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Last Thursday, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs John Duncan suddenly pulled the third-party manager from Attawapiskat with a dubious statement about an improvement in bookkeeping. Guess what John? The situation hasn't gone away.
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John Duncan has some 'splainin' to do about his botched handling of the Attawapiskat crisis to a judge. Last Thursday, he suddenly pulled the third-party manager from Attawapiskat First Nation with a dubious statement about an improvement in bookkeeping.

The move came on the eve of a court case against the government's decision to impose the third-party manager. If Duncan hoped that pulling the third-party manager would save the government from going to court, he was mistaken. The community says that, even with the third-party manager being removed, they intend to challenge Duncan's handling of the file in court.

And given the week that just passed, you can't really blame them. The failure of the government to ensure basic continuity in education funding had precipitated a completely unnecessary crisis. Last week, Attawapiskat students attending school off-reserve faced the prospect of being kicked out of their boarding house accommodations because basic financial obligations for schooling hadn't been addressed. Many of these students lacked food or bus money to even get to school.

Throughout this crisis, third-party manager Jacques Marion was nowhere to be found. Frantic students who had been calling him were told Marion was on vacation in Hawaii. I have no idea if Marion was on the beach or not, but you'd expect a little more from a guy who is charging $1,300 a day from the Band's limited funds. But whoever was at fault, this cock-up on post-secondary education inevitably led to the Minister's office. Duncan's staff seemed absolutely clueless in tracking down the reasons why basic cheques hadn't been written.

This isn't the first time that Duncan has left Attawapiskat students in the lurch. In his initial attempt to impose the third-party manager on Attawapiskat, Duncan's department actually cut off all education funding to the community for nearly two months.

Imagine any other community where the education funds could be frozen in order to force compliance with a government directive. When I challenged John Duncan in early February on the fact that he was creating a crisis for Attawapiskat students, he accused me of making things up. But the reality was, students were being used as political hostages in the government's brass knuckles attempt to impose the third-party manager.

It's hard to believe that the decision to remove the third-party manager isn't related to Duncan's failure on the post-secondary funding file.

Which brings us back to the issue of why the third-party manager was imposed in the first place. Duncan's decision to impose the third-party manager came four weeks into the Attawapiskat housing crisis of November 2011. Up until that moment he had been M.I.A on a crisis that was deeply disturbing to Canadians. The fact that the Red Cross had to undertake relief efforts to help a desperately poor Canadian community drew international condemnation.

On the very day the Red Cross teams were hitting the ground in troubled Attawapiskat, the Harper government attempted to change the channel by blaming the Band leadership with mismanagement of taxpayer's money. Prime Minister Stephen Harper led the attack personally when he claimed that the Conservatives had given every man, woman and child in Attawapiskat $50,000. It was an incendiary statement that wasn't in any way true.

The Prime Minister didn't bother to say that $50,000 spread over six years was little more than $8,000 per resident -- less than half of what is spent per capita on other Canadians. But Harper's line rang out like a dog whistle to a racist base that believed that those Indians couldn't be trusted with our money.

Duncan followed this up by deposing the authority of the Band council and imposing the third-party manager. The message was clear -- the community was responsible for its own woes. In Indian country the message was as clear as a bell -- Attawapiskat had made the minister look bad and they were going to pay.

The third-party manager was supposed to get to the bottom of this misspending. But in the months to come, the government produced no evidence of financial mismanagement. Instead, Canadians watched as the government bungled the installation of 22 mobile trailers in the community.

Despite the fact that they had deposed the leadership, it was clear the government had no idea of the real situation on the ground. The Band continued to deal with the emergency response. They had a planning team in place co-coordinated by DeBeers. What stood in their path was the obstinacy of the department and the failure of the third-party manager to cut cheques in a timely fashion; meanwhile, the community was rocked by one financial crisis after another. Hardly the kind of thing you'd expect from a government stepping in to take the reigns.

Now with the third-party manager gone we are learning that numerous financial issues facing the Band may not have been addressed and the Band is scrambling to maintain some semblance of financial responsible planning. It wasn't supposed to be this way.

Which brings us back to John Duncan.

Three months ago, Chief Theresa Spence came to Ottawa and made a heartfelt plea to the minister. She said that she was sorry that the crisis in Attawapiskat had made him look bad. She wasn't looking to embarrass anyone. She just wanted help for her people who were living in desperate circumstances. Duncan brushed her off.

Well guess what, John? The situation hasn't gone away and the public continues to look for a resolution to this tragic situation. Spring is coming and its clear that the 22 trailers are but a Band-Aid on a much more systemic problem in the community. This government has yet to show that it understands or cares about the need to develop medium and long-term strategies to get this community back on its feet.

John Duncan it's time you showed Canadians that you have actually have a Plan B for Attawapiskat.

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