there are no roads into this community, which has to deal with frozen ground for a substantial amount of the year. it's surrounded by marshes and wetlands, with little agricultural support and no meaningful industry, except perhaps logging. i don't think there are mines in the wetlands of northwestern ontario, although there are quite a few to the south and to the east.
i want the natives to have access to modern amenities. but, their request amounts to building them a city that has no potential economic base. it doesn't matter what you put into a community like this, if it is so poorly geographically positioned that it has no economy. imports into the city are going to need to be expensive, because it is so far removed from existing infrastructure. so, the only way the city would be able to survive and grow would be through increasingly large government subsidies. it doesn't make any sense to walk down this path, and so no government will actually do it.
i think it's worth acknowledging that the low quality of the land in the reserve is the reason that it was put aside for indigenous people, who were then rounded up from the outlying areas and placed in it. nothing could grow here, anyways, so it's of no loss to put the indigenous people there. now, we are faced with the absurd consequences of an unjust policy, the building of an isolated city in the marshland wilderness, and need to re-examine it from the core.
i think that if the trudeau government, or any government, is serious about housing in remote reserves, it needs to lay it out for these people: there will never be running water or sewer systems or stable electricity in these regions, because it makes no sense to build cities where there is no potential for economic activity. governments should nonetheless commit and strive towards moving these people into modern housing in serviceable areas, which may mean indigenous neighbourhoods in semi-rural or suburban areas, but not these remote villages in virtually uninhabitable places.
the government says things to win votes. if it were serious, it would stop the charade. and, as long as the charade continues, it should be seen as disingenuous.
the government's assimilation policy is as old as the country. what i'm suggesting is actually not dissimilar to what the elder trudeau, and his sidekick, chretien, tried to do in the infamous white paper. the assimilation policy had largely been carried out...not in secret, but knowledge of it was need-to-know. an open secret, perhaps. the tools of assimilation changed with technology - there was a phase when the government tried to convert the indigenous people into farmers, and they would have nothing of it - but the goal of assimilation was left unmodified, from the 1700s right up to the 1960s. what trudeau aimed to do was go public with it, and make it official policy; he wanted the indigenous groups to understand what was happening and take some control over it, themselves. that was in trudeau's direct democracy phase. as a reaction to the backlash, the liberal government of the time just shut the file down and carried on with the same assimilation policy, quietly, as it always had before. there were blood quantum rules introduced in the 80s, and by the 00s harper was threatening them with property rights (which make no sense in indigenous culture). the idea for decades has been to starve them of funds and create poor conditions to try and convince them to move away from the reserves, while paying lip service to funding increases that never come. but, it doesn't seem to be working - because they don't have the resources to leave.
it doesn't make sense to build cities in the middle of nowhere. so, they should be offered modern housing elsewhere, but not moved - let them freely make the choice to move away.
and, some won't. but, they'll need to get used to living on the edges of civilization, and the lack of comfort inherent within it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/01/19/trudeau-promises-to-help-first-nation-reserve-with-housing-shortage_a_23338560/
jagmeet singh must cut his beard.