AOK withdraws from partnership building new hotel in Little Current

Project now on hold

by Michael Erskine

AUNDECK OMNI KANING-A plan by a local First Nation to build a "name brand" hotel beside Low Island Park has come to a full stop, literally just minutes shy of signing the final agreement which would have launched the deal.

In a statement released by the Aundeck Omni Kaning band council, Chief Patrick Madahbee indicated that the First Nation has been "pursuing the development of a name brand hotel since 1998. It was agreed by consensus of the chief and council that the hotel project be terminated at this time due to the political and business climate in (the Northeast Town), circumstances relating to partnership conditions, and the high costs associated with this project due to the delays with an OMB hearing."

Chief Madahbee further indicated that: "The Aundeck Omni Kaning band council, taking into consideration our community's best interest, have decided to invest our financial resources for other projects within our community."

In a memorandum distributed to band members, chief and council indicated that a demand by "our principal partner Jim McBane" to change the partnership agreement-privately cited as a 20 percent share for the developer and 80 percent retained by the band in the original agreement-altered the profit-sharing formula to the extent the band could no longer make a business case for its members to move forward with the deal.

"It stopped literally at the 59th minute," said band councillor Scott Madahbee, who noted that the decision to halt the project caused a great deal of disappointment among band membership, especially for those who were looking forward to the jobs the project was to provide. "We didn't take the decision lightly."

Mr. McBane had his reasons for wanting to change the original agreement, said Mr. Madahbee, but the band council did not agree with those reasons, declining to go into detail. Mr. McBane also declined to comment on the disagreement, noting that the arrangement was a private business relationship and not a public matter.

Although Mr. McBane said he has "other irons in the fire" regarding the property at Low Island, he declined to elaborate at this time.

The hotel development was a matter of controversy in Little Current a couple of years ago, when Mr. McBane requested a zoning change to a commercial designation to allow the development to go forward. Opposed by the Northeast Town council, Mr. McBane appealed the matter to the Ontario Municipal Board, at a cost he once pegged at nearly $50,000, and won the zoning change. That zoning change remains in place, despite the failure of the AOK hotel project, but as it was site-specific to the hotel development, there could be some question as to how useful the zoning change remains.

The cost of the project to date, with environmental assessments and testing, planning and design, has been touted to have been in the million-dollar range. Sources say funding for the project was being held in place by government agencies, despite the expiry of the original funding programs. Since those programs no longer exist, restarting the project once the band council resolution officially declared the project dead would be impossible.

Building the hotel on band property was also not an option, as the band's current sewer and water infrastructure could not have supported both the hotel's requirements and much-needed community housing expansion.

Councillor Madahbee said that although he had misgivings about the project when first elected to council, he had since come around to supporting the initiative because of the popularity of the project within the community and the promise of long-term employment and economic development for the band.

"There was an agreement in place, put there by a previous council, but it was also felt that agreement should be honoured," said Mr. Madahbee.

A letter outlining Mr. McBane's changed position was apparently received by the band early last week, and followed by a band council meeting on Wednesday where the issue was discussed. A conference call with the developer during the meeting failed to resolve the issues separating the partners and by unanimous consensus of chief and council the project was dropped.

"Frankly, I'm not surprised," said Northeast Town Mayor Joe Chapman, an outspoken critic of the hotel development since its inception. "I have said all along that it was a good project in a bad location."

Mayor Chapman suggested that the Northeast Town would be interested in looking at a other projects with the band-albeit in a different location. "I think that, had the (hotel) project been in a different location, it would have received broad community support," he said. "We have some good property in town, such as up beside the tourist information booth, that would be ideal for a development project. We are willing to look at any proposal."

Although the decision to kill the hotel project has been a heavy hit to community morale in the AOK community, with a tremendous output of effort by both senior government civil servants and band economic development personnel now seemingly for naught, band councillors note that there are other projects on the planning boards and that they remain undaunted.

"It's a hard thing to say, but now we have freed up the band's resources to look at some other things that show promise," said Mr. Madahbee philosophically. "Some other band councils might have caved in and gone ahead anyway, but we felt strongly that it was not in the interests of our membership to go ahead with the deal. We were prepared to go ahead with the original agreement."

