Imagine being refused a job, an apartment or public service due to your race, disability or sex. How hard is it to enforce your human rights? Six years ago, the McGuinty government’s Bill 107 made controversial changes to human rights enforcement. You likely don’t know that a poorly publicized government-appointed independent review has asked the public if these changes make things better or worse.

Before Bill 107, you could take your case to the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Its job was to enforce the Human Rights Code, to investigate human rights complaints, to screen out frivolous or meritless cases and to try to negotiate settlements. If it decided a complaint had merit and couldn’t settle it voluntarily, its job was to publicly prosecute the case at theHuman Rights Tribunal.

Six years ago, to speed up a slow, backlogged system that needed reform, Bill 107 privatized human rights enforcement. It took the Human Rights Commission out of screening, investigating and prosecuting individual discrimination cases. It makes discrimination victims investigate and litigate their cases at the tribunal without the commission’s help.

Does Bill 107 make lives better for victims of discrimination? Far from it.

It created a huge void for discrimination victims by taking the Human Rights Commission out of individual cases. The government promised free lawyers for all claimants. Yet its new Human Rights Legal Support Centre only represents a fraction. Far too many unrepresented claimants encounter respondents (those accused of discrimination) armed with lawyers. The tribunal reports that 81 per cent of respondents have a lawyer at mediation but only 32.9 per cent of claimants have any representative when filing a claim.

The Liberal government promised human rights hearings within one year. The tribunal set a goal to achieve this in only 75 per cent of cases. Its average time to complete cases is 372 days, but most of those never have a hearing.

Individuals can’t themselves investigate and litigate complex systemic discrimination cases. The Liberals pledged that the stripped-down Human Rights Commission would effectively combat systemic discrimination by bringing public interest cases to the tribunal and intervening in individual cases. To date the commission has brought only one public interest case and intervened in only 73 of the thousands of individual cases. Also, the government hasn’t established the promised anti-racism and disability secretariats, ignoring its own legislation.

Liberals also promised more accessible human rights but instead created new barriers. A discrimination victim who wins at the tribunal risks having to pay thousands of dollars in legal costs if their win gets overturned by the court due to the tribunal’s own legal errors. Would a blind person likely take on the TTC today, to force it to call out bus stops, when the new Legal Support Centre is statistically unlikely to take their case, the TTC is ready to spend $450,000 on lawyers, and the applicant could be stuck with a huge court cost order because a win at the tribunal was based on the tribunal making legal errors?

The government said Bill 107 would address the backlog. Yet its transition process unfairly led 885 cases to vanish in the system.

Liberals promised fair hearings. Yet they gave the tribunal power to override legislation designed to ensure fair hearings and allowing it to pass controversial and complicated rules.

We hope this current Human Rights Code Review will recognize these amply-documented problems, and make strong recommendations to improve Ontario’s troubled human rights system. Many from equality-seeking communities want the government to keep its broken promises about Bill 107. They want the government to require the tribunal to obey legislation designed to foster fair hearings, and to restore the Human Rights Commission as a stronger public interest voice at the tribunal. Discrimination victims should be given the option of asking the Human Rights Commission to investigate and publicly prosecute their case if there’s enough evidence. Discrimination victims want results. They don’t care if they get it through hearings or through mediations.

Do you like the TTC announcing bus and subway stops, even if you’re sighted? Imagine if under this new human rights system, no one wanted to risk taking on big organizations like the TTC without the backing of a public prosecutor to win that and other accessibility measures. Is that the human rights enforcement system we really want?

David Lepofsky is a blind Toronto lawyer, activist for reforms for the rights of persons with disabilities, and twice successfully won human rights cases before Bill 107 to force the TTC to announce bus and subway stop announcements.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1175822–it-s-tougher-than-ever-to-enforce-your-human-rights-in-ontario >

The protests today from Occupy Wall Streeters to redistribute income from the rich to the poor are generally based on faulty, convenient and largely undisclosed assumptions about Canadians being stuck in inequality. That is, occupiers and others tend to offer policies that assume the people who face low income today are the same ones who encounter it tomorrow. Thankfully, the reality of Canadian society is that people move up (and down) the income ladder over time as their circumstances change.

