The Irish Medical Times carries an article by Lloyd Mudiwa examining the appalling conditions the indigenous peoples of North America live in under the jurisdiction of the much fêted “multicultural” nation of Canada:
“Some 146 years after Canada’s independence, its Aboriginal peoples are still suffering from the health effects of social and economic inequities.
On virtually every measure, the health of Canada’s Aboriginal people, also known as the First Nations, ranks well below that of the general Canadian population.
Canada is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but the benefits of that wealth are far from equally distributed.
Aboriginal people are overrepresented among those living in historical poverty in the North American country, and many First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities are struggling with high unemployment, low incomes and overcrowded housing.
Today, these determinants continue to take a significant toll on the health and life expectancy of Canada’s indigenous people, with Aboriginal people suffering from chronic diseases, obesity, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, mental health problems, suicide and infectious diseases in much greater proportions than Euro-Canadians (their rate of tuberculosis is six times greater than for the overall Canadian population).
A 2009 UNICEF report noted that children from Aboriginal communities are seven times more likely to die in infancy than others, and 50 times more likely to be hospitalised with preventable illnesses, such as chicken pox.”
The article lists many aspects of the perpetual poverty that most citizens in the culturally diverse First Nations experience as their day-to-day norm, up to and including the actions of hostile provincial and federal authorities. This includes persecuting those people who attempt to ameliorate the suffering of their own communities such as Doctor Cindy Blackstock, a respected physician and Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada.
“…Dr Blackstock was invited as an expert by a First Nations group to a meeting in the government offices, meant to discuss the welfare of First Nations children.
Despite clearing all the security staff and conducting herself peacefully and professionally, she says a government official told the First Nations group the meeting would not go ahead if Dr Blackstock entered the room.
There is a Privacy Act in Canada, which is its form of a Freedom of Information Act, where citizens can apply to government departments to get information about themselves, so Dr Blackstock did that. It took her a year-and-a-half, but she finally got a DVD in the post.
There were notes about when she was not at an event. There were also snapshots of her personal Facebook page, or they had somebody copy and paste the material and send that along to other government officials.
Dr Blackstock got email correspondence between the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and the Department of Justice, with Aboriginal Affairs owning up that they had been on her personal Facebook page for six months, but gave up when they realised the Department of Justice was also on there collecting data and they could just share the information.
There was a whole other series of monitoring of her movements — even her personal events.
One of the events that was shocking to her was that when the Australian Aborigines invited her in 2010 to their conference in Alice Springs in the desert of Australia, the Canadian government had notes of her talk given there.
On her Facebook page, Dr Blackstock was disturbed by an entry where she was discussing the baking of cookies with friends. Some of them, based internationally, commented and the government copied their URLs and comments and passed them to other government departments of justice and Aboriginal affairs.
A message by a 12-year-old child who had seen Dr Blackstock’s video about First Nations children in her class and just wanted to thank the campaigner was also copied and passed on to about 10 or 11 lawyers at the Department of Justice without that child’s/child’s parents’ consent.”
In fact there seems to be a massive if sometimes shambolic system of monitoring by Canadian police and security agencies of anyone interested in promoting the civil rights of indigenous peoples in the North American nation. It embraces activists, politicians, journalists, physicians, historians, linguists, anthropologists and many others. Please read the article in full and share on your social networks.
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
Reblogged this on seachranaidhe1.
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Canadian dominion administration seemed always to have deeply schizophrenic record of governance and established rights towards their indigenous populations: perhaps worrying for us (and what’s needed to be shouted about on our side of the ocean) is that while the multicultural ideologues’ propensity to proselytize how “Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world”, there is total avoidance in illustrating the failures of post-colonial states (Canada, Australia, Ireland) in providing work for the native born unemployed: is it no wonder leftist-libertarians in Ireland have as their supporters neo-liberal free-market European Unionists who care less about the nearly half a million long-term unemployed and underemployed and more about labelling as “racist” those eager to withdraw from the EU – as well as Irish speakers’ advocacy groups who demand equality rights in their own country? *Croppies lie down, say nothing!* @
From RTÉ radio:
http://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/documentary-podcast-undue-alarm-canada-aborigines-john-oconnor-doctor.html
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Ireland, Australia, Canada are “post-colonial”? I think we’re still waiting for the post to arrive.
On the more general point, nothing on the internet can be confidential. Big sites like Facebook etc. are data-mined and the data sold commercially, the same is true of much of the information you supply to banks etc., or to local and national authorities, such as the voters’ register. Is it surprising that governments get in on the act too? Bureaucracy requiries uniformity, so to the bureaucratic mind anything and anyone who deviates from the average is naturally suspect.
What do you mean by “Leftist-Libertarian”?
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I have to admit this is based on general reading only, mind, but in relation to political philosophies my impression is that (outside of specific political organizations) there are essentially two political ideologies represented in the European Unionist ‘tradition’ (to borrow a phrase) in direct opposition to egalitarian republicanism – certainly in the twenty-six counties: neo-liberalism (a laissez-faire, free-market worldview involving dilution of state supports to a level where choice must be made between having a welfare state or open border migration) and libertarian socialism (ostensibly broadly defined as utopian-Marxism where nationalism and national borders are an ‘obstacle’ to the free movement of workers) @
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The view from inside the Eurocracy: The Intercultural Alternative to Multiculturalism and its Limits.
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‘inter-culturalism’ – I think these social scientists are either trying to deliberately confuse or else my brain is melting – thanks for the article: I’ll have to print it off
“Let this be the rejoinder to the spurious claim that it is ‘political correctness’ and fear of being labelled racist that stifles informed debate […] it is racism that stifles informed debate about our inter-cultural reality and silences the voices of those at its sharp end”
‘Shane O’Curry is the director of Enar Ireland, the European Network Against Racism in Ireland. Enar Ireland manages iReport.ie’
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/language-can-so-easily-be-used-to-dehumanise-other-ethnic-groups-1.1663197?page=2
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Hah! Great minds think alike. Just posted something related to the IT article 😉
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NOTHING “post” about Canada’s ongoing colonialism! They are literally poisoning Indigenous people in mass in so-called Alberta. Darth Vader has a better environmental record. And I’ll be damned if the Queen of England isn’t on their bloody money. Canada is the British Empire, alive and kicking.
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Fracking and such like is on its way to Ireland with hardly a murmur from the political classes. Who of course will benefit from the handing out of exploration licences and the receipt of party donations.
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apologies to all on that poor phrasing – i should of course have placed “post-colonial” within inverted commas – prisoner of the man: wifi! @
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