continues to grow along with the federal bureaucracy focused on Indian issues in this series.
Rotting First Nation, wealthy chief
Glenn Hudson, chief of the Peguis First Nation in Manitoba., is one of 30 chiefs who earn more than provincial premiers. In 2009 he earned $206,381 tax-free.
BRETT POPPLEWELL/TORONTO STAR
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PEGUIS FIRST NATION, MAN.—As the leader of one of the country’s largest and most indebted First Nations, Glenn Hudson has attracted the ire of his community, the media, the general public and the department of Indian Affairs.
With a tax-free income of $206,381 (the taxable equivalent of $355,107) in 2009, Hudson’s remuneration exceeds that of the prime minister, who earned a taxable $310,800 that year.
It’s a sore point for many of his people who live in mould-infested houses, 65 per cent of which Indian and Northern Affairs Canada says should be either condemned or renovated.
That juxtaposition of rich and poor on this perpetually saturated flood plain 150 kilometres north of Winnipeg attracted the Toronto Star.
With $20 million of debt, Peguis, which spends more taxpayer dollars than the $31 million per year that it’s allotted, is one of at least 157 First Nations in financial trouble. But the financial mismanagement of this community has been a problem for years.
Peguis was $10 million in debt 11 years ago.
According to Indian Affairs’ own protocols, the community’s debt should have triggered the department to place its finances in the hands of a third party manager in 1999.
That didn’t happen.
Eleven years on, with Peguis rotting both financially and structurally, the community’s finances have only recently been placed under partial management of a Saskatchewan-based consulting firm which, according to Hudson, is getting paid $210,000 a year to help balance the community’s finances.
It’s a drizzly Tuesday afternoon in Peguis. Outside, the muddy, potholed roads that cut through this community of 3,660 Ojibwa and Cree Indians are relatively quiet, the result of too much rain and too little to do.
Inside the dilapidated shopping mall, there’s a lineup of community members, young and old, gathered outside Hudson’s office. They’ve come to vent their frustrations to the chief, who, for the past two weeks, has been holidaying in South Africa while his people swept floodwater out of their homes.
Hudson is the signing authority on all matters related to the band. He decides who gets to go to university on the band’s dime, who gets an all-expenses-paid funeral, and who gets a new house. He also decides what his own salary will be.
As chief, he used band finances to back a $170,055 mortgage on his own home and has hired the engineering firm that used to employ him to handle all the claims put forward by band members who have the misfortune of getting flooded every summer. He defends the latter action as giving business to an Indian-run engineering company rather than “some white” firm from Winnipeg.
Inside the chief’s simple, pre-fab office there’s no computer on his desk, only a calendar, a notebook and a clipping from a local newspaper saying the chief and council are doing a stand-up job.
Asked to comment on accusations that his salary is exorbitantly high, the 42-year old industrial engineer-turned chief is quick to point out that he makes less than his predecessor, Louis Stevenson, chief for 26 years. In Stevenson’s outgoing year of 2006-2007, he earned a tax-free $373,011 — the taxable equivalent of $665,984.
Hudson’s also quick to point out that Stevenson, who was arrested in 2000 after brandishing a hand gun inside a Winnipeg bar, was known for attracting controversy to the community.
Stevenson did not respond to the Star’s requests for an interview.
“The previous chief ran a dictatorship here,” Hudson says. “I’m just maintaining the status quo.”
Unfortunately for many people in Peguis, the status quo is abject poverty.
Take, for example, Miranda Daniels, a 25-year-old mother of two living in a mould-infested condemned home with her two and three year old sons.
“They tell me I shouldn’t be living in here,” she says. “But I have no place else to go.”
With a Grade 12 education, Daniels tried to live in Winnipeg, but having grown up in Canada’s reserve system, she says she felt like a Third World immigrant in a city known for its native gangs and ghettos. So she moved back to Peguis with her children and joined the more than 1,000 people collecting welfare here, and added her young family to the list of 600 others waiting for community housing.
Hers is a story echoed by a number of young families living in homes that reek of rot.
“I don’t understand how we are allowed to live like this,” Daniels says. “The chief lives in a new house while we live in this.”
In April, Chuck Strahl, then minister of Indian Affairs, wrote a letter to Hudson citing “financial management, transparency and accountability challenges” as cause for stripping Hudson of some of his powers and strongly suggested that the chief and council take a 20 per cent pay cut.
