Indigenous boycott begins do-nothing meeting

Groups seek larger role at all-talk, little-action premiers’ conference

Nobody wanted to call it a boycott.

But that’s what it was. What else do you call it when the leaders of Canada’s three major Indigenous groups refused at the last minute to attend a longplanned meeting with Canada’s premiers Monday in Edmonton?

At a news conference in Toronto to explain why he wasn’t going to Edmonton, Assembly of First Nations Chief Perry Bellegarde said it was “not a boycott … it’s just something we’re not showing up at.”

I don’t understand why he and his colleagues from the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and the Métis National Council were tiptoeing around the word “boycott.”

They were invited to attend the meeting, as they are every year on the eve of the annual premiers’ conference. And every year they turn up.

This year, they decided not to and held a news conference a few hours in advance to explain why.

In a nutshell: they want to be partners in the full premiers’ conference, not simply part of a sideshow to the main event.

As Bellegarde pointed out, Canada’s Indigenous peoples see themselves as not just another special interest group: “We are Indigenous peoples with the right to selfdetermination because we have our own lands, we have our own laws, we have our own languages, we have our own identifiable peoples and we have our own identifiable forms of government.”

The premiers didn’t agree and instead went ahead with their meeting, which included the leaders of just two Indigenous groups: the Native Women’s Association of Canada and the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples.

Not much was accomplished other than more discussion about how to improve the lives of Indigenous peoples.

But that’s par for the course for these events with the premiers.

Lots of talk, not much action.

This is a chronic problem not just with meetings between Indigenous leaders and the premiers but with the full-on premiers’ conference — formally called the Council of the Federation meeting — that runs two days every summer.

The premiers really should hold the meetings on a giant treadmill rather than at a conference table, for all the progress they usually make.

Even when they make some headway, it’s often more symbolic than concrete.

Two years ago, they agreed to a Canadian Energy Strategy to help, among other things, Alberta get more pipelines built to ship its energy products to tidewater. We are still waiting. Last year, the premiers opened up more interprovincial trade, but left out free trade in alcohol, meaning we still have provincial laws more reflective of Prohibition than present day when it comes to the average Canadian wanting to transport a few cases of beer from province to province.

Part of the chronic problem of inaction is that provinces can’t do much on so many issues without the federal government at the table.

Another is that the table is already crowded with the leaders of 10 province and three territories representing disparate people and different political parties.

The leaders of Canada’s major Indigenous organizations should be careful what they wish for. If they had a seat, there’d be so many voices that even less would get done than doesn’t get done already.

But that doesn’t mean these conferences can’t be interesting or even entertaining.

We can usually count on old-timers such as Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall to inject some controversy — as he helpfully did Monday afternoon.

When asked about reopening NAFTA with the U.S., Wall suggested Canada should begin drawing up a secret list of “things we might retaliate with” should negotiations fail with the Trump administration.

Unlike previous conferences, there won’t be much controversy over pipelines this year. John Horgan, British Columbia’s new anti-pipeline premier, is not attending. He would have likely received a diplomatic grilling from fellow NDP-premier Notley and a not-so-diplomatic grilling from Wall.

Instead, Horgan decided to schedule his swearing-in ceremony for Tuesday, giving him a reason to avoid his fellow premiers without leaving himself open to accusations he was, for lack of a better term, boycotting the meeting.