Crowd-pleasing classic requires no baking

Where's the outrage?

It's been a year since the Winnipeg Free Press first highlighted the damage to health and human dignity caused by the lack of running water in 1,400 First Nations homes. The series of stories spawned hundreds of emails, online comments and letters to the editor, many asking what action average people could take to solve the problem.

But since then, a small handful of advocacy campaigns have largely failed to galvanize public opinion, few charitable organizations have stepped up to tackle the problem and the federal government is under no sustained pressure to provide essential services to First Nations mired in Third World conditions.

"All that energy and public attention just dissipated," said Laurel Gardiner, director of the Manitoba office of the Frontiers Foundation, an aboriginal charitable agency that's piloting a home retrofit program in Island Lake.