It's been a month and a half since the leaders of the Attawapiskat reserve in northern Ontario declared a state of emergency.
Today, in mid-December, many of its 1,800 men, women and children are shivering in tents, unheated construction trailers and cobbled-together shacks with no running water or electricity. Riding to the rescue, the Harper government dispatched an accountant.
The $1,300-per-day bean counter - to be paid for by the people of Attawapiskat - was summarily sent packing. Certainly there are hard questions to be answered about how federal monies have been spent.
But there will be plenty of time to ask and answer those questions after this life-anddeath crisis is stabilized.
The Conservatives' new plan is to truck in 15 modular homes once the roads are passable, which could be anywhere from a month to three months from now. We have to wonder if it will take a death before the Tories are moved to consider any real action.
This didn't happen overnight. According to Chuck Strahl, retired Conservative Indian Affairs minister, the Tories have known about the problems in Attawapiskat, and many other communities, for years. Yet not a finger was lifted.
It is the height of Conservative hypocrisy to now blame the crisis on local mismanagement, given that one of Stephen Harper's first acts in government was to tear up the 2005 Kelowna Accord, which promised, among other things, $1.8 billion for aboriginal education and $1.6 billion for housing and clean water.
Attawapiskat is just the latest in a long list of examples in which the country has failed its aboriginal people.
We hope, for the sake of the families living in such terrible conditions, that this will at last be the figurative straw that breaks the camel's back, providing genuine impetus for change that is both positive and sustainable.