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The concept of mobility is fairly straightforward. It suggests that people’s earnings increase and decrease over the course of their lives in natural fluctuations. For example, all current workers were students at one point who likely earned at the low end of the range from a lack of skills and part-time work. However, their earnings increased as they completed their education and began working full time. Their earnings increased further as they gained experience and hopefully promotions.

There are also natural declines in income over one’s life. A spouse may take time away from the labour force to raise children. Workers may experience bouts of unemployment as they move from one firm to another. Workers also reduce their hours of work and their income as they transition to ­retirement. Again, all of these ­fluctuations are ­naturally part of one’s life.

Statistics Canada monitors such fluctuations in order to better measure and understand the economic well-being of Canadians over time. Specifically, Statistics Canada’s Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) follow 17,000 households over rotating six-year periods. Such data provides researchers and policymakers with powerful information about how Canadians’ income and labour market participation varies over time.

There are a number of ways to analyze mobility. A recent study by Statistics Canada divided the population into five equal groups (quintiles) based on income. Statistics Canada then followed these individuals over time to assess how their incomes changed relative to the initial income thresholds used to divide the population.

To get a sense of the income levels for these five groups, the average income (after tax) for individuals in 2005 was: $14,100, $25,400, $34,700, $46,100, and $76,600.

The latest one-year data, 2008-09, shows quite a bit of mobility, despite the marked economic slowdown of the period. For example, 25% of those who started in the bottom 20% had moved up at least one group within a year. Similar upward movement is observed for the second quintile (26%) and the third quintile (24%). Put differently, for each of the bottom three income groups (each composing 20% of the population), roughly one in four people moved up at least one group in just one year.

The rates of mobility increase when the period is extended to five years, covering 2005 to 2009. Forty-three percent of those who started in the bottom 20% moved up at least one grouping over five years. Rates of upward mobility were again strongest for the bottom 60% of earners over this period. These results are also remarkably similar to analyses completed in the 1990s.

In both the annual as well as the five-year data, Canadians also moved down income groups. However, the net effect over time was an increase in earnings — more people moved up than down. Contrary to the conception offered by the occupiers, it’s a not a zero-sum game where someone has to lose for someone else to win.

Mobility data can also examine the degree to which Canadians experience low income. Over the period 2002 to 2007, which is the latest available data, 80% of Canadians did not experience low income, defined as falling below Statistics Canada’s low-income cutoff. Roughly 8% experienced low income for one of the six years covered in the period. Only 2.1% of Canadians experienced low income for each of the six years.

Explaining the persistency of low income for this 2.1% is an important goal. We know it includes, to some degree, the attainment of education and family composition. Specifically, the data tell us that single parents and those who didn’t complete high school have a much higher chance of experiencing low income.

Canada is a mobile society characterized by both increases and decreases in income that are largely connected with natural changes in one’s life. Thankfully, the data have consistently shown an upward path for incomes and increasing opportunity for workers.

This is not to say that inequality should be discarded as an issue, but rather that it needs to be fully and completely understood. Simplistically presenting the data to support pre-existing preferences for more taxes and redistribution would likely impede the very mobility that is so critical to overcoming low income.

Financial Post
Jason Clemens is the director of research at the Ottawa-based Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the author of the recently released “Income Inequality: Oversimplifying a Complicated Issue,” available atwww.macdonaldlaurier.ca.

< http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/04/30/few-people-stay-poor/ >

Cindy Blackstock says the only thing public school taught her about Aboriginal people was that in the days of the fur trade, the Hudson’s Bay Company would give Aboriginal people “cool stuff” in exchange for skins. Growing up Gitxsan in Northern British Columbia during the 1960s and ’70s, racism and stereotypes about stupid, lazy, alcoholic Aboriginal people were, at best, unchecked.

Now executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society (FNCFCS), Blackstock says Aboriginal students growing up, and going to school, on reserves today have it a lot tougher than she did: funding for reserve schools is roughly 25 per cent less than funding for public schools, the on-reserve graduation rate is just 40 per cent, and more Aboriginal youth are in government care today than were during the height of residential schools.

