RAPID LAKE, QUE. -- A ravaged road just a three-hour drive north of Ottawa winds through majestic pines and ends in the Third World. It's a bone-rattling ride over frozen ruts that leads to Rapid Lake. The 29-hectare reserve is now home to the displaced Algonquins of Barriere Lake.
Postcard-pretty views clash with squalor, showcasing a housing crisis faced by native people across Canada.
Prime Minister Paul Martin, set to chart his government's course when Parliament reopens Feb. 2, has said aboriginal poverty must be a national priority "like never before."
They'll be watching closely at Rapid Lake for any hint of real change.
Toddlers here risk infectious splinters from playing on crude and sagging plywood floors.
Musty blooms of toxic mould are blamed for asthma and chronic, hacking coughs.
And a cluster of 61 run-down houses and trailers draws power from an overworked diesel generator that frequently conks out.
It's not unusual for 18 people to share a single bungalow with an unfinished basement.
"There's nowhere to move," says Jaimie Wawatie, 22. She lives with her boyfriend, their three-year-old daughter, her boyfriend's parents and at least three of his siblings.
The federal government, having created remote and impoverished communities through its own native policies, has found them easy to ignore.
Martin has signalled his commitment by creating two high-level committees on aboriginal affairs, including one he will lead. He also set out Thursday to become the first prime minister in 20 years to visit a native reserve in Saskatchewan.
The trip to the Gordon First Nation north of Regina raised hopes that Martin will act on some of the most urgent aboriginal needs.
Desperate housing shortages top the list.
Many of Canada's more than 600 native communities have used government loans and their own earnings to build houses.
Grinding hardship persists on federally- created reserves cut off from both job markets and a share of natural resources.
The result has been called Canada's hidden slums.
At Rapid Lake, you can see the cement basement through holes in Josh Wawatie's rotting kitchen floor.
Josh, his girlfriend and their kids share the main floor with her sister and boyfriend. Bags of diapers and piles of clothing are strewn about.
In the living room, Jim Nattaway and Sandra Papatie are watching the movie Bad Boys on a DVD player. Their children, two-year-old Trina and Owen, 1, were placed in foster care a year ago when a children's aid worker saw their shack, says Nattaway.
"I miss my kids so much," says Nattaway, 33, a former janitor who is now out of work.
Unemployment hovers around 90 per cent, and the Algonquins get no share of the millions of dollars in lumber and tourism drawn off their traditional lands each year.
The Algonquins of Barriere Lake had sunk much time and effort into a pioneering land management deal with the province and Ottawa, but it was derailed three years ago. The federal government walked away in the last stages, saying the process had taken too long.
Ottawa has carefully tried to limit its duties.
On housing, the federal government says it's not obligated to provide a home for every native family.
Ottawa has spent almost $4 billion in the last decade on native housing, but hasn't properly set goals or tracked results, Auditor General Sheila Fraser reported last spring. Responsibilities should be more defined, she said.
A growing shortage of 8,500 reserve houses across the country was logged in 2001, and it was estimated almost half of 89,000 units needed repairs.
Others in the community concede renovations have sometimes been trashed in drunken parties. But Jaimie Wawatie dismisses any perception that that's the norm.
Social conditions created by the government drive some people to drugs or alcohol, she says. But others desperately want to care for something decent.
"That's what we're waiting for -- a chance."
