Infrastructure desperately needed in Aboriginal northwest
There has been much commentary about healing and rapprochement with Canada’s First Nations due to the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission report on the horrific abuse Aboriginal children experienced at residential schools during the last century.
However, if Ontario, which has the largest population of First Nations people in the country, truly want to make amends for the “sins of the past” than we need to look at “economic and social reconciliation” as our primary vehicle for restitution.
Until every First Nation community in the province has the same level of infrastructure and social services as non-Aboriginal towns and cities, most of the remorseful speeches by guilty white politicians are nothing more than “hot air.”
Without a doubt, some of the most destitute and impoverished First Nations communities are located in Ontario’s mineral-rich but isolated northwest, near the Ring of Fire – the most significant Canadian mineral discovery in almost a century – and in the regions to the west.
Almost a decade of political inaction by both the provincial and federal governments has caused Cliffs Natural Resources – a major American multi-national mining company – to abandon its $3 billion private sector investment in northern Ontario and miss out on the first part of a multi-decade commodity super cycle.