Ten years ago she led FNCFCS on a mission to work with the government of Canada to bring equality to all Aboriginal people. But after five years of government rejecting proposal after proposal for fair education, safe housing and clean drinking water on reserves, FNCFCS took them to court. On April 18, FNCFCS won their case in Federal Court, and will head back to the Canada Human Rights Tribunal for another hearing.

Blackstock’s work has attracted the special notice of officials. Late last year, she learned she was a target of government surveillance, with employees monitoring her making speeches and photographing her Facebook page. According to reporting by the APTN, officials from the department involved, Aboriginal Affairs, declined comment and instead issued a statement stating it “routinely monitors and analyses the public environment as it relates to the department’s policies programs, services and initiatives… social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are public forums, accessible to all.”

The Tyee spoke with Blackstock the day before the April 18 ruling, to ask why a case about equal rights for Canadian children was meeting so much resistance from the Canadian government, and how it feels to know that same government has spent time and resources spying on her.

On April 24, Blackstock will speak at a Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada event in Vancouver, but for those who can’t make it, here’s the story of how one of the most important human rights cases in recent history reached this point

From co-workers to combatants

Beginning in 2002, FNCFCS worked side-by-side with the feds to develop a strategy for bringing on-reserve services like water, housing and education up to par with public provincial systems. But after government walked away from two solutions they helped develop, FNCFCS took them to court.

“We filed a court case against the government of Canada in 2007 alleging that they are discriminating against First Nations children by underfunding child welfare services,” Blackstock told The Tyee.

“And since it’s been filed, Canada has done everything in its power to avoid a hearing on the merits of that case, that being the central question of whether they’re discriminating or not, and they’re trying to get off it on legal loopholes.”

Blackstock, FNCFCS, and the Assembly of First Nations took the case to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, which was ideal for FNCFCS because they have the power to order a specific solution.

“What we didn’t want was a court order that was very vague, that Canada could then drag its feet over for decades or more before providing the right thing for kids. We had these solutions, we jointly developed them, we wanted them ordered to implement them,” Blackstock explains.

But when the ruling came down in 2010, Tribunal Chair Shirish Chotalia dismissed the case, arguing that to compare federal and provincial services was to compare ”apples and oranges.”

Blackstock was shocked. To her mind, the ruling not only ignored a previous Supreme Court decision that found discrimination cases do not require a comparison group, but that Chotalia was essentially saying racial discrimination by the government was okay.

“The implications of that ruling would really be to immunize Canada against any human rights application made by First Nations, because, of course, they only fund on-reserve services,” she says.

Target of surveillance

FNCFCS and the Assembly of First Nations took the case to Federal Court for their right to present evidence of unequal treatment for Aboriginals at the Tribunal. This time, however, they had witnesses to the proceedings. When the case had its time in court Feb. 12-15, 2012, hundreds of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, mostly children, sat in the courtroom to watch.

“We had just about 200 people show up every single day just to witness this case firsthand,” says Blackstock, adding some of the adults in attendance included legal scholars from as far away as Australia.

“We had so many children coming that we had to book them in shifts. We could have well had a courtroom that held 500-600 people if we were able to accommodate everyone that wanted to come.”

Most of the kids learned about the court case by signing up for FNCFCs I Am A Witness campaign, which posted court documents from both sides online, inviting people to monitor the proceedings as impartial witnesses. But although they didn’t ask people to choose sides, Blackstock says most of the people she spoke with, young and old, were upset with the government’s treatment of Aboriginal people.

“They just could not figure out why they were trying to worm out of providing equitable and culturally-based treatment for children,” she says.

All the action didn’t take place in the courtroom, however. Last November, Blackstock revealed a file she received through Access to Information showing both the departments of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development and Justice were spying on her, with as many as 165 government employees involved.

Blackstock told The Tyee she has not let the revelation deter her or change how she lives her life. Instead, she says it reveals a lot about the insecurity of the federal government.

“Canada is becoming a place where we’re only democratic once every four years when the government wants to hear from us, and the rest of the time they’re trying to protect themselves from viewpoints from the public that raise critical issues,” she says.

“That should be welcomed by a competent government, they should be welcoming dissent because it helps us create a better society, helps us create the discourse that’s necessary to raise us all up.”

