Vouchers replace cash on dry reserve in bootlegging fight

Band officials are taking drastic steps to eliminate bootlegging on the Pauingassi First Nation, a remote Manitoba reserve where alcohol is prohibited.

Pauingassi residents receiving welfare will now receive vouchers, instead of cash, in an attempt to reduce the money available to pay bootleggers, band officials told CBC News.

"We tell them this is a basic need for them. This is for your food and supplies you need for the rest of the month," said Chief Harold Crow.

About 80 per cent of Pauingassi band members receive welfare, Crow said, and most have accepted the new voucher system.

But some have tried to get around it by selling their vouchers for cash.

"I have a few young people that try to do that, try to manipulate the system, but then they pick up their ideas from outside people that have severe addiction problems," Crow said.

Bootlegging can be a lucrative business on the reserve, where the chief has estimated half of the residents are alcoholics. A bottle of whisky that sells for $20 in any Manitoba liquor store can fetch as much as $100 on the reserve.

Earlier this year, several community leaders, including a band councillor and an addiction worker, were caught with hundreds of bottles of whisky on the isolated, fly-in reserve, located about 300 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.

The addiction worker has been fired, and the band councillor's fate is now before a community council, Crow said.Other staff members caught with liquor have been suspended.

Only First Nation using welfare vouchers

Jim Wolfe, head of the First Nations Inuit Health Branch for Health Canada in Manitoba, said he's pleased with the actions Crow has taken.

His staff is keeping a close watch on the situation on Pauingassi, he said, "to help us look a little more closely at what the initiatives are and how they're taking place and see if we're making progress."

Wolfe said his program is keeping a tight rein on new program money on the reserve until Pauingassi officials prove they have the bootlegging under control.

Officials with the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs said Pauingassi is the only First Nation in the province to move to a voucher system.

Concerns about conditions on the Pauingassi First Nation resurfaced in August in the wake of the drowning death of a six-year-old boy. Police believe three other children between the ages of seven and nine bullied the child, who could not swim, into the water.

The incident was the third violent death on the reserve in the past 18 months, all involving suspects who were minors.

Over the past year, the community has spent thousands on recreational, cultural and treatment programs to control an epidemic of gas sniffing once thought to affect half of the reserve's children.