Entrenched interests

Police in Saskatchewan charged a man with uttering threats after a post appeared on Facebook condemning Loon Lake, Sask., volunteer firefighters for not going to a house fire in which two toddlers were killed.

If you haven't already read my money and culture and truck posts on this topic, you probably should. Anyways, anger that the Village of Loon Lake didn't (again) send it's volunteer fire department to the Makwa Sahgaiehcan Reserve because the band council (again) had been delinquent in paying their bills has been brewing on social media over the past 48 hours. As can be expected, it's the hardworking white mayor/firefighter who's somehow responsible for the consequences of mismanaged band funds.

Again, have you read my money and culture posts? You should, there's some great stuff in them. Especially the money one, where I identify the people responsible for the disaster which is the Makwa Sahgaiehcan Indian Reservation.

Over in Loon Lake, the head of the volunteer firefighters is also the mayor: Larry Heon. He's paid a whopping $964 a year to be the mayor (plus $65 reimbursed to Larry, probably for petty cash purchases like running to Rona and picking up a can of paint since one of the walls in the office got scuffed). In fact, Larry and the other six councilors cost the Loon Lake taxpayer some $4,019 in total remuneration.

Over at the Makwa Reserve, that $4,000 covers the cellphone allowance for a single councilor! A total of $26,000 was spent on cellphone allowances alone. Chief Richard Ben is paid an $80,000 salary: 83 times more than Heon is paid.

But Chief Ben isn't the highest paid member of the band council over at Makwa, partly because apparently he's the only person in the entire town who's able to run his cellphone for less than $300/month. That honour goes to Ronald Mitsuing, who gets paid a total of $167,691 between his salary and his honorarium and his cellphone allowance and the $72,162 he collects in "contracts" which I assume means he's dubbed himself the town comptroller or something.

And they keep coming! There are two other councilors with the surname Mitsuing which would be pretty bizarre if they weren't related (imagine Jeb Bush running for President in 2016 but not being related to either of the two Bushes who ran for President). None of them are as handsomely rewarded as Ronald Mitsuing is, but the three Mitsuings manage to do well enough, I suppose.

$358,103.

You know that phrase "too many chiefs, not enough Indians"? Well the Makwa Sahgaiehcan live it! The six councilors plus Chief Ben combine for three-quarters of a million dollars in salary. You'd have to be completely insane to blame the volunteer firefighters for expecting that their expenses would be covered by such lavishly self-endowed men.

Well it turns out there are varying levels of insanity. There's the Lisa Sappier level of insanity. Let's call that Level 1.
Then there's the @earlofawesome Scott level of insanity. That's level 2.
Don't forget level 3, the Niki Ashton level of insanity.

Is there a level above that? Well, yes, of course: the kind of level that involves making threats of violence against volunteer firefighters. Spurned by the varying levels of rhetoric, Level 4 should be named after a person too, shouldn't it? Why don't we name it after the guy who made the threats?

Loon Lake RCMP got a report about a "threatening post on social media" at about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, according to a news release.

They charged Tony Mitsuing, 27, police said. He was released on conditions not to contact the target of the alleged threats and will appear in court March 26.

So there we go, we can name this the Tony Mitsuing level of insani...hey, wait a minute.

Yet another Mitsuing?

The population of Makwa Sahgaiehcan is 923 people, and I'm starting to wonder if 900 of them are Mitsuings.^† So we have three of them on council, and now a fourth (confirmed to be on the reserve) making violent threats against Loon Lake Mayor Larry Heon, the guy who is able to care for the citizens who elected him in a way that a band council made up of Tony's fellow Mitsuings have utterly (and lavishly) failed at.

If you didn't think band mismanagement was a problem before, methinks the lady doth protest too much.

^†Patrick Ross is apparently from the Meadow Lake area been close enough to the Meadow Lake area to give him some personal contacts and has dealt with some subset of the Mitsuing clan, so I expect we'll be seeing some more from him on this topic once Moms start chatting with Moms, that sort of thing.