Equality’s ‘the floor, not the ceiling’

She will not be grateful, either, for the $275 million the government is putting into Aboriginal education this year. It is nowhere near enough, she says, and equality is “the floor, not the ceiling” of what Aboriginal people are asking for.

“They described the accounting problems with their fighter jets of $10 billion as simply being an accounting error. If they’ve got that amount of money to play with, $10 billion would have gone a long way to addressing these inequalities that these kids are facing, and there’s absolutely no legitimate reason for racial discrimination to be used as a fiscal restraint measure,” she says.

But Blackstock says the tide is turning for Aboriginal people in Canada, whether the government is leading the way or running to catch up. She says each new generation of Canadians has a chance to right the wrongs of the past, to treat Aboriginal people with the respect and dignity they deserve.

“We’re shifting the climate in Canada so that this type of discrimination against First Nations children, be it in education, child welfare or any other service, is politically and socially unviable,” she says.

Blackstock and FNCFCS still have to make it through the judicial system, however, vowing they will take the case all the way to the Supreme Court if they must, which could take years to settle. A new day Canada’s for Aboriginal people may be dawning, but it could still be a long time before we see the light.

< http://thetyee.ca/News/2012/04/20/Aboriginal-Equality/?utm_source=mondayheadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=230412 >

When governments make a decision that is stupid, embarrassing, overly partisan, or risks causing an outcry, they tend to do so late in the day and late in the week, preferably on the eve of a holiday long weekend, when citizens – and journalists – aren’t paying much attention.

So, late Thursday, the government of Stephen Harper dropped this bombshell, as related in a brief announcement posted on the web site of the National Aboriginal Health Organization: “NAHO funding has been cut by Health Canada. It is with sadness that NAHO will wind down by June 30, 2012.”

This travesty of public policy only came to light because of feisty publications like Windspeaker and Nunatsiaq News.

Founded in 2000, NAHO oversaw many research and outreach programs, in crucial fields such as suicide prevention, tobacco cessation, housing and midwifery. It collected an invaluable series of audio and video interviews with elders recounting traditional tales and knowledge. The group also published the Journal of Aboriginal Health and was home to one of the best collections of aboriginal health research in the world.

There are many political and policy differences among aboriginal groups, but NAHO managed to bring them together at one table, with a common purpose, improving the health of the unhealthiest, most disenfranchised people in the country. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, but it was an achievement in itself.

We are destroying this asset for what reason exactly? To save a few bucks?

NAHO received $4,955,865 from Health Canada last year.

In the world of $25-billion (and counting) fighter jet contracts, that’s a pittance.

And what does it say about the federal government’s priorities?

If you want to trim the Health Canada budget – and the plan is to shed $200-million – then trim some bureaucratic fat at the Tunney’s Pasture headquarters – don’t cut grants to groups that actually do useful things.

If we want to fight a war, why not a war on poverty and health disparity in aboriginal communities?

The abysmal health status of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples is Canada’s greatest shame.

Taking an ax to an organization that highlights these health issues – and, better still, pursues solutions – is not going to make these problems go away. It is merely going to sweep them under the carpet, where they have been for far too long.

One cannot help but see this as part of the continuing attack this government has waged on information, particularly information that casts the government in a bad light.

Here’s the kind of information we need to know about the health status of Canada’s 1.2 million aboriginal people, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us:

Life expectancy: Aboriginals can expect to live, on average, a decade less than other Canadians;

Disability: Native people have higher rates of disability and live, on average, about 12 more years with a disability;

Infant mortality: Aboriginal children die at three times the rate of non-aboriginal kids, and are more likely to be born with severe birth defects and debilitating conditions such as fetal alcohol syndrome;

Injuries: Members of First Nations and Inuit communities suffer traumatic injuries at four times the rate of the general population;

Suicide: The rate is six times higher;

Chronic disease: Natives have three times the rate of diabetes; suffer more heart disease and at a younger age;

Infectious disease: Tuberculosis rates are 16 times higher in first nations than in the rest of Canada; HIV-AIDS rates are growing fastest in the native population; medieval water-borne illnesses like dysentery and shigellosis are still commonplace in native communities;

The unemployment and poverty rates are five times those in the non-aboriginal community;

Education: Only 4 per cent of natives have a university education, one-quarter the rate in mainstream society. One-third of aboriginal people do not graduate high school, three times the rate for non-aboriginals;

Housing: More than one-third of First Nations people have, in government jargon, a “core housing need,” meaning their homes do not meet the most basic standard of acceptability;

Infrastructure: Overcrowded houses, lack of running water and inadequate sewage are the norm in many native communities;

Environment: The contaminants that stalk some communities are frightening: Mercury, PCBs, toxaphene and pesticide levels are all higher in the bodies of aboriginals than non-aboriginals.

