About that $90 million...

So much for all those claims about Attawapiskat's leaders wasting money and keeping their books closed.

The most informative piece of Canadian journalism that you'll read today comes not from one of the major dailies or broadcasters, but a "blogger" named Chelsea Vowel. A self-styled "Plains Cree speaking Metis woman in Montreal," Vowel deconstructs the most bandied about figure from last week – the $90 million that the federal government has spent on Attawapiskat over the past five years. Vowel, as far as we can tell, is the first person to note that that's $90 million over five years – which works out to the far smaller figure of just $18 million a year. And that $18 million isn't all going to housing, the source of the crisis in the northern Ontario community, but also education, administrators salaries, infrastructure, health care, and more. Housing only received some $5.8 million since 2006 - enough to build 23 homes, but only if repairs and upkeep to every other home on the community were overlooked. Meanwhile, estimates put the amount of money needed to build enough homes to facilitate the entire community at $84 million. That's... a bit of a funding gap.

Likewise, Vowel also bats away the notion that the band's expenditures are kept hidden, as she links to a document detailing how every last penny is spent in the community. Well, so much for those two "blame-the-Indian" narratives that dominated right-leaning news coverage of the community last week. It also throws into question just what a third-party manager would do to make sure funds are spent more wisely in the community. Putting the band's finances into third-party hands has been just about the only measurable response from the federal government in the Attawapiskat crisis so far. Either way, good on Ms. Vowel for bringing all this to light (and for doing so in such a readable, straightforward manner, we might add.)