OPP lay charges against

murder suspect's father

by Michael Erskine

GORE BAY-In a bizarre twist to the story of Brent Jeremy Kells, the 21-year-old Zhiibaahaasing man charged with first degree murder in the shooting death of 25-year-old Maryann Davis, his father, Robert William Kells has been charged with one count of obstructing justice and as an accessory after the fact to murder.

The elder Mr. Kells was released after appearing in Gore Bay Superior court, after sureties were placed by his wife, Zhiibaahaasing First Nation Chief Irene Kells and her daughter.

According to public records cited on April 21 by the Expositor's sister publication, the Manitoulin West Recorder, police allege that the elder Kells, knowing that his son had killed Ms. Davis, burnt his son's clothing, and that he then tried to help his son escape.

A preliminary hearing for Brent Kells is scheduled to begin on Monday, June 5, in Gore Bay.

'Bully' is a bad word!

Part I of a series

Behaviour emotionally scars both victims and perpetrators

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first installment of a series on the issues surrounding bullying in the schools, its impacts on both bullies and their victims, and what parents can do to help their children.

by Michael Erskine

MANITOULIN-Parents often view bullying in the school yard as a rite of passage, one that would be as familiar to the parents of Plato and Socrates as it is to Tammy Albers, a concerned Little Current parent who recently delivered her comments on the issue to a provincial taskforce in Sudbury examining the issue. But the phenomenon has been growing at such an alarming rate that it has been described as an epidemic hitting North American schools.

Bullying certainly seems to be on the rise, or perhaps it is just that our zero tolerance of violence in the schools has made parents and educators more sensitized to its presence.

No person familiar with the evening news can escape the conclusion that with a culture and mass media seemingly obsessed with 'Die Hard' reactions to every injustice, the toll of bullying can be as deadly on the perpetrator  as it is on his or her victim. In the horrid anti-logic of revenge violence, there need not even be a direct link between the bully and a victim's retribution.

In 1999 a 14-year-old Taber, Alberta student shocked the nation as he reacted to years of bullying and ostracism by gunning down two 17-year-olds he didn't even know in revenge. More common, however, are cases like that of a 14-year-old British Columbia girl who had endured incessant bullying and saw suicide as her only way out, just as the new millennia had barely dawned. She took her life in November, 2000, bewildering her parents and the friends who thought they knew her.

The price of bullying can be steep. Health outcomes can include anxiety, insecurity, distress, depression, poor academic performance, insomnia, nightmares, loss of appetite, cramps, irritability, passivity, shyness, withdrawal, (oddly enough) aggression and a pattern that can continue on into sexual harassment and victimization.

Making things even more difficult is the fact that bullying can be a nasty little secret that children chose not to share with those who can help them because they believe it will only get worse.

A report compiled by the Kids Help Phone Foundation noted that children are being bullied at ever-diminishing ages-and that the impacts extend well into adulthood. The victims are often children whose differences from the societal norm-such as being new in the neighbourhood, having different philosophies or cultures, or being better at sports or perhaps having superior scholastic skills-make them targets of those who prey.

While violence grabs most of the attention shone on the issue of bullying by the media, verbal abuse is actually the most common form of bullying. Violence still tends to be largely a boy's domain-girls more often use more covert forms of bullying such as social ostracism-but recent trends show an increase in violence among young women that promises to remove that gender gap as time goes on.

Whatever form bullying takes, it often holds its victims in thrall for extended periods of time, sometimes lasting for years.

Intervention by school officials and better communication of bullying issues have been cited by children themselves as actions they would like to see implemented to deal with the issue-and it was in this vein that Ms. Albers' comments were directed.

"I asked why elementary schools do not have guidance councillors," she said. Councillors in the schools whose mandate is to deal with societal issues could help nip bullying in the bud and go a long way toward helping children who bully deal with the issues that encourage their behaviours. "There are 18,000 children who are bullied every day in Ontario, including over 1,300 elementary school students. It's a very serious issue."

Ms. Albers lays part of the blame on parents who do not give teachers the support they need to deal with behavioural problems.

"Parents have to lighten up on teachers," she said. "We, as parents, used to respect teachers and we taught our children to react to them as they would our own authority."

The tendency now is to immediately take the child's side-and that can often be a critical mistake.

