Canada was expected yesterday to unveil a C$4 billion (US$3.4 billion) federal program to empower the country's native Indian and northern Inuit communities with tools to help alleviate poverty and disease on their neglected native lands.
Prime Minister Paul Martin and the premiers of the 13 provinces and territories were participating in an unprecedented, two-day summit with five organizations representing the nearly 1 million aboriginal peoples of the North American nation, namely Indian tribes known as First Nations and Inuits, aboriginal Canadians of the northeastern and Arctic territories.
The federal government currently spends upward of C$8 billion a year for aboriginal groups, but problems abound. Native reserves are dramatically short of housing and safe drinking water, their high school graduation rate is just over half the national average and life expectancy for Indians is five to seven years lower than for non-aboriginals.
The infant mortality rate is 20 percent higher among First Nations, suicide rates are threefold and teen pregnancies are nine times higher than the national average.
"It is evidence these heartbreaking facts speak not just to health care," Martin said on Thursday at the opening ceremony, set on the shores of Lake Okanagan in Kelowna, the former frontier town.
"They speak to the psychic and emotional turmoil in communities that we must find ways, urgently, to address," he said.
Martin on Wednesday went a long way toward addressing one of the most shameful stains on Canadian history, proposing C$2 billion in payments for aboriginal victims of sexual and psychological abuse during forced Christian schooling.
Some 100,000 children were required to attend such residential schools over the past century in a futile and painful attempt to rid them of their native cultures and languages and integrate them into Canadian society.
The legacy of sexual abuse and isolation among these children has long been cited by Indian leaders as the root cause of epidemic rates of alcoholism and drug addiction on reserves.
Inuit and First Nations came from around the country for the unprecedented gathering, hoping the summit would be a historic turning point for the peoples who once helped European immigrants and fur traders survive the harsh northern climes.
"Mr. Prime Minister, over the next two days the ... leaders in this room have an opportunity to make a historic and positive impact on our aboriginal communities, and to set a source of action that can help alleviate some of the most challenging problems facing aboriginal peoples across Canada today," Chief Robert Louie of the Westbank band of the Okanagan Nation, told the opening ceremony.
Not all who came were happy about the federal plan to spend billions over five years to improve housing, health care, education and economic development for nearly 1 million indigenous people.
About 200 protesters from the Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centers demonstrated outside the summit site, upset that their organization, which provides social services to the urban Indians and Inuit who do not live on reserves, had not been included in the talks.
"Our concern is that you can can't have half a solution," said Paul Lacerte, executive director for the British Columbia chapter, who noted half of Canada's Indians do not live on reserves.
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