NAHO’s role is the “advancement and promotion of health and well-being of all First Nations, Inuit and Métis individuals, families and communities.

Clearly, NAHO’s work – “the advancement and promotion of health and well-being of all First Nations, Inuit and Métis individuals, families and communities” – is not done; heck, it has barely begun.

There’s a disturbing pattern here. The government has also cut funding to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. And the First Nations and Inuit Health branch at Health Canada oversees what is without question the worst health system in Canada, making every effort to slough the responsibility off onto the provinces and territories.

Jack Hicks, an Iqaluit-based suicide researcher summed it up this way: “The Conservatives want out of the aboriginal business.” Who can forget the historic apology proffered by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to survivors of the residential schools? But words are not enough, and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission is not enough.

Concrete actions need to be taken to help the 150,000 Inuit, Métis and First Nations children who were forcibly separated from their families, but action must be taken too in their broader communities, where another million or so aboriginal people, who did not go to residential school, also need help.

The healing process may take generations, true reconciliation even longer. But the ultimate goal must be healthy communities.

Closing the gap will not be easy, or quick. But it starts with small steps, the kind that can be found every day in the contributions of groups like NAHO.

Those footsteps of progress should not be silenced.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/andre-picard/harpers-disregard-for-aboriginal-health/article2396146/ >

Handing young aboriginal men and women a stay-out-of-jail card in cases of serious violence is a mistaken answer to the problem of overincarceration of aboriginal people in Canada. It puts one wrong in place of another.

Del Louie, 22, viciously assaulted a 55-year-old Vancouver bus driver named Charles Dixon. After three operations, Mr. Dixon’s face is held together by a plate with four screws. Mr. Louie had been convicted before for assaulting a bus driver.

There is no doubt that the overrepresentation of aboriginal people in provincial and federal jails is a calamity for the country, for aboriginals and for the individuals behind bars. The unprovoked physical assaults on bus drivers and others who work in service jobs hardly compare – unless you happen to be the one driving the bus (150 assaults on Vancouver bus drivers were reported last year). And shouldn’t society protect those who do such jobs?

Mr. Louie’s assault was exceptionally serious. His sucker punch on a vulnerable man in a chair broke two bones in Mr. Dixon’s face and left him with cognitive problems.

As a general rule, Canadian judges don’t like to compound one tragedy with another. Provincial Court Judge Karen Walker sentenced Mr. Louie to 18 months at an alcohol rehab residence, citing his aboriginal background and other mitigating factors – through no fault of his own, he has fetal alcohol syndrome. The tragedy of another aboriginal man going to jail was thus avoided, or at least deferred.

The problem is the thorny one of justice. The law says sentencing is supposed to contribute to the maintenance of a peaceful, law-abiding society. In the Louie case, having an aboriginal mother protected him from being held fully accountable for committing a violent crime. That lower standard of accountability doesn’t protect Mr. Dixon or other bus drivers, doesn’t denounce an unprovoked attack with the vehemence it deserves. And it’s hard to see how it helps Mr. Louie or other aboriginals to be deemed less accountable, even for crimes of serious violence, because of their ancestry.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/editorials/the-wrong-answer-to-aboriginal-overincarceration/article2393887/ >

It’s reflexive in certain quarters, especially when teachers unions are up in arms, to chastise Canada’s school systems for all manner of weaknesses. Facts, as we know, never deflect ideology, or else some of these now-ritualistic attacks would have long yielded to a more balanced analysis.

Canadian teachers are among the best paid in the world. They have no claim whatsoever to even more during tough fiscal times. Their strike in British Columbia and their grumbling in Ontario are unjustified.

