mediaINDIGENA

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  • AUDIO: Discussing Canada’s soft support of the UN Declaration; Aboriginal Political Twitterers

    Better late than never with the Nov. 16 edition of MEDIA INDIGENA on ‘THE WORD’ with host Lady V and MI’s Rick Harp as they discuss Aboriginal accounts to follow on Twitter for political junkies, and how Canada’s “Statement of Support” for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples got immediately tested by women’s rights advocate Sharon McIvor.

    MI on STREETZ, Nov. 16, 2010:
    [audio:https://mediaindigena.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/MI-StreetzFM-nov16-10.mp3|titles=MI-StreetzFM-nov16-10]

    Catch MI on THE WORD live on-air/on-line at STREETZ 104.7 FM every Tuesday at 12 noon central time.

  • First Nations leaders reject “inaccurate, negative publicity” over salaries: do they have a point?

    UPDATE (Nov 24, 2010): Hours after originally penning this piece, I realized I needed to make my point better and more fairly about how the data has been misrepresented, and by whom. Accordingly, I wish to clarify here that INAC did in fact track and present the data for travel, honoraria and salary separately (though it still isn’t always clear how these each break down) — it was only the CTF who re-presented them as a lump-sum figure, making it seem like the “salaries” were larger than they were. Go to the original CTF post and click on one of the data sets to see what I mean.)

    The day after the Canadian Taxpayers Federation published what it claims is 2008 “chief and council pay data” for reserve politicians across Canada, reaction has come fast, hard — and, so far, a bit vague.

    Today, Chief Shirley Clarke of the Glooscap First Nation in Nova Scotia told the media in a statement that she feels “the [CTF] document provides an inaccurate perception that we are unjustly overpaid for the limitless work we do on behalf of our community.”

    According to The Vancouver Sun, it very much appears that Glooscap is the First Nation where “the highest [reported] salary [sic]— $978,468 — went to an unnamed band councillor at a small Mi’kmaq reserve in Atlantic Canada.” It is thought the anonymous politician represents this tiny community of 300 people (with just 87 of them living on-reserve) because, as the CBC noted, the CTF “report only identified reserves by population and federal funding,” and in Glooscap’s case, the figures “exactly matched.”

    But Chief Clarke would neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of this near-$1 million figure to reporters; she would only say the data as presented are misleading because they do not include a breakdown of what the compensation covers, reports the CBC. The Canadian Press also quotes the Chief as saying “Our responsibilities are endless,” and do not follow a typical 9-to-5 schedule.

    Meanwhile, Chief Lawrence Paul of Millbrook First Nation (also in Nova Scotia) told the Toronto Star, “he has no problem with making salary information public if the same standard applies to all governments and corporations.”

    Included within that similar standard should be the method of calculation and presentation. One point that has been made elsewhere on MEDIA INDIGENA, and not altogether unfairly, is that figures provided to promoted by CTF to the media and the public by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada “include salaries, honorariums and travel per diems,” according to the Canadian Press.

    To illustrate the significance of this point, look at what would happen if we lumped together these costs for federal Members of Parliament (MPs) in determining their remuneration.

    Start with “travel per diems.” According to numbers crunched by Postmedia News in May, the top 10 travelling Members of Parliament incurred expenses anywhere from $29,927 to $60,483 in 2008-2009.

    The base salary of a MP in Canada is $155,400 a year. If you’re that top traveller in 2008-2009, your total “salary” — using the all-in methodology of INAC and the CTF — would be $215,883. Technically speaking, that’s kinda misleading and unduly inflates the MP’s ‘earnings’ by 39%.

    And as for those honoraria attributed to First Nation chiefs and councillors? This also potentially matters to our comparisons between Native and non-Native political ‘salary’ levels.

    You see, every MP in Canada receives what’s known as a “Member’s Office Budget” (MOB), to the tune of over a quarter-million dollars a year.

    Here’s a breakdown of what’s considered an eligible expense under every Member of Parliament’s annual budget of $280,500:

    • employee salaries
    • service contracts
    • constituency office operating expenses (e.g., utilities, telephone service for secondary constituency offices, additional cellular/BlackBerry services in excess of goods and services provided by the House incl. airtime and data plans, furniture and computer equipment)
    • Miscellaneous Expenditures Account, i.e., certain hospitality expenses and gifts given for reasons of official protocol (max. 3% of MOB)
    • travel
    • accommodation
    • meal and incidental expenses (by Member and his/her employees, designated travellers and/or dependant(s) within the Member’s constituency or his/her province or territory)
    • certain transportation expenses incurred by the Member within the National Capital Region, as well as accommodation, meal and incidental expenses incurred by employees on authorized parliamentary business trips within Canada
    • advertising to constituents concerning: Member office location and contact information; assistance and services they provide; meeting announcements related to constituency functions; congratulatory messages or greetings to constituents; opinions or statements in support of their parliamentary functions (max. 10% of MOB)

    My question is, how many of the expenses of the kind listed above may or may not be included under what INAC and the CTF put forth as the “salary” of First Nation politicians in its publicity?

