In the last days of October Canada was seized with an issue that stirred the conscience of the nation. It transcended party politics. It touched the moral fibre of the nation.

As the story unfolded in national parliament and provincial legislature, words alone could not bring home the nature of the problems faced by the residents of one Indian community living on the shores of James Bay in northern Ontario. It took television to reveal the true horrors of living conditions, pictures that immediately evoked comparisons with Third, even Fourth World countries.

Kashechewan. From almost complete obscurity, the town of some 1,900 people, Canadian people, First Canadian citizens, became a household name all across the land.

Bad water. E-coli infested water. Not fit to drink. Chemically treated to the point that it raised dreadful sores on the skin when people used it for bathing babies and young children. That was the worst of the pictures. Others showed the damaged houses. Still others the school built over oil pools.

For the first time in many years Canada had to confront the appalling neglect of its poorest and most neglected. Sure, there are Indian communities where such horrors do not exist, where the people living in them, assisted by governments and voluntary organizations, have achieved reasonable if not affluent living standards. Then there is Kashechewan, and all the other communities like it on Indian reserves.

It so happened that the United States of America, in that very same week, was confronting its own past history with the passing of Rosa Parks, at age 92. She it was who brought home to Americans the injustice of racial segregation in that country when, in 1955, she refused to give up her seat in a bus to a white man, in Montgomery, Alabama. Her action led to the eventual overthrow of that country's racial segregation laws.

It is hard to believe that segregation was still being practised in Canada as late as 1961, and later, with or without legal sanction. A visitor travelling through Kenora had first-hand experience of it. He stopped at the Ontario Liquor Control Board outlet. It was at a time when Ontarians had to buy a permit to order to buy "spirits". Having filled out his order on a special form, he joined a queue, and was at once informed he was in the wrong queue. Yep. That was the queue for Indians. He had to go to another queue which was for white people!

Segregation, apartheid, these are things now universally condemned. Racial profiling is another. When reservations for Indians were first legislated, these terms were practically unknown. Tales of residential school abuses were ignored decade after decade. Whole native communities, Indian and Inuit, were transported and relocated at the diktat of "well intentioned" ministers and bureaucrats. "To provide a Canadian presence in remote northern region" was often the rationale put forth.

It has taken the Kashechewan experience to bring home to all Canadians how we have treated-mistreated-our own people. Even in this, the Year of the Veteran, some surviving native veterans have yet to receive their pensions, their courageously hard-won entitlements.

There is a lesson here for all of us. We have to rid ourselves of apartheid in Canada before we continue to crusade against it in other countries.

That others are beginning to think along the same lines is heartening. A column by veteran politician and political affairs commentator Douglas Fisher in the Ottawa Sun newspaper of Sunday, October 30, titled "There must be a better way" is but one example.

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