Party of One (39 page)

From the First Nations perspective, the passage of omnibus legislation in bills C-38 and C-45 was a reminder “that colonization is still alive in Canada.” The tribal council reminded everyone, “The original practice of colonization was to isolate us on reserves in order for the Crown to extract our resources. The new version of colonization is to change laws without consulting us in order to extract our resources.” The tribal chiefs requested that their letter be included in Douglas Eyford’s report to Prime Minister Harper. It was.

With Stephen Harper determined to push ahead and First Nations committed to protecting their constitutional rights and the environment, it wasn’t hard to predict a collision was coming. That was all the more likely with the Idle No More movement gaining traction in the Aboriginal community—a movement based on a sense that “this is our time” and the status quo is unacceptable. Former prime minister Paul Martin told me he is worried about the deteriorating relationship between the federal government and First Nations people. “The great tragedy of Kelowna is that the fundamental problem has only gotten worse as Harper has gone back to the old way of doing things that has been failing since the 1920s,” he said. “There is great tension now because the Harper government has reversed wheels on the issue.”

The Kelowna Accord was supposed to lift up the standard of living for Aboriginals and honour treaties. The immediate goal was to fund health and education infrastructure, and give native Canadians a share in the resource developments taking place on their lands. After eighteen months of hard negotiations, a remarkable consensus had been achieved. For the first time, all stakeholders, including the federal government, the provinces, territorial leaders, First Nations, Métis, and non-status Indians, had come to an agreement. There would be $5 billion over five years, and hard performance measurements of the results.

The wisdom of Kelowna was in the approach: “Look, tell us what the issues are.” Martin recalled, “They told us what the problems were: education, health care, clean water, housing, economic development, accountability and, of course, resource sharing. Then we asked all of the Aboriginal peoples to tell us what the solutions were and they told us. Once again, we knew imposing solutions doesn’t work. So governments were going to be partners in bringing about the conditions that would put the Aboriginal people’s own solutions to work.” This was a fundamental departure from
the usual approach of bureaucratic analysis and unilateral federal action. “Two hundred years of history has shown us that that doesn’t work,” Martin told me.

Although Stephen Harper promised to support the principles of Kelowna, he never did. In fact, Harper made cuts to health programs such as the Aboriginal Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy and the Maternal and Child Health Program, while committing $3.5 billion to improving maternal health abroad.
⁵
Many First Nations people do not have equal access to clean drinking water, good education, or adequate housing. Martin believes the Harper government has created the false impression of a crisis of accountability and transparency in the First Nations world. “The fact is,” Martin told me, “there are outstanding Aboriginal leaders and in the vast majority of cases, they are both accountable and transparent.”

O
N
N
OVEMBER
29, 2013,
the day the final Eyford report was presented to the Harper government, the president of the Canadian division of the US company Kinder Morgan
⁶
told a business forum at Lake Louise, Alberta, that First Nations issues desperately needed to be addressed. Ian Anderson said, “Facing up to our situation . . . is mission critical. It’s not someone else’s problem to solve. It’s our issue to resolve—all of us.” Governments, industry, average citizens, members of the public, had to listen and learn, he said. “We’ve got to help create economic certainty for industry for our country, but only through hard work with our First Nations communities to make them partners in what we’re trying to accomplish.”

The Harper government was sufficiently concerned about the warnings contained in Eyford’s draft report that before receiving the final version in late November, the prime minister dispatched several cabinet ministers and their deputies to a meeting in Vancouver on September 23, 2013. Once again, he misplayed his hand.

The Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs was invited to attend on very short notice. Harper was ignoring one of the key recommendations of his envoy: respect your negotiating partner. The chiefs were not given a preamble or agenda, or any idea of what was on the table. They had been summoned, not invited. Once again, the odour of paternalism was in the air. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip had a sinking feeling “that perhaps they’re covering their backsides in terms of a consultation record”—a reference to Ottawa’s largely unfulfilled constitutional obligation to consult. This was the first time that the chiefs had heard from the Harper government in months. Eyford stressed in his report that regular meetings and discussions were critical to building relationships with Aboriginal communities. The Carrier Sekani First Nation had repeatedly asked for such meetings with the prime minister, but the requests had gone unanswered.

