4 dead in Canadian school shooting

[Officer of Engineers]

The question liberals would ask is what made him sick in the first place.

The Liberal solution is to throw more moneys at this which is exactly not what this community needs. They're flushed with enough money to spend it all on booze and drugs instead of post-2ndary education.

[Monash]

The Liberal solution is to throw more moneys at this which is exactly not what this community needs. They're flushed with enough money to spend it all on booze and drugs instead of post-2ndary education.

It depends on how well the funds are targeted/delivered. Money directed firstly to education services - to get the kids out of town/into skilled employment elsewhere plus improved drug counseling and rehabilitation services will help (especially the education bit). A misguided 'money fest' not so much.

[Officer of Engineers]

It depends on how well the funds are targeted/delivered. Money directed firstly to education services - to get the kids out of town/into skilled employment elsewhere plus improved drug counseling and rehabilitation services will help (especially the education bit). A misguided 'money fest' not so much.

Ottawa can increase all the education/training budget up the ying-yang but they cannot reduce the band fund, at least not without rewriting the treaties.

But give the bands a few years, they'll find ways to shift the education funds to booze and drugs.

Historically, the only way for the bands to lift themselves out of the hole are casinos; requiring clear thinking band members to work and manage the place, ie more money than what Ottawa gives them.

[Monash]

We have similar if not identical problems over here.

The problem is basically one of economics. Small, isolated rural communities simply can't generate the employment needed to sustain their population in the face of technological innovation. Across Australia there are literally hundreds of small country towns that have slowly died due to technological and social change. It might have started with the railroads, the automobile and farm mechanization but telecommunications, aircraft and computers are finishing it. Towns which were established and then prospered via servicing farms and hamlets within a days wagon or so ride lost their reason for being, mechanization meant local farms that once needed lots of farm laborers could dispense with them and the result was inevitable. Non aboriginal members of the community voted with their feet and left. And the towns? They withered and died within a generation or two as soon only the older generation were left. Key regional centers and the big cities prospered but everything else just died.

For local aboriginal populations however - fixed in place as they are by both their local cultural (and white liberal) expectations the result is devastating i.e. chronic, socially debilitating long term rates of unemployment. Casinos in Canada aside you can't generate enough viable, meaningful jobs in communities that number in the few hundreds to employ everyone. Maybe a store or two, a pub, a couple of local handymen etc and four or five public service positions (health practitioners, a couple of school teachers and a cop or two) that's it. A town of say 500 people or so might today, if they are lucky generate the FTE of what 20 or 30 jobs?

And race has nothing to do with it, ring fence a a white community of the same size so the adults can never leave, give them say 50 jobs (and that's being generous) to share between them and leave them to stew for a generation or two what do the think you'll find - exactly what we see in so many aboriginal communities today.

Short answer is there needs to be wholesale community acceptance of the fact that (sadly) young people of all races, religions and creeds need to leave most small country towns and their communities if they want a future. Come back yes, to reconnect and perhaps in the end retire but leave as adults to get an education and a job.

Wish it wasn't so but there it is. And no amount of social welfare can change it.

[Officer of Engineers]

Short answer is there needs to be wholesale community acceptance of the fact that (sadly) young people of all races, religions and creeds need to leave most small country towns and their communities if they want a future. Come back yes, to reconnect and perhaps in the end retire but leave as adults to get an education and a job.

The band dies. They don't have the critical numbers to form ghettos in cities to maintain their culture.

Wish it wasn't so but there it is. And no amount of social welfare can change it.

White man's guilt. The truth is that the aboriginals don't have the numbers to survive as a culture in the White Man's world and we're paying them to maintain the culture ... as if their culture is drugs, booze, and suicide. Their culture is already dead.