Ottawa, Ontario - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper re-assured unnamed backers of his Conservative Party on Wednesday by clarifying that "absolutely none" of the money he recently committed to maternal health initiatives would be spent on Canadian First Nations people.
Prime Minister Harper was in Dakar, Senegal last week attending la Francophonie summit, and pledged $150 million dollars over five years to help improve the health of women and children in developing countries.
"We're acutely aware of how much work remains to be done to improve maternal and child health, and we will keep raising this issue at every opportunity in Canada and on the world stage," said Harper, adding that "there is simply too much at stake to remain silent. We know how many lives can be saved, we know how to do it, and so friends we must get it done." He highlighted that the Canadian-based Micronutrient Initiative, an international non-profit organization, has helped save four million lives in its battle against vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
However, since returning from Senegal, several notable backers of his governing party have made clear their concerns that the Prime Minister not misuse any public funds by allocating any of it to Canada's indigenous peoples. Speaking to The Sentinel Dispatch on condition of anonymity, three notable supporters said they had concerns. "The natives are already given too much of our tax dollars as it is; why should they be given more?"
In an e-mail obtained by The Sentinel Dispatch on Wednesday, Harper encourages his backers that "not one penny will be allocated to maternal aboriginal health in this country." In the e-mail, Harper cites several reasons, the bluntest being that "there are fewer and fewer aboriginal women in this country each year anyways."
Indeed, a report released by the RCMP in May 2014 stated that 1,017 indigenous women and girls were murdered from 1980-2012. Because of gaps in police and government reporting, the actual numbers may be much higher. This number does not include the number of missing indigenous women that are missing. Despite every Premier in the country calling for a national public inquiry into the crisis, the Prime Minister has consistently refused to call such an inquest. After 15-year-old Tina Fontaine's lifeless body was pulled from Manitoba's Red River in August, Harper commented that "It's very clear that there has been very fulsome study of this particular … of these particular things. They're not all one phenomenon, We should not view this as a sociological phenomenon. We should view it as crime."
From the Ottawa Bureau