"Burnt Church Mi'kmaq Say They're Paying Harsh Price For Defying Ottawa"

FREDERICTON (CP) - Officials at New Brunswick's troubled Burnt Church reserve say the Mi'kmaw community is paying a harsh price for its defiant stand against the federal government and its fishing laws.

Members of the Burnt Church band are holding meetings this week with representatives of the Assembly of First Nations to discuss the seasons of violence that have marked the lobster fishing dispute on Miramichi Bay.

Band councillors said Thursday that in addition to lingering court cases and physical and emotional scars from ugly confrontations with federal fisheries officers, the people are also paying for their intransigence through poverty and housing problems.

Band official Brian Bartibogue said he wants the news media to come to Burnt Church to take a look at the run-down houses, the overcrowding, the hunger and the poverty this winter is bringing to the small reserve in northeastern New Brunswick.

Bartibogue said Canadians won't understand what Burnt Church is fighting for until they see what happens when people have no means of earning a living and no hope for the future.

"It's not just about fishing, it's about providing for our communities in a way that brings us up to the standards of the rest of Canada," Bartibogue said. "We deserve a better life than what we have today and that's what we're fighting for."

Bartibogue said the reserve has appealed to Ottawa for funds to help provide proper housing for families struggling to survive on welfare payments of roughly $75 a week, but he said the band has been told there's no money available. "We are being economically starved out because of our stand against the federal government," he said.

He said the smouldering bitterness over native lobster fishing rights likely will ignite another season of conflict and confrontation unless the federal government and the reserve can find a way of bridging their differences.

Burnt Church has become the flashpoint in the dispute over native access to natural resources and Ottawa's right to regulate the fishery.

Bob Rae, the former premier of Ontario who was appointed mediator last summer as the dispute boiled on Miramichi Bay, is awaiting word on whether his efforts will be needed in the new year.

The lobster fishery opens in northeastern New Brunswick in the spring.

Bartibogue said the reserve doesn't trust Rae. "That's not the answer," Bartibogue said of Rae.

"The federal government has to realize we have a right to determine our own destiny and that we do not have an aboriginal right to live in poverty. We'll have to keep taking them (the federal government) to court until Canada lifts its standards for human dignity."

Meanwhile, the New Brunswick government has offered its services, if wanted, to try to bring the two sides together.

Aboriginal Affairs Minister Brad Green said no one in the province wants a repeat of the mayhem that has marred the lobster fishery over the past year and a half. "We have been consistent in calling upon both sides in the dispute to come together and sit down and work out a compromise that both can be comfortable with," said Green.

"The answer to this dispute is not a return to confrontation between federal enforcement officers and the people of Burnt Church either on land or on water."

Andre Marc Lanteigne, spokesman for the federal Fisheries Department, said fisheries officials will not change their hard line toward reserves that try to fish under their own rules.

"We are encouraging more management by communities but we must make sure the interests of other stakeholders are factored in and that our regulations are followed," he said.

The federal government has signed 30 of the 34 First Nation communities in Atlantic Canada to one-year fisheries agreements. Under the agreements, the reserves get economic development money, fishing gear and training to help them enter the East Coast fishing industry.

Burnt Church rejected the deal and has drawn up its own fisheries management plan.

The power struggle between the Mi'kmaq community and the federal Fisheries Department resulted in numerous confrontations on Miramichi Bay last summer and fall as fisheries officers seized aboriginal traps.

No one was killed in the dangerous encounters on the bay, but there were injuries on both sides and there were many arrests and charges against native fishermen, several of which are still before the courts.

Cochrane, who signed the current $35-million, five-year funding agreement for the treatment centre last July 1, was on the weeklong Caribbean cruise along with about 70 staff members from the treatment centre. He said he paid for that trip.

Perry Fontaine, the treatment centre's president, told the Globe that the facility paid $2,200 for Chochrane's plane fare to Hawaii, and about $1,500 for his accommodations in September.

Fontaine said the centre paid Cochrane's way because he was conducting research for a native-run, federally financed aboriginal health organization, the Anishnaable Mino-Ayaawin. The organization administers health care for seven Southern Manitoba bands.

Fontaine said he believed Cochrane had left Health Canada in early September and was employed by AMA at the time of the trip and therefore would not have been in conflict as assistant deputy minister. Fontaine said he believed Cochrane gave the AMA a report on the conference.

However, AMA executive director Daryl Cote denied there was any AMA business to do in Hawaii, adding that Cochrane has never worked for the group and that he has never seen a report on research done for AMA in Hawaii.

Cochrane would not comment.

Cochrane's former executive assistant at Health Canada, Aline Dirks, said Wednesday that she also believed Cochrane was reassigned from his assistant deputy role to work for AMA.

She said senior executives in Health Canada told others in the department that Cochrane could go to work for AMA on secondment. But no deal had been signed and the plan fell apart when Cochrane was summoned back to Ottawa from the Caribbean cruise in October. She said Chocrane sent a report of his Hawaiian research findings, if not directly to Cote at AMA, then certainly to Fontaine.

Health Canada spokesman Jeff Pender said Wednesday the department was reviewing the Hawaiian trip to see whether Cochrane reported it to his supervisors in the department as required under Treasury Board conflict-of-interest guidelines.