https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_and_Northern_Quebec_...
> My own perception is that corruption within the bands is rife, with chiefs and their family/friends benefiting from the rent-seeking and pretty much everyone else in the band losing out.
Look far north. The village doesn't have clean water, but the local chief has two hummers and brand new ATVs on the front lawn. Guess where your tax money went...
I'm not going to try justifying a Hummer, because I don't know what intrinsic value it holds in their circumstances. I have been to northern communities where expensive pickup trucks were the norm, for very good reasons. There are many parts of Canada where a car is basically useless. The communities are small enough that one can walk from end to end in a quarter of an hour, yet the roads leading to the town would be impassible to anything less than a decent truck (and even then are impassible to any vehicle at certain times of the year). That is before utility is taken into consideration. You won't get very far with hauling loads of firewood home and would not enjoy the trip to the dump with your household trash in a car. Owning a truck also makes more sense for the trip to the city, where virtually everything from food to furniture will be less expensive. Arguing that they should own inexpensive cars because it supports the suburban lifestyle of the south is even more tone-deaf than arguing that people in the suburbs should use public transit because it is sufficient for downtown residents.
I think that the Mayor of Vancouver's salary is pretty fair considering the job they're doing, I can't speak on the specifics of this village but I am extremely suspicious of anyone who demands that people live in visible poverty to receive aide. The concept of "the welfare queen" originated with Reagan and was entirely born to utilize as a political tool - we can stop playing into stereotypes.
1. I am 100% not a car person - if anyone else knows a better assumed value than 24k please feel free to revise or correct numbers
Hummers cost north of $100k USD. Assuming the mayor of Vancouver’s salary is listed in CAD it isn’t enough to buy one after tax. Furthermore on that salary it probably wouldn’t be prudent to buy one at all.
I'm personally a non-driver so I am quite clueless here. That said it does impact my understanding a fair bit since paying 24k for a car seems like a pretty nice price for a car (you can get used cars for thousands of dollars, but a new car is probably going to be well over 10k) but where there are definitely cheaper options - paying 100k is pretty ridiculous.
In particular this organization was opposing considerations of the Mohawk People to invite in outside investors that wanted to build casinos on reservation land - that's a hard decision to make and even harder when there is a single ultimate tribal representative that you can throw ten million dollars at without serious impacting long term financial expectations. The Mohawk Council of Chiefs in Akwesasne[1] represents a tribe with enough members, and historical precedent, that they benefit from and enjoy an actual government body, but many of these tribes are small enough or remote enough that a single member is vested with a lot of power and this will often go poorly. I don't think there's a really clear good solution here - it'd probably make sense to consolidate tribes into fewer regional bands but Natives are obviously pretty skittish about surrendering any of what little power of self-governance they have.
Source? I think this is a common argument and having lived among native reserves I have never seen it myself or seen reports of it. Feels like an urban legend crafted to justify not providing support, but willing to think differently if there’s evidence to support it.