Manufacturing Indifference

The Canadian mainstream media willfully participate in a smear campaign designed to undermine an attempt by a community's leader to bring their desperate plight to light and then are shocked that they aren't welcomed with open arms.

If an auditor flew in to your company or your town and giving you  limited time and resources to cooperate, conducted an audit/witch hunt that the courts later ruled was unnecessary and possibly illegal and found, in a two year span, approximately 30 missing invoices and receipts, would you conclude that your company or town was corrupt?  Or would you conclude that running a large community with huge social and economic problems with limited resources can easily result in a couple dozen receipts going missing in the span of a couple years?

Oh and by the way, this was during a period of co-management by the government (which the courts actually ruled was an unreasonable remedy), these problems occurred while the government appointed co-manager had signing authority.

Spence cleaned things up massively when she came in., The problems at the reserve were not caused by theft or mismanagement but lack of sufficiant resources and the reserve has been ASKING for a real forensic audit for years. The few examples brought up in the smear job can probably be cleared up by asking vendors for confirmation of purchases as the reserve themselves requested. 

The smear job by the government with the active complicity of the media has accomplished its goal: the message that  'corrupt, incompetent Indians are wasting or stealing all the generous support your tax dollars pay for so you can safely stop paying attention' has been delivered and gratefully swallowed. All the followups pointing out the truth will either be confined to alternative media and ignored, or actively suppressed as the Kinsella Sun piece was. The media did their job as the interests they are paid to defend see it.

UPDATES:  Sorting out the spin and counting the real money