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Welfare Funding

October 20, 2009

Gord Mackintosh
Minister of Family Services and Housing;
Minister Responsible for Persons with Disabilities.

Dear Mr. Mackintosh,

Why do people wish to kill themselves?  What is it that drives them to despair so much that they feel they would be happier dead?  I am writing you in response to the article in the Winnipeg Free Press recently where your views on Manitoba’s Aboriginal Child Welfare funding, were summarized. 
I don’t know how long this issue will take to be addressed, how many letters will be written, how many marches will be made, or how many young people will die before the abominable errors are corrected.  You know, in fact, we all know the impact that lack of prevention has upon individuals, families, schools, workplaces and the whole of society.  We all become sick.  I have worked my entire career to teach those ‘less able than the norm’, for whatever reason, to try to function in society.  My last experiences in the school system (which is the receptacle for the suffering of children and families), required my colleagues and I to apply for funding to the governments for assistance to handle the marginalized children in the schools.  We were instructed, by the government to make our descriptions of the children and their behaviours as graphic and gruesome as possible, no matter the nature of the personal sufferings.  The mentality of the government was, the worse you can make it, the better your chances of funding for your needs in the system.  Believe me, we didn’t have to exaggerate the conditions of the children in need.  There were just too many of them to receive the assistance they all desperately needed.  

“The test of a caring government is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens.  This is a test.”
 I agree with you one million percent.  If this is a test, when do we get to enact the real thing?  I mean it.  When do we ever get to clean up the mess we have inherited so that the next generation will never have to clean up ... when they can be so proud that at last, that they can bring their children into a world that really cares, is beautiful and needs to promise nothing because happiness surrounds them?   
And when these young ones grow up and perhaps are so unfortunate as to have moved out of the despair of their ‘preserves’ to the streets of a big city and find themselves homeless, what do we do for their basic needs?  It’s simple.  If they don’t have an address, they don’t get a health card.  Without a health card, they don’t get any of our wonderful world class health care.  What would Nellie McClung have to say about this?

I applaud your voice and your views, but we need more than to adjust the funding formula for aboriginal children on reserves, in need of social workers.  We will never meet our ‘targets’ of wiping out poverty unless we wipe out poverty.  We have to want to do this more than anything else.  We have to believe that it is the most important issue - before we eat our evening meal or tuck ourselves in to sleep.  We need a collective change of heart that knows without a doubt that the young are the most important people in the country and must be attended to.  It is their hopes and dreams that will be the net we will all sleep in. We need to believe from our heart of hearts that the need for a child-welfare model and new funding formula will be totally unnecessary as we all learn to love and respect all of the children as our own.

I would like to see the headline of the next article read: No Welfare Funding Reform This Year or Ever – Not Needed ... Our Caring Has Worked!

We need a big change of heart.  This is the only way to wipe out these problems - forever.
We are here to work together to accomplish this dream.  We would be pleased to meet with you anytime.

Sincerely,

Laurel McCallum, Chief Agent, PPP
With the Spirit

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