    Most of them? One or two of them? We don’t know. And I think if we’re gonna rake these politicians over the coals, we should know exactly what we’re talking about first.

    Does that make it likely that the unidentified band councillor from Atlantic Canada justifiably racked up almost a million dollars in combined expenses and salary in one year? Call me skeptical on that one. But I do suspect that if MPs were reported to have ‘earned’ $435,000 a year ($155,400 + $280,500) each, we would likely see them fall prey to the “inaccurate, negative” publicity currently faced by some on-reserve politicians.

  • Canadian Taxpayers Federation publishes First Nations political salaries

    The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) has posted what it claims are “new jaw-dropping chief and council pay data today that reinforces the CTF’s call for greater transparency of reserve politicians’ pay levels and the need for reform.” (Oddly, as an illustration for the item, they have a picture of anonymous powwow dancers. So that’s what highly-paid politicians drop all their dough on — regalia?)

    If you download the “data” (which are actually PDFs of scanned print-outs listing salaries), you can see how difficult it is to quickly and easily match the salary with the Chief/Councillor for a given community, as the band and band numbers are redacted. But it appears CTF did the heavy lifting just in getting these numbers.

    So credit where credit is due. These salaries ought to be public.

    That said, I suspect the real audience for this exercise is disgruntled non-Aboriginal members of the Federation. Now, if only the CTF posted similarly detailed information as to the sources of its funding, the salaries of its staff, and financial statements listing what they spent their members’ money on, including expenses associated with the meetings and business of its volunteer board. If any/all of that’s in fact on the website somewhere and I just overlooked it, let me know, and I will update this post.

  • VIDEO: Alberta Tar Sands debate gets down and dirty

    Ho-leh, did the sparks fly at this debate in Vancouver.

    First, a little backstory: Ezra Levant, author of Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands, was originally scheduled to face off against Ben West of the Wilderness Committee over the premise of Levant’s book. And for most of the night, that’s just what they did. But then, at one point in that discussion, West decides to invite Gitz Crazyboy, an Indigenous youth worker and activist from Fort Chipewyan, AB, onto the stage to answer a question about the impact of Tar Sands development on First Nations people as he saw it.

    As you will see, Crazyboy’s take on that question didn’t go over too well with Levant. It’s in two parts.

  • Christie Blatchford’s “Helpless” is hapless and historyless account of Caledonia conflict

    About six months ago, the Globe and Mail‘s Christie Blatchford filed a series of courthouse dispatches from Hamilton, ON regarding the case of a Caledonia, ON family and their $7 million lawsuit against the Ontario government for failing to protect them from “the natives” (of Six Nations) as a result of the Caledonia land conflict.

    With column titles like “A reign of terror, a trail of OPP inaction,” “In Caledonia the weak finally have a voice against the strong,” and “A couple terrorized in a ‘war zone’ while police stood by,” Blatchford bludgeoned readers with hyperbole and sensationalism. Her pieces pitted faceless native thugs against a decent, law-abiding, salt-of-the-earth Canadian couple.

    This fall, Blatchford turned those articles into a book with the correspondingly obnoxious title, Helpless: Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy and How the Law Failed All of Us.

    I haven’t read Helpless, but if it’s anything like her Globe articles, I already know the story: savages circle the wagons while innocent homesteaders valiantly fight against overwhelming odds when, at the last minute, the cavalry arrives to vanquish the heathen warriors. But in this case, they don’t show up (or so Blatchford claims) and the noble frontiersmen and women suffer all manner of horrors at the hands of their terrorizers.

    But this week a group of students at the University of Waterloo decided to interrupt that narrative. They prevented Blatchford from speaking at a scheduled speech on campus, taking the stage and challenging the way she tells this story. The students asserted that the land dispute has been taken out of context by Blatchford’s book and that it fails to examine the history of the situation.

    And, in fact, Blatchford has admitted to looking at the conflict through “a very narrow prism.” Ultimately, the students felt that Blatchford should not have a forum to spread views they believe amount to racism.

    Indeed, the frustrating aspects of the articles that precipitated the book revolve around the endemic usage of “the natives” — some abstract and homogenous ‘others’ who are all inherently prone to violence — a conclusion arrived at without any in-depth examination of their actual motives.

    It seems Blatchford harbours an ongoing ignorance as to the perspectives of those Mohawk or Cayuga activists whom she indicts. But after the protest at the University of Waterloo, perhaps she can finally sympathize with them.