Family Owned Business

"The petition is an attempt to get some clarification as to how the chief and council are being compensated, and then to discuss what we should do about it." Brian Smith, Glooscap First Nation band member

Now that the screeching cat is out of the bag, members of the Glooscap First Nation reserve in Nova Scotia are feeling rather hard done by. Particularly the large number of band members who are unemployed and who are reliant upon the band council's good will to release to them the wherewithal for shelter and food. Knowing full well that if any hint of criticism of the family-operated reserve is suspected, all assistance will be cut off to them.

The Glooscap First Nation reserve is a proud family-operated enterprise. There was a recent death in the reserve council, and there will be a by-election held to fill that vacancy. Five candidates are in the running, all but one of whom just happen to be family members of the chief of the band, and the existing councillors.

Chief Shirley Clarke and the current three councillors have munificently granted themselves salaries in excess of $209,000 free of taxes. (One can only surmise that the country's many reserve chiefs and council members who earn modest annual salaries must be scratching their heads over this supreme inequity. They might also be feeling rather annoyed at what these revelations unveiled by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is doing to their reputations.)

But there it is, $209,000 in salaries. To expertly operate a reserve of just over 300 people. And this is a reserve, as it happens, where fewer than 90 of its members actually live on the reserve. Tough work, administering that number of dependents, doling out the taxpayer-funded reserve funding that keeps coming along regular as clockwork.

This is the also, by the by, the reserve that boasted a councillor whose hard work merited a $1-million annual salary, last year.

The reserve's by-laws allow for a band members' meeting, if 20 members sign a petition for such. Thus far, fifteen members have signed such a petition, asking for a meeting. At which meeting, should it come to pass, the members will presume to enquire of their chief and council the wherewithal and reason for that generous self-awarded salary standard.

The petition is led by a band member by the name of Brian Smith, a former banker and currently director of operations for the National Centre for First Nations Governance. Which happens to be an independent Vancouver-based organization whose purpose is to train native leaders on how to operate functional, good reserve governments.

Now he can look closer to home and do some ameliorative work right there. If he can also manage to win the open council seat in the upcoming election, he will also be able to put theory into practise.