MNS faces more funding losses

Page 3

When Dwayne Roth walked from Saskatoon to Regina in November and declared the beginning of a modern day Metis rebellion, a number of Metis people apparently took what he said to heart.

Roth, the president of the Metis Nation-Saskatchewan (MNS), made his statements, and his 250-kilometre journey, to protest the provincial government's decision to suspend its funding of the organization and its refusal to recognize the results of the MNS election held at the end of May.

After receiving numerous complaints about voting irregularities, the province put a freeze on $410,000 in funding that was to go to the MNS and commissioned a review of the election. The findings of that review, completed by former provincial chief electoral officer Keith Lampard, concluded problems with the way the election was run were severe enough that the Metis people of Saskatchewan-and the Saskatchewan government-could not have faith in its results.

Now two federal government departments have followed Saskatchewan's lead and frozen their flow of funds to the provincial Metis organization.

The Office of the Federal Interlocutor for Metis and Non-Status Indians has put on hold the $1.175 million the MNS is eligible to receive to help the organization identify Metis harvesters who would benefit from the Supreme Court's Powley decision. The decision confirmed Metis people with a clear link to a stable Metis community have an Aboriginal right to hunt under the Canadian Constitution.

Funds from the department of Canadian Heritage have also been frozen, explained Myriam Brochu, chief of media relations for the department.

For the past 30 or so years the department has provided the MNS with core funding through the Aboriginal Representative Organizations Program. The money was earmarked for operational support.

"So it basically paid for some salaries ... rent or hydro and all of that," Myriam Brochu said.

The money being held back by Canadian Heritage is the funding installment for the period from November 2004 to April 2005.

"It's not suspended forever," Brochu said. "It just hasn't been released until they provide us with a report on positive steps that are being taken to restore the trust of the Metis constituents and the government of Saskatchewan, prior to further payment."

With less money coming in, the MNS has become more and more reliant on its huge volunteer base to try to fundraise and get other things done, said Ralph Kennedy, secretary of the MNS provincial council.

The decreases in funding being received by MNS is hurting the organization, Kennedy said, but it's also hurting all the Metis people in the province. At a time when the MNS would like to be working with the provincial government to deal with issues like Metis hunting rights, the province is instead finding ways to block resources coming to the organization.

"I don't know why the Saskatchewan government is hurting the Metis people so bad," Kennedy said,

"It's just self-motivated," he said, making reference to the often raised MNS executive claim that the provincial government has an agenda to put a person of their choosing into the MNS presidency.

As, one by one, government funders decide to withhold funding, and opposing sides in the election issue fight their battles through the media, some Metis people in Saskatchewan are thinking about taking a page out of Roth's book, who in turn took his lead from Louis Riel.

Kennedy said the executive has heard from a number of Metis people from across Saskatchewan who would like to see the MNS approach to the current impasse kicked up a notch or two. One of the suggestions involves taking over Batoche-once the site of the battle that signaled the beginning of the end of the Metis rebellion led by Riel and Gabriel Dumont and now a national historic site-and turning it into a refuge camp for Metis people, "because that's how we're being treated here," Kennedy said.

Other suggestions involve setting p blockades on highways across the province or organizing sit ins.

"There's different people who want us to do different things, more on an aggressive scale, but we're trying to be as reasonable as we can," Kennedy said. "People want us to take over Batoche and call in the different foreign countries and say, 'Look at how Canada treats its people.' As soon as there's any kind of wrong-doing in some country, Canada is right there saying 'You've got to do your human rights part here, you know. You can't treat these people like this.' But yet the provincial government here can say to the Metis people, 'We don't like the way your elections are, we want to put in this person.'"

While Kennedy said it would be a fairly simple thing to have Metis people block every major highway across the province, that isn't the way the MNS wants to handle the situation.

"We're trying to approach this as reasonable people," he said.

Some Metis people on the other side of the issue don't seem to share Kennedy's views on the subject. A handful of people recently staged a sit-in at the Saskatoon office of Metis Employment & Training of Saskatchewan Inc.(METSI) to protest the results of the recent electio. They called on the federal government to take over the employment and training arm of the MNS. The sit-in ended when the department of Human Resources Skills Development Canada directed the METSI head office to take over operation of the Saskatoon office until the department was satisfied that client services could be maintained by local management.

Kennedy called the sit-in "old-day politics" and said the only ones that were hurt by the protests were the clients who had to endure an interruption in services.

Kennedy hopes a provincial council meeting can be held shortly so a decision can be made about where the MNS goes from here.

In the meantime, Kennedy has written letters to the Metis people who have set up a provisional Metis council, asking them if they want to ontinue to be members of the MNS. That group, led by Robert Doucette and Alex Maurice, the two other candidates who ran for the MNS presidency in the May election, is hoping to force a new election.

"Some of the stuff they're doing is in conflict with our constitution and I just want to know if they want to still be members in our nation ... I understand some of them are setting up a different type of corporation and there's rumours flying through all the different news articles that they want to start their own or they want to belong somewhere else, so I sent them a letter and I asked them for a reply," Kennedy said, adding that it would be up to the Metis senate to make any decisions regarding the continued membership of those involved in the provisional council.