WORKFARE CAUSING HUNGER ON NORTHERN RESERVES, NATIVE CHIEF SAYS from _The Globe and Mail_, Friday, February 12, 1999 by RICHARD MACKIE, Queen's Park Bureau Toronto -- Chief Dan Kooses sorrowfully explains the additional suffering that changes to the province's workfare system have caused the 1,500 members of his impoverished Kashechewan First Nation, which borders on James Bay. Families are going hungry, he says, because they cannot afford to feed themselves in their remote community where eggs cost $3 a dozen, a loaf of bread costs $2 and four litres of milk costs $19. With an unemployment rate of 80 per cent, welfare, family assistance and Old Age Security are major sources of income on Kashechewan and neighbouring reserves. As a result, his band, along with most others in Ontario, was hit hard when the Progressive Conservative government first cut welfare payments by 21 per cent then introduced work-for-welfare and other changes that restrict access to assistance. Requiring people to look for jobs or take training in order to receive their benefits is irrelevant in communities where there are no jobs or prospects of jobs. To fight the changes, the Kashechewan First Nation and six others in the Mushkegowuk Council in the James Bay region have gone to court to argue that the province's workfare legislation is unconstitutional because it does not recognize that the bands are self-governing. The court challenge is part of a broader effort by leaders of the Cree bands in Northern Ontario to take their communities out of the cycle of Third World poverty and dependence on government to which they have been reduced, Lawrence Martin, grand chief of the Mushkegowuk Council, told a Queen's Park news conference yesterday. They want to share in the wealth that the resources of Northern Ontario generate and use it to build healthy, economically viable communities. Now, Chief Martin said, people are trapped in "isolated, desolate communities." The Mushkegowuk challenge comes as Canada's courts increasingly warn governments that they must deal with the rights granted to native people in treaties and the Constitution. Chief Justice Antonio Lamer of the Supreme Court of Canada noted in an interview with The Globe and Mail last week that "Section 15 [of the Charter of Rights] and aboriginal rights and treaty rights are going to be the main challenges the court will have to deal with." His comment encouraged Joanna Birenbaum, one of the lawyers for the Mushkegowuk as they prepared to file their challenge in the Ontario Court's General Division. Their case is based on the argument that Indian bands' rights to their own governments "are recognized in the federal and constitutional laws of Canada to this day," Mr. Martin said. "This province has intruded on those historic, constitutional and federal laws where it has no business and it has no power." Mr. Martin said that instead of negotiating changes in the existing welfare system, which was set up with the bands' agreement, the Ontario government unilaterally imposed workfare and the other changes. "The workfare legislation as it stands changes our democratically elected governments into nothing but so-called delivery agents -- helpless puppets who must obey every whim of the province," he said. Frank Klees, the MPP for York MacKenzie and the legislative assistant to Community and Social Services Minister Janet Ecker, said workfare was not designed to impose new hardships, and agreed to meet the chiefs. --- end --- Information about Ow-Watch-L at: http://www.welfarewatch.toronto.on.ca/wrkfrw/welcome.html Visit the Workfare Watch Project Website at: http://www.welfarewatch.toronto.on.ca/ -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
