Reply #101: "medicine chest"

[Lisa]

From what I can recall of First Nations treaty issues, some of the bands signed treaties which promised them a "medicine chest" as part of the concessions. Given that this was in the 1800s, there wasn't any provincial medicare back then. (In theory the provinces look after the health care stuff, so it's not really a "national" plan, e.g. the card that Bill Clinton was showing at his speech way back -- my card has "British Columbia" on it.)

And because it's legally a federal thing (the treaties are on a footing with international agreements), the provinces aren't supposed to have jurisdiction over aboriginals.

So there has been much legal wrangling over whether "medicine chest" is literal (a box stocked with bandages, disinfectant, etc.) -- or whether it was symbolic and should be updated to reflect what the bands were promised in a larger sense, or what our modern-day expectations are. Not surprising that there is a federal/provincial/municipal mess -- the land/resources issues are even worse. (If the box-of-bandages sounds weird, consider that many "treaty day" celebrations consist of a federal representative solemnly handing a crisp new bill to each member of the band ... in an amount like $5 or $10, which would have been a lot of money in 1900, but has not been indexed to inflation!)



Re: national day care, the old Liberal government was promising to put this in -- it didn't actually get off the ground, because the Conservatives are scrapping it for their own programme (which involves just giving parents money and letting the market take care of the rest). (Friends with kids tell me that the payments won't go very far.)

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=587d1824-0129-4bed-889b-dc18b7e8c0d3&k=63741