The sad truth was that it was all really unfinished business from the historic Crown–First Nations Gathering of January 2012, attended by the prime minister, the governor general, and First Nations chiefs. That had been a meeting that promised hope and re-engagement. But a year later, in January 2013, the reality of life for Canada’s Aboriginals was even further behind the rhetoric of the inaugural Crown–First Nations Gathering. The anniversary of the historic 2012 meeting was a dismal affair at the official level. The governor general did not attend the January 11, 2013, meeting—a deep insult to some of the chiefs because he is the head of state and represents the Crown, with whom their treaties were made.

The prime minister and some of his ministers were there, as was AFN National Chief Shawn Atleo. But Atleo’s leadership had been deeply wounded by the government’s failure to advance the agenda. Many chiefs boycotted the meeting and sided with the hundreds of members of Idle No More, who no longer supported endless talk without palpable outcomes. Instead, they rallied round
a lone, female chief who from her cold teepee on an island in the Ottawa River would soon steal the show from the politicians— Theresa Spence.

In his opening remarks, the PM said he understood that as head of government, the leaders wanted him to hear the dialogue directly. Harper made reference to commemorations of the War of 1812 that included a tribute to First Nations support and his apology for the residential schools. This came across as yet another attempt to substitute ceremony for substance. Some chiefs expressed anxiety over even sitting around the table with Harper. Outside, their people were calling for real change. The sound of the street protest could be heard in the prime minister’s office, where the meeting was taking place. Several Idle No More members had stood at the door of the Langevin Block and begged their chiefs not to enter and to hold fast with Chief Spence. Grand Chief Charles Weaselhead perhaps said it best: “Idle No More and our grassroots peoples force both of us to take heed and address these issues.”

The number one priority for the First Nations was a renewed relationship and full implementation of treaties. The nations had very specific demands they wanted met, not interminable negotiations imposed on them for decades. Instead of advancing treaties, the provisions of Bills C-38 and C-45 had run roughshod over them. Harper knew Idle No More put pressure on First Nations leaders, but he offered them nothing they could use to show their people that dialogue was getting somewhere. He had made the political judgment that if an Aboriginal Spring were to occur, it would not be popular with Canadians.

No one should have been surprised that Canada’s Aboriginals had finally lost their patience. First Nations have been waiting for social justice for 250 years. With the Constitution Act of 1982, Canada’s Aboriginals believed their special rights and status would finally be implemented under section 35(1). But eight years
passed with no real progress on land claims. The Innu occupied the NATO Base at Goose Bay, the Lubicon Cree boycotted the Calgary Winter Olympics, and resource blockades were erected in British Columbia. Then, in July 1990, came the first powder-keg moment: the deadly Oka crisis in Quebec that ended with the tragic death of Corporal Marcel Lemay of the Sûreté du Québec. Five years later, it was Ipperwash, where native protester Dudley George was shot dead by police.

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1991, called by the federal government in response to Oka, dragged on for five years. Finally, a five-volume, four-thousand-page report was published in 1996. Aboriginals are still waiting for the renewed relationship and the “sharing” promised in the report. And while it was true that the Harper government, inspired by the late NDP leader Jack Layton, made a historic apology in the House of Commons in June 2008 for the criminal abuse of native children at residential schools, even that laudable gesture quickly soured. After creating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to look into the tragedy of the residential school period, the Harper government then refused to turn over documents requested by the Commission “for privacy reasons.” In the end, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had to take the very body that had created it to court to obtain documents it needed to do its work. Shades of Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page.

