What is Canada’s obligation? [editorial]

“If Canada can’t bring First World Canada to all the communities within its borders, does it deserve those borders?” This statement by APTN host Michael Hutchinson, as part of the Feb. 23rd segment of The Laughing Drum, provides some interesting grist for the proverbial mill.

Hutchinson and his panel of Indigenous comedians were discussing some of the inane, shallow and badly researched perspectives offered up by Maclean’s columnist Scott Gilmore. Gilmore, husband of MP Catherine McKenna, minister of Environment and Climate Change, opined in two columns, not one, that northern Indigenous people should be helped to move from their home territories to southern cities where the roads are paved with opportunity for all.

Gilmore wrote that communities, such as La Loche, Sask., which suffered terrible tragedy when a young man took four lives in a mass shooting in the community, will always be far more disadvantaged compared to larger cities in the south and “the single most effective step they can take to immediately improve their health, education, safety and income is to leave” home.

Of course, we’d like to mention as an argument to that perspective, Canada purposely disadvantages these communities by ongoing underfunding in areas such as health, education and safety. And provide as an example the Feb. 24^th Nishnawbe Aski Nation declaration of a public health emergency, in part, for what has been described as a “dire shortage of basic medical supplies” in their northern communities.

A nursing station runs out of oxygen while treating a woman in respiratory distress; two four-year-old children die because of rheumatic fever caused by treatable strep throat.

Still, Gilmore’s contention is that an exodus from the north will “end the culture of isolation, despair and violence that has plagued Canada’s remote north since before there was a Canada.”

We think Gilmore is blinded by the view from his southern city ivory tower and would benefit from a unescorted stroll round some select southern city neighborhoods, like perhaps in greater Toronto—where we lost two promising Indigenous men to violence in a three-week period this year—or maybe Winnipeg, where they drag the Red River for the remains of missing Indigenous women. Or Thunder Bay, perhaps, where Indigenous people might expect to have things thrown at them by people in passing cars, or so we have been told by inquest witnesses into the deaths of seven Indigenous high school students who moved to that city for their education.

Patty Hajdu, MP for Thunder Bay—Superior North, said “It’s appalling, it’s ashaming for my community, but for our country as well, that Indigenous young people who come to Thunder Bay to study are subjected to racism that includes things like people flinging things out of cars at them or demeaning hate speech that they face.”

Maybe Thunder Bay is too far north. Perhaps we should be draining that whole city into Gilmore’s neighborhood. Regardless, it’s clear that southern cities aren’t the haven for Indigenous people that Gilmore thinks they are.

It is our contention (and it seems to be the opinion of Hutchinson, as well) that the better argument in advocating for the improved lives of Indigenous people in remote and isolated areas is that it is far more sensible to adequately resource their communities so that the people can stay in their historical homelands.

This all boils down, however, to the real question at the root of the Gilmore comments. If we might paraphrase Hutchinson, the honest and uncomfortable question being raised by the columns is, ‘Is Canada obliged to bring First World Canada to all the communities within its borders?’