Daphne Bramham: After decades of promises, has Canada finally reached a tipping point?
Credit to Author: Daphne Bramham| Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2020 17:33:57 +0000
Countless words have been written in voluminous reports with hundreds of recommendations regarding the promise that Canada’s relationship with Indigenous people will be transformed. Often years in the making and costing millions of dollars, the reports are encyclopedic, in both the good and the dull sense.
Warmly welcomed by politicians, the full reports with their many volumes are rarely read by them or by anyone else, including journalists and experts offering sage commentary.
The excuses are easy: The reports are too long. We are too busy to read more than the executive summaries. And how much easier it is to reduce it all to a simple debate over whether using the word genocide is appropriate to describe the murders and disappearances of so many Aboriginal women.
For every recommendation, promises are made to give due consideration. But after public attention has inevitably and quickly pivoted to the latest Instagram-able issues, it has been easy for politicians to decide the recommendations are too costly in dollar terms, political capital, or both.
Canada has wasted so many opportunities. Why is anyone surprised by the disruption to national rail service, or by protests that have kept legislators and others from their work?
The only surprise is that the tipping point finally forcing a resolution to generations of talks seems to be the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs’ refusal to allow a natural gas pipeline to run through their traditional territory.
Every little thing that makes a difference — to paraphrase the subtitle of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. He argues that there are three essential requirements to tip the balance and force change:
There must be strong leaders with influential and charismatic friends, which is a good description of the Wet’suwet’en chiefs and climate activist Greta Thunberg, who has accused Canada of violating children’s rights because of its continued support for oil and gas development.
There has to be a “stickiness factor” that compels an idea or phenomenon to stick in people’s minds and influence their future behaviour. That might, in this case, include small things such as the now-ubiquitous acknowledgements at every gathering of whose unceded territory people are meeting on.
The final element is context, and for this, I’ll stick to only the most recent.
Eight years ago, Idle No More shut down multiple border crossings, blocked railway lines, disrupted traffic with flash mobs and garnered international attention.
It petered out when then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised high-level dialogue, not with Idle No More’s female founders and leaders, but with then-Assembly of First Nations Chief Shawn Atleo.
Five years ago, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 11 pages of recommendations provided a roadmap for overcoming the legacy of residential schools. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau committed to implementing all 94 recommendations in December 2015. The government’s progress is tracked online at rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca
That raised Indigenous peoples’ expectations, as did the appointment of Jody Wilson-Raybould as justice minister. But many hopes were dashed with the government’s purchase of the Trans Mountain Pipeline and its subsequent re-approval, as did Wilson-Raybould’s demotion and eventual ouster from the Liberal caucus following her testimony about how Trudeau tried to convince her not to prosecute SNC-Lavalin.
Which brings us to the gas pipeline going through Wet’suwet’en territory that is backed by John Horgan’s NDP government — the same government that less than a year ago promised to bring B.C. laws in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
Adding to the frustrations are 1,200 murdered and missing women, health outcomes that lag other Canadians by a wide margin, and 27 years of B.C. treaty negotiations that have yielded only eight finalized agreements, involving only 38 per cent of the province’s Indian Act bands.
And, yes, there’s climate change that also disproportionately affects Indigenous people.
Senator Murray Sinclair, who chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, wrote in a recent blogpost that what is needed to resolve the Wet’suwet’en pipeline dispute are “positive acts.” But he is not optimistic.
“Frankly, given Canada’s intransigence, and the rising sense of injustice felt by Indigenous leadership throughout the country, I do not like where this is heading.”
It is a rich irony that among the strongest voices deriding protesters as radical activists and urging police to take action against them are themselves using the spectre of western separatism to get their way on pipeline approvals.
Canada is in the midst of an existential crisis with the intersection of Indigenous rights, climate change and the economy.
There is no simple solution. Certainly, it can’t be solved by company-sought court injunctions enforced by police, or by any other court rulings. It hasn’t worked before in Canada and it hasn’t worked in other democratic societies.
Canada’s future depends on federal, provincial, Indigenous, business and community leaders as well as its citizens talking in good faith and with respect about what Canada should be and could be, not only a decade from now, but a century from now.
Twitter: @bramham_daphne