Aboriginal leaders condemn Tory budget
“Unfortunately, this budget makes Inuit feel once again that we’re outside looking in.”
Led by Mary Simon, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, and Phil Fontaine, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Canada’s national aboriginal organizations condemned the Conservative government’s latest budget this week.
“The budget has been presented with the theme “That’s your Canada, voilà votre Canada”. Unfortunately, this budget makes Inuit feel once again that we’re outside looking in. As proud Canadians, that’s not acceptable,” Simon said in a statement.
Under the Conservative government’s budget, unveiled March 19 by Jim Flaherty, the federal finance minister, Ottawa will redistribute enormous amounts of new federal money to provincial and territorial governments over the next seven years: at least $39.4 billion.
That money will help those governments improve health care, post-secondary education, social assistance and infrastructure.
That includes a $300 million fund for immunizing women against the sexually-transmitted papilloma virus that leads to cervical cancer, a disease that flourishes in Nunavut.
For those reasons, Nunavut government officials are moderately happy, especially because of an improved territorial funding formula that will better meet Nunavut’s needs.
But there’s little in the budget that’s earmarked for aboriginal people and aboriginal leaders suggest that’s a betrayal. “This budget only allows for enough money to continue the management of misery,” Phil Fontaine said in a statement.
And Simon said there are no Inuit-specific announcements and that the Tory government is ignoring its constitutional obligations to Inuit.
So for Inuit, any benefits that they get from the budget will depend on the jurisdiction where they happen to live.
Nunavik Inuit, for example, may see better social programs, because the Quebec government was a big winner on budget day and will get an extra $3.2 billion from Ottawa this year.
Simon said Inuit may get some “indirect help” from this kind of spending, but that it’s “unclear how broader announcements from this budget will be accessible to us.”
She also said the federal government is ignoring the partnership accord that ITK signed with the federal government in 2005, and an Inuit action plan submitted to Ottawa last month.
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