And yet, teachers deliver very good results, judged by international tests. Far from being the shipwreck some describe, Canadian school systems have produced some of the best test scores in the world: second best in the Western world (after Finland) and behind only Korea and Japan in Asia. Canadian results shame those in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and France.

With all its faults, Canadian school systems deliver value for money judged by outcomes that can be compared internationally, something that can’t be said for the health-care system. Teachers and the organization of the school system contribute to these results; family support (especially a respect for learning), cultural assumptions and community norms are also critical – more critical than class size or school funding formulas.

So why would anyone, given the international evidence, pull away from such a system? Apparently, Canada’s aboriginals want to – or at least their leadership does. And so does the recent panel on First Nation Elementary and Secondary Education for Students on Reserve.

Note the words “on reserve.” This three-person study, appointed by Ottawa and the Assembly of First Nations, looked only at education on reserves that produce, sadly but predictably, very substandard results – as for every other indicator of social and economic well-being from employment to poverty, infant mortality to child abuse, earned income to per capita income.

Reading this report was like going back to the 1960s when “child-centred education” was in vogue. Everything in schools was to become culturally sensitive. Objective measurements were deemed bad for pedagogy. Self-affirmation by students was in; measuring up was out. Tests were bad, report cards a thing of the past.

The “child-centred” philosophy proved disastrous and, by the 1980s, parents and ordinary citizens were up in arms. Their struggle met resistance from civil servants in the education ministries, the teachers unions and university theorists. Eventually, the pressure from parents, coupled with the decline in students’ results, ended the “child-centred” system and ushered in a more balanced approach. Similarly, Asian immigrants thought the “child-centred approach” to be rubbish. Today, the much improved results for Canadian students reflect the abandonment of the philosophy of this latest report on aboriginal education.

The report, which uses the phrase “child-centred” as a mantra, is heavy with new structures and systems designed to give on-reserve Indians the power to run school systems themselves, with or without links to the provincial school system.

The report is long on aboriginal students feeling good and short on practicalities. Is there, for example, a “funding gap” between aboriginal schools and provincial ones? Aboriginal groups insist the gap is wide; the Aboriginal Affairs Department told the Auditor-General last year that no such gap exists. Or how would a National Commission for First Nation Education possibly operate, even with provincial chapters, for more than 600 aboriginal communities, many with fewer than 500 people?

Systems and structures are fine and necessary, as is proper funding. But the University of Ottawa’s Ross Finnie (among others) has convincingly shown that results from formal education have more to do with parental attitudes, cultural assumptions about the importance of education and community norms than anything else.

Which means that aboriginal education can’t be divorced from its core contextual problem – the reserves themselves that the panel correctly notes display socio-economic and health inequities, poverty, suicides, youth incarceration and abuse, high teen pregnancy rates, lower life expectancy and chronic disease.

Fix those problems, which flow from the reserve system, and better educational results have a chance.

< http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/it-still-comes-down-to-fixing-the-reserves/article2368368/ >

Ottawa has been underfunding First Nations education for decades. Some communities have no schools at all. Many others have dilapidated buildings but too few books, desks and teachers to justify being called a school at all.

In 2009, a teenager from Attawapiskat confronted the Indian affairs minister and demanded better. Shannen Koostachin died shortly after in a car accident. But, thankfully, others continued her work.

This week, with the help of New Democrat MP Charlie Angus, they won unanimous, all-party support for funding reserve schools “on par” with public schools. This non-binding resolution is an important acknowledgement of how badly the government has been failing First Nations students.

But, to actually improve the situation the upcoming federal budget needs to include new, dedicated funding. Right now, Ottawa provides thousands of dollars less per student than provinces spend to educate non-native kids. Fewer than 40 per cent of native students – half the rate for non-natives – graduate from high school. It’s a tragedy for them and a terrible waste of potential for the country.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper knows this. He has seen the effects first hand. Just last week, he flew to Iqaluit, Nunavut, where graduation rates are even lower, to announce $27 million to boost adult education. That’s needed to help upgrade the skills of high-school dropouts so they can find a job. But wouldn’t it be better to provide decent schools and curriculum so students don’t drop out in the first place?

