Charlie Hunter is Coming Home...

Hi Friends

This is a sort of good news/bad news story.

On March the 5th of this year I read a little human interest story in the Toronto Star newspaper.
This story was of a young boy from a fly-in Cree community who had died tragically while attending a residential school. This accident took place back in the seventies and his remains were interred some two hundred kilometers away. It proved to be too costly for the family from a fly-in community to be able to afford to visit the child's resting place. His aged parents had only ever been able to visit his grave once, since his death, and now in their own twilight years yearned to be able to tend his resting spot.

While the Canadian Government acknowledged the sadness of this situation,( INAC minister John Duncan sent his condolences ) they also made note that there wasn't any money in the budget to repatriate this child's body back home. This after the much ballyhooed apology, where it was said;
that the residential school period was shameful time in our history was at an end.
Well reading this story it was shockingly evident to me that these were words, flowery words, but just words in the end. As the old adage goes, talk is cheap.

To plead poverty when the government had just announced a thirty billion dollar fighter jet contract, and having just spent one billion dollars for security on a week-end summit in Toronto in the past summer, and to the pledging of billions of dollars for the building of more jails, for what even their own minster had called un-reported crime.
Does this sound like a cash poor government to you?
The expense to bring this child's body back to his community would be a sum total of twenty-three thousand dollars. What a chance to show the Canadian people in general, and the Indigenous people in particular that they stand by the apology. That the new relationship with the First Nations would be vastly different than the previously dark one. But it was not to be! The Canadian government held fast to their original statement of this being too expensive for the government to take on.

Today in the Toronto Star a follow up story ran...and it was the good news part of this post.
Charlie is coming home, courtesy of the good citizens who read this story, and were touched by the plight of this family and the apparent heartlessness of this government.

These people gave their own apology, of sorts, to this family, when this government wouldn't.

regards Debra