Pope Francis calls for an Easter truce in Ukraine

First Nations child welfare deal victim of politics

It was inevitable the proposed $47.8-billion deal — struck by the federal government, the Chiefs of Ontario, Nishnawbe Aski Nation and the Assembly of First Nations — to rectify the underfunding of on-reserve child welfare services, would be rejected.

If passed, it would have been the largest financial compensation and program allocation for First Nations in Canadian history, to address the needless suffering and apprehension of tens of thousands of children.

On Thursday, however, in a vote of 267-147, the majority of chiefs in Canada rejected the deal in a special meeting of the assembly in Calgary.

The Agreement on Long-Term Reform of the First Nations Child and Family Services Program was a deal forced by multiple decisions over two decades by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. After it ruled the experience of on-reserve First Nations children was discriminatory, it ordered the federal government to fix the system and compensate families and children forced into foster care.

We don’t vote like our lives depend on it

There’s an old saw — we get the government we deserve. It assumes active participation in our elections, full and fair media coverage from which voters can learn and a set of viable, capable candidates from which we can choose.

Arguably, those conditions did not apply this time around in Winnipeg. Our voter turnout was just 38 per cent and Mayor Scott Gillingham’s victory came from just 15 per cent of Winnipeg’s eligible voters. Two supposedly serious competitors embroiled themselves — by choice — in juvenile mudslinging and offered scattered, chaotic policy platforms.

A fourth contender surged from behind in the closing weeks of the campaign — and Noah Redden had spent most of the campaign being thought of as one of the pack of gadflies that emerge to run every time there’s a mayoralty campaign here. Yet he virtually tied Kevin Klein for second place. Had Redden been treated during the campaign as a viable candidate (he was the only one to publish online a detailed, thought-through policy platform), who knows what would have happened?

Absorb those facts.

Blockade halts rail traffic west of Winnipeg

RM OF HEADINGLEY — It was a satisfying sight for Harrison Powder: a freight train stopped, hundreds of metres up the track from a blockade erected by a group of demonstrators.

Powder was among a group of 10 along a windswept country road, about 25 kilometres west of Winnipeg, protesting RCMP enforcement of a court-ordered injunction in northern British Columbia and the arrests of community leaders from Wet’suwet’en Nation.

A spokesman for CN Rail said train movements on the line stopped Wednesday because of the blockade.

“Canada should remember this, so should the RCMP and industry the next time they go invading Indigenous territory trying to force a pipeline through,” said Powder, a member of Bigstone Cree Nation in Alberta, and a Winnipeg resident. “They should remember what happened here with this incident, because it can happen again.”

Pope Francis calls for an Easter truce in Ukraine

‘The debate about the merits of a minimum wage that keeps pace with the cost of living seems to be over in Ontario.’