Kim Barker, public health adviser for the Assembly of First Nations, told the Senate committee on aboriginal peoples she was “devastated” when she first heard that health officials were spending precious time debating the wisdom of sending hand sanitizer – which can contain up to 70-per-cent alcohol – to the communities. “We heard that ... people were spending days discussing the pros and cons of a non-alcohol-based hand sanitizer versus an alcohol-based one because of the concerns about addictions in communities,” she said. “It was absolutely outrageous...One Manitoba chief, David Harper of Garden Hill First Nation, became so frustrated waiting for federal flu-fighting supplies he flew to Winnipeg to buy them himself.”
No doubt the virus also was aware of the opportunity, too, justifying the delay from a medical point of view. No doubt the same rules were applied in all remoter or more insular small towns across the country based on their alcohol sales or addiction in patient programs per population. No doubt they checked with the bar tabs at social clubs across the land.
Comments
seanie - June 25, 2009 12:49 pm
If that kind of debate even had to be had, it should have taken at most, 2 hours.
google: Effectiveness of non-alcohol versus alcohol containing hand santitizers.
google: costs of non-alcohol versus alcohol containing hand santitizers
Compile results, make a decision.
Moronic.
David Janes - June 25, 2009 2:25 pm
Really? Ignoring seanie's crowdsourcing health opinions (google 1640 ad: demons possessing you? thorax bleeding it is!) ... like, wtf? Are aboriginals now supposed to be so dependent that some level of government is supposed to be distributing hand cleanser? What's next? Their free toilet paper didn't show up?
Alan - June 25, 2009 9:41 pm
Well, maybe if you live 4,700,000,000 miles from the next Shopper's Drug mart, David. Do you think that Chief flew to Winnipeg even though he could walk to the corner store?
How is your strike anyway?
David Janes - June 26, 2009 5:53 am
I bet they have someone coming in at least once a week, a probably much more frequently ... ah, from their website there's a flight once per day.
This is directly comparable to a local situation. A friend's (daughter's) school has two cases of H1N1. When it was suggested to the school by the parents that there should be hand sanitizer in every room, the principal told them they could buy there own if they wanted.
TO strike no big deal in terms of incovenience, just increasing my contempt for David Miller who represents everyone except the taxpayers and citizens of Toronto.
David Janes - June 26, 2009 5:53 am
Sigh, fix that up would ya luv.
Alan - June 26, 2009 7:58 am
[Done.]
I don't disagree but clearly someone else other than the community had control of the budget, the wholesale contacts and accounts and the health policy decisions and said if you want them go find them. For all we know there was a "no sell without consent" statement on the air delivery standing orders from the supplier who flew in.
David Janes - June 26, 2009 8:46 am
[Thanks]
But is this not the heights of paternalism, of cultural degradation? We're not talking about bottles of tamiflu here or MRI machines: hand cleanser is about as expensive as toilet paper. Is this the vision of where aboriginals should stand in society, being like some unemployed slob sitting on the front porch of his tenement complaining no one will clean up the garbage on the lawn?
Alan - June 26, 2009 8:50 am
I agree. It is the height of paternalism. That some committee has control over this isolated community's access to something as common as toilet paper is the height of paternalism.
Actually the height of paternalism was, as a law school pal told me, when he used to be refused beer on the train from Halifax to Sydney because he was Mi'kmaq back in the 60's and 70s. But that doesn't happen that much anymore or at least it isn't actual written policy.
David Janes - June 26, 2009 6:02 pm
Skipping along, Cosh has interesting comments:
What Prof. Watson might have missed is that the federal government has obligations toward the affected Indians that are not quite "paternalistic" in nature, but arguably contractual. The flu-stricken parts of Manitoba are subject to the terms of Treaty No. 5, which some bands signed less than 100 years ago. As it happens, one of the things the Indian signatories insisted on was that "no intoxicating liquor shall be allowed to be introduced or sold" on Manitoba reserves, and that Ottawa do everything in its power to "preserve [the Queen's] Indian subjects inhabiting the reserves, or living elsewhere within Her North-west Territories, from the evil influence of the use of intoxicating liquors."
If Health Canada were to take those treaty terms literally, it would be positively bound not to supply an abusable ethanol product to Manitoba's aboriginal communities. Likely no one would want to see lives lost because of treaty language that is reinterpreted pretty flexibly by contemporary governments and Indians anyhow. But it would be fair to say that federal officials do have a special responsibility, one transcending purely utilitarian considerations, to take substance-abuse concerns into account.
Treaty 5 here noting the strong language that this shall be "strictly enforced"
Alan - June 26, 2009 6:27 pm
But is that adjective "intoxicating" that one that means use of an organic chemical for, you know, consumption?