Stephen Harper simply didn’t grasp the depth of the anguish in the native community. Many Aboriginals carried horrific memories from the days of the residential schools—of sexual and physical abuse, torture, even documented cases of medical experimentation. Former PM Paul Martin told the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission that it was “cultural genocide.” About 150,000 children were taken from their families and sent to church-run schools to “civilize” them.

Facing the combined and often allied power of Big Government and Big Business, Canada’s Aboriginals have traditionally fought back in two ways: lawsuits and symbolic statements. Chief Theresa Spence began her now-famous forty-seven-day hunger strike on December 11, 2012—a month before the prime minister met the AFN in his office. She was a single, middle-aged Aboriginal woman with a grade-eight education received at a residential school. She wanted a working rather than a ceremonial meeting with Canada’s leaders, including the governor general, to discuss “treaty issues.”

Chief Spence was from Attawapiskat, a northern Ontario reserve with third-world conditions situated adjacent to a fabulous diamond field. DeBeers Canada is developing open pit mines there “with a $7 billion footprint.” The diamonds are some of the finest quality ever discovered, and the recent find of a thirty-fivecarat stone at the site made news around the world. For the use of their traditional lands, the company gives the Attawapiskat Nation $2 million a year. Some natives get a hard hat and short-term jobs. When the company eventually leaves, the band will be left with giant craters on their traditional land.

The Attawapiskat First Nation is part of Treaty 9, known as the James Bay Treaty. It was signed in the summers of 1905 and 1906, with treaty commissioners from Ottawa speaking on behalf of King Edward VII—which was why Spence wanted the governor general included in the meeting she was demanding. For $5 and land for a reserve, the native signatories to the original treaty were told they would receive “benefits that served to balance anything that they were giving up.” Chief Spence had a simple condition for ending her fast: a face-to-face meeting with the chiefs, the prime minister, and the governor general. Chief Spence, like the young people thronging the grounds in front of Parliament Hill, had simply come looking for the honour of the Crown.

Instead of hitting the reset button and kick-starting a new era in the relationship as promised at the Crown–First Nations Gathering in 2012, Stephen Harper continued to act like an Indian Agent rather than a partner. Spence experienced the blunt force of the Harper government’s power. While she was on Victoria Island in a teepee in 18-degree-below-zero weather, Ottawa released an audit by Deloitte questioning the record keeping of the Attawapiskat band from 2005 to 2011—in other words, Spence’s competency, if not honesty. Hundreds of instances of questionable accounting practices were uncovered, and even though Spence had only been elected chief in 2010, the public shaming was all hers. Senator Patrick Brazeau and other Conservatives lined up to take potshots at her.

Brazeau, who would soon be facing criminal charges and expulsion from the Senate, said Spence wasn’t a good role model for native children. Some in the media and the general population carried Spence-bashing to the point of racism: Indians were lazy, freeloading drunkards, and their leaders stole from their own people. (The average salary of a First Nations leader is $36,845, about $10,000 below the average Canadian wage.) In its December newsletter, the right-wing Mackenzie Institute even hinted that some Aboriginal people had been “chumming around with some Iranian government officials.” At no point in the occasionally racist public dialogue did Stephen Harper intervene with a request for mutual respect.

The poisonous barbs and the Deloitte audit did their work. Chief Spence ended her fast without getting a meeting. According to an Ipsos Reid poll, only 29 percent of Canadians approved of what she had tried to do. But only 27 percent in the same poll believed that the prime minister was treating First Nations peoples fairly. Meanwhile, Chief Spence’s popularity grew by leaps and bounds in the native community and in other countries. Round
dances and flash mobs occurred in Edmonton and Toronto, and even at the Peter Pond Mall in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Support for Spence and Idle No More came from indigenous people around the world. Te Wharepora Hou, a Maori women’s collective in New Zealand, took it as the global call they had been waiting for: “Now we can join together and start looking for solutions.”