Children who bully are often remarkably adept at manipulating adults, and one of the key elements in problem bullying is the 'blame the victim' defence often adopted by bullies. Although it was once believed that bullying behaviour signalled a lack of self-esteem, recent research has shown that not to be the case. Bullies often have high levels of self-esteem-it is their victims who tend to be less sure of themselves and to lack social networks and supports provided by friends.

Bullies are often difficult to spot. Violent activities often take place where supervision is less pervasive, such as recess in the school playground, and are often carried out by proxies, goaded on by an instigator who remains aloof from the actions themselves and thus escapes retribution.

The bully's motivation is often to exercise power and control over their victim, and they are often found to be acting out of powerlessness in some other facet of their lives, such as their home life. They usually target those they see as being different, sometimes even superior, to themselves.

Since some children-especially, it has been found, those with attention-deficit issues-may strike out at those who are bullying them, they can be misidentified as the instigators, rather than the victims, of bullying episodes.

Those who are most likely to be victims, however, are those to whom violence is not seen as a legitimate reaction.

In the articles during the following weeks, we will explore how to identify your child as a victim, or perpetrator, of bullying and what programs are in place in the schools to help deal with the issue, in either case, as well as what parents can do to help.

EDITORIAL

We should heed the Hurricane's message

Our world is beset by frightening forces of who seek to employ weapons whose destructive potential approaches, quite literally, biblical proportions, against defenseless and innocent people.

Terrorists have shaken our complacent society to its very core, murdering thousands of innocents and threatening to carry death and destruction to millions more-usually invoking the will and mission of God almighty.

But the greater threat facing us all, the threat which is creeping in the back door while we cringe in anticipation of a turbaned bogeyman crouching in the cave's shadows beyond our porch lights, is the loss of those rights and freedoms for which our ancestors have given their life's blood on a thousand battlefields to win and defend.

Dr. Reuben 'Hurricane' Carter, the civil rights icon who brought a message of defiant hope to the VCARs conference in M'Chigeeng last week, is a man who knows first hand what it means to stand naked before the unbridled might of the state, and the dangers contained in the current willingness of North American society to surrender its precious rights and freedoms.

Stripped of his inalienable rights by a system blinded through prejudice and racism, those rights and freedoms yet remained as tools that would eventually allow Dr. Carter to be rescued from his wrongful imprisonment-in his extraordinary case, justice prevailed.

For millions across the globe who are blessed with less luck or whose defenders are less adamant, the fairy-tale ending currently unfolding for Dr. Carter in the winter of his life will never come-justice is rarely perfect in our all-too-human world-but that does not mean that we should not strive with all our might for justice, truth and freedom.

There is a devil's price to pay for those rights and freedoms, and that price includes some of the guilty going unpunished, if we are to protect the innocent from injustice.

We must accept that innocent people will continue to be cut down by those who seek to destroy our way of life, no matter how Orwellian our system becomes. It is a rice we must resign ourselves to accept if we are not to fall back into the type of tyranny that history teaches us has always led civilization into a dark age.

B.F. Skinner posited more than a generation ago that modern society can no longer afford freedom and dignity and that the machine will someday soon impose a new, ordered world upon human society, an order where security and safety of the herd is imposed through consensual social tyranny. He believed that such an order will inevitably take the place of our outdated democratic anarchy, and the freedom of the individual to live life largely free from the interference of the state will end.

B.F. Skinner obviously never met the likes of the Hurricane.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Strike has been bad all around for Island

Perhaps a new council could do a better job

To the Expositor:

This disagreement has outlasted its usefulness!

The loss of the trade show will probably impact the economy of the Northeast Town by some $2 million and the spinoff to the rest of the Island by about the same. Then you have the long-term effects which could disrupt the usual activities of the Island during the balance of 2006.

To put in plain English, it is bad all around for the Manitoulin. Personally, if I were in some of the individuals' shoes who could make things happen, I would be most uncomfortable. After the next election the area could see a whole new council. Perhaps a new council could do a better job at managing the affairs of the community. That would be better for the Manitoulin in general and the whole economy across the area.

Angus (D.A.) Dunlop

Letters can also be dropped through the slot on the front door of the Expositor office.Send your Dear Dave letters to Box 369, Little Current, Ontario, P0P 1K0,