For more than a year, Ottawa and the Assembly of First Nations have been working to come up with a better way forward. So far, though, there’s been little action and no funding commitments. That needs to change or this week’s resolution will be meaningless.

It’s worth remembering that in 1989, MPs made a similarly grand gesture by unanimously voting to eradicate child poverty by 2000. There are 639,000 children living in poverty who can vouch for the government’s failure to live up to that promise.

As a friend of Koostachin put it: “It’s time to put words into action.”

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/article/1139587–native-education-must-be-funded-equally-with-public-schools >

When the House of Commons reconvenes Monday, the focus will rightly be on allegations of electoral fraud and signs of any Conservative climb down on the Internet surveillance bill.

But shortly after the featured bout, the Commons is also expected to make history later in the day.

The government has signalled it will back an NDP motion declaring that all First Nations children in this country are entitled to the basic human right of access to high quality education.

The motion also commits the government to closing the funding gap between aboriginal education and provincial school systems.

There have been many feel-good, non-binding symbolic motions passed in this chamber over the years.

In his last act in the Commons as NDP leader in 1989, Ed Broadbent convinced Parliament to back a resolution promising to end child poverty in this country by 2000.

It didn’t happen.

But Charlie Angus, the New Democrat whose motion goes to a vote Monday, says the government is “running out of road” on the question of aboriginal education.

The Timmins-James Bay MP worked with a young girl from Attawapiskat, Shannen Koostachin, whose fight for proper schools in her community became one of the largest youth-driven civil rights campaign the country had ever seen.

Tired of attending school in rundown portables sitting adjacent to land contaminated by a massive diesel spill, Shannen began a campaign that took her to Parliament Hill where she faced down cabinet ministers, demanding the right to be educated in a dignified manner.

At 14, she was the face of a young aboriginal movement demanding better and she was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize.

Shannen perished in a 2010 car crash at age 15, but others took up her cause, and it became known as “Shannen’s Dream.”

The motion on Monday calls on the House to adopt that dream and her family will be here for the vote.

The timing of Angus’ motion is no accident.

The housing crisis in Attawapiskat dominated the national news late last year. (Promised housing has arrived and should be ready by the end of March.)

In January, at an Ottawa summit with First Nations leaders, Prime Minister Stephen Harper spoke of the need for training aboriginal youth to feed an employment shortage in this country, something that should start with education.

A mere 40 per cent of youths living on reserves finish high school.

Each student receives, on average, about $3,000 less in funding every year from kindergarten through Grade 12 than non-natives.

A national panel on First Nation education in early February reported at least 100 schools on reserves were unsafe for learning and called for immediate funding increases to bring them in line with provincial funding.

It also said teachers on reserves should receive pay hikes to put them on equal footing with their provincial counterparts.

Don Drummond broke from his doom-and-gloom report to the Ontario government earlier this month when it came to aboriginal education, saying the crumbling and underfunded reserve schools in the province must be financially supported to the same level as their provincial counterparts.

The McGuinty government must push Ottawa and, if the Conservatives refuse, then Ontario must step up to the plate, he said.

Last week a United Nations panel of human rights experts severely criticized the Harper government on the disparities between First Nations communities and the rest of the country.

Angus believes the level of awareness about the education inequity in this country has been raised.

Shannen briefly lived with the MP and his family.

“I was a school board trustee and I’m a politician and you see these issues from 30,000 feet,” Angus said. “She made me see it through a child’s eyes.

”She could tell by Grade 7 her life was slipping away. She had a spark, a fire that I’ve never seen. I don’t know where she got it, but she was fearless.’’

As symbolic as Monday’s vote promises to be, Shannen’s Dream will never be fulfilled unless a government backs that symbolism with some cash.

< http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1136945–harper-conservatives-set-to-back-motion-to-end-aboriginal-education-funding-gap-fulfilling-shannen-s-dream >

People accused of crimes have long been allowed to argue their trial was unfair because their lawyer did a lousy job of representing them.

Now, mentally ill Ontarians caught up in legal battles over the right to choose their own medical treatment have the same rights.