Hudson, who says his salary has now dropped to $170,000 a year (the taxable equivalent of $287,231), says he and his band councillors are being punished by Indian Affairs, embarrassed into action by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation — which had used Hudson’s salary as a rallying cry to demand transparency and accountability on reserves across the country.
“When you go pressure and lobby the federal government, they’re going to react, and that’s what Chuck Strahl did,” says Hudson.
“I can show you numbers where we were 40 and 45 per cent in deficit back in 1999. Why didn’t the minister step in (then)?”
Anna Fontaine, regional director for Indian Affairs in Winnipeg, won’t specify why the department cracked down on Peguis but insists it wasn’t because of public pressure.
Whatever the cause, Hudson is adamant that the only way for his people to climb out of the financial mess they are in is to do it themselves. He says Indian Affairs won’t help them, hasn’t helped them, never will help them.
The Peguis band moved to their current reserve lands in 1907, when they were illegally relocated from their traditional territory in Selkirk, Man.
In 2009, Hudson inked a deal with the government, formally surrendering the band’s claim on land’s now occupied by the city of Selkirk.
The community’s surrender claim is valued at $118 million, which Hudson says will be used to help build much-needed housing and infrastructure.
“They moved us onto a flood plain and took our land,” he says. “Now they’re mad at our salaries?”
“We opened up this country for settlement based on our treaties. We have been given the short end of the stick in terms of what should come back to us as nations.
“(Taxes) are not the basis of what is paying our salary. It’s the rich natural resources that Canada and all Canadians benefit from that is paying our salary.”
CNN International Article: Uganda’s Incendiary Anti Gay Law May Be Passed Soon.
Ugandan anti-gay measure will be law soon, lawmaker says
- The bill would punish homosexuality with life imprisonment or execution
- It was introduced by a member of Uganda’s Parliament a year ago
- With no activity, other governments and rights groups believed it had been shelved
- Not so, says the sponsor, who adds that it will become law “soon”
Kampala, Uganda (CNN) — The member of the Ugandan Parliament behind a controversial “anti-gay” bill that would call for stiff penalties against homosexuality — including life imprisonment and the death penalty — says that the bill will become law “soon.”
“We are very confident,” David Bahati told CNN, “because this is a piece of legislation that is needed in this country to protect the traditional family here in Africa, and also protect the future of our children.”
Governments that have donated aid to Uganda and human rights groups applied massive pressure since the bill was proposed a year ago, and most believed that the bill had been since shelved.
Not so, says Bahati, adding, “Every single day of my life now I am still pushing that it passes.”
Video: Interview with persecuted gay Ugandan
Video: Lesbian couple flees mob
His statements come in the wake of a global outcry over a tabloid publication of Uganda’s “top 100 homosexuals” that included pictures and addresses of Ugandans perceived to be gay.
The Ugandan newspaper Rolling Stone — no relation to the U.S. magazine — published the list in early October. Since then, at least four Ugandans have been attacked, according to gay rights groups in the country.
Stosh Mugisha was one of them. On the day that the tabloid was published, people started pointing at her and commenting, she says. Late that night, a crowd gathered outside her house.
“People were throwing stones through gate,” says Mugisha, “they were shouting, ‘Homosexual homosexual!’ I started getting scared.”
Mugisha and her partner of one year had to flee their house the next morning, narrowly escaping stoning. Now they are in hiding.
–Giles Muhame, newspaper editor
“They start bringing in these issues like, ‘How can you be born gay? How can you be born lesbian?’ They really don’t know that we have battled to stand and be who we are,” Mugisha says.
Giles Muhame, the youthful editor of Rolling Stone, is unrepentant. He says homosexuality is a virus spreading through the world and believes they have done a public good.
He says the aim was to target Ugandan homosexuals who were recruiting “converts in schools.”
“We thought, by publishing that story, the police would investigate them, prosecute them, and hang them,” says Muhame.
While extreme views to many, in Uganda even this sentiment holds some weight. This is a mostly Christian country where local and international, particularly American, evangelicals hold great sway. Together with Ugandan politicians and preachers, they have lobbied for greater punishments for gays.
Mugisha says she used to be a Christian, but the constant harassment she receives for wearing pants, rather than a dress or skirt, or for wearing a baseball cap and being “boyish” as she calls it, means she has lost her faith.
She says Uganda is no place for gays and lesbians.
And member of Parliament Bahati agrees, “God has given us different freedoms, our democracy is giving us different freedoms, but I don’t think anyone has the freedom to commit a crime and homosexuality in our country is a crime, it’s criminal.”
Gayblackcanada 