Globe and Mail- Ottawa heads to court to fight class-action lawsuit over unsafe drinking water on First Nations
Three years after Ottawa settled two class-action lawsuits over unsafe drinking water on First Nations for $8-billion, government lawyers will appear in Federal Court this week to fight a third class action that could add another $1-billion to the government’s ballooning First Nations water bill.
Yet another scam. If the Indians win, Canadian taxpayers lose. If the Indians lose, Canadian taxpayers lose.
In both cases, the government bloat carries on.
Unless and until the individuals within government are personally sued, nothing changes.
$4.29 billion could buy a lot of water treatment plants. So why are none being built and where is the money going? Most municipalities have water treatment plants, so why do these ‘nations’ still drink crappy water? And how did these ‘fly in’ communities survive before the airplane? What sort of water did they drink? The learned helplessness of Indians is profitable now, but what sort of future do they gave?
Is Indian Affairs fighting Environment Canada?
Who’s on first?
Lawyers always win, on both sides.
The instinctive thing to do is blame the government for this, but I have sympathy for them here. Negotiating with natives is brutal. They are their own worst enemy.
They are not negotiating, the are finding way to give the Indians more taxpayer money, with absolutely no changes required in return.
This is for a band of 1,500 people. Show me where it says the govt of Canada has the fiduciary duty to provide Indian bands with clean water. Is there a clause that says we must also provide them with Netflix and Jello pudding cups? Indians have been infantalized to the point where they cannot perform the basic actions required for their survival. The lawyers who encourage them to sue us, the people of Canada, need to be legally censured (maybe charged with frivolous and vexatious abuse of the court).
A lawyer friend chased the land claim settlement lottery for many years before finally getting a winning ticket. He worked on many cases and was routinely fired by the bands when he didn’t get the required results soon enough. Career wise and monetarily he would have been better off doing real estate transactions but he thought it was the morally appropriate cause to pursue.
Every village in Alberta has drinking water without extraordinary cost. The systems are managed by the villages and are often next door to reserves that cannot manage their own infinitely more expensive system. It’s all a scam. Having poor quality drinking water has huge rewards. Why would local water systems ever be the responsibility of the federal government when the reserves govern themselves?
What happened to the $8 billion from the prior lawsuits? My sense is that $8 billion should be sufficient to install brand new water treatment facilities in every reserve in the nation. I can’t imagine what might have happened to that money. Contingency fees for lawyers and pay bumps for first nations politicians and lobbyists is my guess as to where it went.
Not to mention the sports bar big screen TVs and the one-ton 4X4’s for the Chiefs and council members.
Any tribe of indians on reserves (I will no longer call them first nations) who does does not arrange for maintenance of existing systems should never get 1 cent.
If the water sucks, MOVE.
The band system favors their elites, the chief and his/her relatives. Everyone, just like in Canadian politics, is screwed over. So how is native culture superior to the later arrivals, and why do we give them one more thin dime for land for which we have paid a purchase price many times over? It is time for the First Nations to grow up and be adults, not children.
The grievance industry, not unlike Pallywood, thrives on victimhood. The Indian industry doesn’t want good infrastructure on their ghettos because it interferes with the quest to invert apartheid to further enslave taxpayers mentally crippled with white guilt. Solutions to problems, unless they strengthen apartheid are unwanted. The last thing they want is living in functioning communities out of their control and enjoying equality under the law.