In a 3-0 decision Tuesday, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that Zeljko Gligorevic, who has schizophrenia and is locked in the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, is the victim of a miscarriage of justice because he was denied effective legal representation at a hearing before the province’s Consent and Capacity Board to determine whether he can refuse anti-psychotic drugs.

It is the first time a court has said the right to effective legal representation applies to those involved in legal proceedings in the mental health system.

“This was a novel claim in Canada,” said Mercedes Perez, a Toronto lawyer who specializes in mental health issues and was appointed to act as a ‘”friend of the court” in Gligorevic’s case.

For people charged with criminal offences, the right to effective assistance from a lawyer has been recognized as a principle of fundamental justice and a component of the right to a fair trial under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

But in civil cases, one of few options available to people who take issue with the quality of their lawyer’s work has been to sue for negligence. That’s not a very satisfactory remedy for someone like Gligorevic, who is fighting attempts to have him declared incapable of making his own treatment decisions.

While effective legal assistance is seen as crucial at a criminal trial, where an accused person’s freedom is at stake, it is no less serious in the mental health context, where treatment decisions affecting a person’s liberty, dignity and right to self-determination are also at issue, said Justice Eleanore Cronk, writing for the appeal court on Tuesday.

Without “the availability of effective assistance of counsel who is prepared to undertake fearless advocacy for the allegedly incapable patient at the board capacity hearing, the right of self-determination in respect of medical treatment becomes illusory,” she said.

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The law is finally fair. In a landmark judgment last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Canadians with mental disabilities have the same right to testify in court as everyone else.

The tragedy is that it took so long to get this principle established — and that so many lives were blighted along the way.

It should have happened in 1985 when the equality provision of the Charter of Rights took effect. It says unequivocally: “Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability.”

But an older law, the Canada Evidence Act (passed in 1893), imposed restrictions on litigants with mental disabilities. It gave anyone charged with a criminal offence the right to challenge the competency of the accuser. The presiding judge would then examine the plaintiff to determine whether he or she understood the obligation to tell the truth. Those who failed this test would be denied the right to testify.

That was what happened to K.B., a 26-year-old woman believed to have a mental age between 3 and 6. She alleged she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by her mother’s partner at the time, a man identified in court documents as D.A.I. The Crown intended to put her on the witness stand to testify. It also intended to use the statements she made to her teacher to build its case.

The trial judge, Justice Colin McKinnon of the Ontario Superior Court, deemed the woman incompetent to give evidence. Although she knew it was wrong to tell a lie and had no trouble answering factual questions about her family, her age, her school and her daily routines, he was unsatisfied she grasped the difference between truth and falsity.

He disallowed her statements to her special education teacher and to the police, saying they “would seriously compromise the accused’s right to a fair trial.”

That left the Crown with nothing but the testimony of a family friend who said he found a Polaroid photo of K.B. with her breasts exposed in D.A.I.’s room; and her sister who said she had seen the accused touch K.B.’s breasts while she was in bed. It wasn’t nearly enough to get a conviction and the case collapsed. D.A.I. was acquitted. The ruling was affirmed by the Ontario Court of Appeal.

Determined to fight on, the Crown appealed to the Supreme Court and it agreed to review the case.

Its judgment, released last Friday, was written by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin. “Those with mental disabilities are easy prey for sexual abusers,” she said. To prevent them from testifying because they cannot explain the nature of the obligation to tell the truth “is to exclude reliable and relevant evidence and make it impossible to bring to justice those charged with crimes against the mentally disabled.”

The court ordered D.A.I.’s acquittal be aside and a new trial conducted. It also said adults with mental disabilities should be subjected to no higher test of truthfulness than any other witness: Can they tell their story coherently and do they swear to tell the truth?

The ruling was not unanimous. Three of the nine justices wrote a dissenting opinion. “The majority judgment unacceptably dilutes the protection Parliament intended to provide an accused person,” they warned.

But their view, while acknowledged in the ruling, did not prevail. That means K.B. will finally get her day in court. It means other Canadians with intellectual challenges will have a clear right to testify. And it means one of the most damaging stereotypes of people with mental illness will lose its legitimacy in the courts.

This is a moment to celebrate. But it is also a poignant reminder of all the victims who were silenced and all the abusers who now walk free.

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