No wonder Bill Wilson is fed up

your ass doing nothing while getting paid 3 or 4 thousand dollars a day. YOU HAVE FAILED MISERABLY ! - IT IS TIME FOR ALL OF YOU TO RESIGN !!!! ”

Wilson is far from the first to complain about the snail-like progress of the inquiry. Just a few days before his outburst, a group of 30 Aboriginal leaders and family members issued an open letter charging that the Liberal effort is in “serious trouble.”

Addressed to chief commissioner Marion Buller, the letter asserted that communication has been poor, leadership lacking, time inadequate and respect for native procedures absent from the process to date.

“It is now clear that you must aren’t enough, that First Nations communities want progress, and they’ll be the ones who decide whether it is being made. This is a lesson that has confronted previous governments, but never seems to be absorbed. The Harper Conservatives, much maligned by opposition parties and indigenous advocates, made serious efforts to improve aboriginal conditions, but were stymied when First Nations leaders belatedly balked at a package of educational reforms that had been painstakingly negotiated with the Assembly of First Nations chief Shawn Atleo. Though Harper maintained that it was First Nations leaders who reversed their position and scuttled the deal, he was the one who bore the brunt of criticism from a country that is absorbed with guilt over the past.

Former Chrétien cabinet minister Bob Nault suffered a similar experience when he introduced The First Nations Governance Act in 2002 (aimed at making band councils more accountable to members), only to see it denounced as “racist” before he could even finish his press conference. Ottawa’s belief in its ability to cure past ills by cobbling together new packages of Ottawa-centric remedies runs back decades, yet each new prime minister stumbles anew into the complex and often contradictory world of indigenous politics, seemingly clueless as to the labyrinth they’re entering.

The efforts of Trudeau and his hapless Indigenous Affairs Minister, Carolyn Bennett, have been true to the template. Trudeau blithely signed on to an impossible package of reforms on the campaign trail, and has been breaking them ever since. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will not be enacted in whole, not that the pledge to do so ever made sense. Dozens of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will never see the light of day, because they are wholly impractical or ruinously expensive. Pipelines will be built, and dams constructed. The realities of a modern society built over the grave of past injustices will not be miraculously reversed, no matter how wrongful those sins were. Canada’s First Nations will not be treated as a sovereign entity, because they are not one entity but dozens of them, with many leaders and many agendas that are often in competition, or open conflict, with one another.

This was all there for the Liberals to see, but they chose not to. Insincerity and political ambition won out, again. No wonder Bill Wilson is fed up. But is he really surprised?