Drink deep, the water's fine?

Page 4

It's the eternal struggle in politics: "Yeah, it's a great idea. But how do we pay for it?"

In a perfect world everybody would have everything they need and lots of it. Those on the political left would like to work towards that ideal in this astral plane. Those on the political right, it seems to us, are more inclined to keep it all and share it only with their friends, and the heck with everybody else.

Yes, we're talking about the Mike Harris government and Walkerton. With markets all over the world hobbled by fears created by the Enron scandal, where well paid "watchdogs," supposedly on the lookout for financial impropriety appear to have been willing to tell the stockholders-the regular folks-anything the big guys wanted them to say in exchange for a piece of the action, we're seeing the bitter fruit of the free market system. Walkerton and Enron are what happen when self-interest and hard-hearted political ideology are allowed to go unchecked.|

We see some of that in the Indian Affairs approach to water quality. In big cities, where the "real people" live, according to Ontario Deputy Premier Jim Flaherty, another Harris inner circle member, there are highly trained people with good-sized staff and big budgets to keep microbial death out of the water. On First Nations, the person with responsibility may (or may not) have a bit of training but that person certainly doesn't have a lot of help and, as several of sources told us this month, the First Nation water quality system sure doesn't have much of a budget.

Nobody can argue that Native people have been marginalized and excluded from the pursuit of wealth in this country for a long, long time. The wealthy in this country are in that enviable position because resources were-and are being -removed from lands that belonged to the Indigenous people. It's time to share.

Saying there's no money is no excuse for the less than optimal water management regimes on too many reserves. And bringing in the lawyers to make sure the government can't be held responsible if or when things go wrong with a marginally funded system is just sinister. Especially when you know the system is so rickety, it's just a matter of time.

Find the money. Fix the problem. Create budgets that ensure the system can sustain itself.

This is water. The stuff of life. Just because someone in a bad spot is forced to sign a legal disclaimer, that doesn't mean the people making the decisions are in the clear morally. And if a little morality isn't injected into the way this country is governed-and soon-we're going to have a lot more Walkertons and Enrons and, yes, Ipperwashes.

Windspeaker note:

We "threw down the gauntlet" last month and said we were going to look into just how much money the department of Indian Affairs is expending on the governance push. We didn't forget that promise, but the job turned out to be quite a bit bigger than we thought and . . . well, as many of us used to tell the teacher when our work wasn't done on time: the dog ate it. We'll get it too you soon, and we hope you'll find it worth the extra wait.