UN declaration won't clean anyone's water
No promises of treatment plants for First Nations
The federal Liberals deployed Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller this week to officially confirm what everyone already knew: Justin Trudeau's promise to end long-term drinking water advisories on First Nations by spring 2021 would not be fulfilled. The government's official tally is that 97 longterm advisories lifted, which is very much better than nothing, but that 59 remain. According to a CBC News survey of First Nations in October, several see no realistic prospect of a fix for several years to come.
“This was an ambitious deadline from the get-go,” Miller said. “While there have been many reasons for the delay, I want to state as clearly as possible that, ultimately, I bear the responsibility for this.” And then, as is modern practice when ministers accept responsibility for terrible failures, nothing happened.
News reports routinely use that word “ambitious” to describe the goal. And by Canadian standards, clearly, it is. Some of these drinking-water advisories are so old that successive prime ministers have vowed to end them. By the standards of our peer nations, however … no. Five years, seven years, nine years is plenty of time to get huge things done, even in remote or challenging environments. And most of the First Nations we're talking about are hardly remote.
The Wahta Mohawk First Nation is right in the heart of Ontario's ritzy Muskoka cottage country. The Little Pine First Nation is roughly halfway along the Trans-canada Highway between Saskatoon and Edmonton. The Oneida Nation of the Thames, where a long-term advisory was declared in September, isn't just south of 60; it's southwest of Toronto. The proposed solution to the 14-year-old advisory on Semiahoo First Nation, on the Pacific coast at the American border, is a “new connection to (the) city of Surrey and repairs to (the) distribution system.” Not exactly the moon shot. More like hooking up a very sophisticated garden hose.
The Semiahoo project would “for sure” be complete by summer 2020, Chief Harley Chappell said in January. Ouch.
“What communities want is not an Ottawa-imposed deadline. It's a long-term commitment for access to clean water,” Miller ventured — quite bravely, it must be said. That formulation rather falls apart when you think about it for a moment: “You didn't really want me to take out the garbage this morning, Mother. What you really want is a long-term commitment to garbage-removal.”
But in the absence of a new deadline, and of clean drinking water, the Liberals had something else to offer First Nations this week: a “bill to implement (the) UN Indigenous rights declaration,” as a CBC headline put it; more accurately, as the CBC reporter put it, “legislation that will begin the process of bringing Canadian law into alignment with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP),” and to quote the bill itself, a law compelling the justice minister “to prepare and implement an action plan to achieve the objectives of the (UNDRIP).”
A plan! For action! What could go wrong?
“The legislation is a significant step forward on the shared path to reconciliation for Indigenous and non-indigenous peoples alike,” Lametti averred.
We shall see. The declaration, and Ottawa's historic aversion to signing off on it, has certainly played a key symbolic role in the national discussion over reconciliation. (The Conservatives endorsed it as an “aspirational” document in 2010; the Liberals embraced it whole-hog in 2016.) But in terms of practical benefits — clean water, education, jobs, cultural protections, fishing and hunting rights, etc. — it doesn't have a lot to offer. Some interpret UNDRIP as offering First Nations an absolute veto over resource projects, but it's far from certain courts would agree. Mostly, the declaration simply affirms rights that are already well-established in Canadian law.
No one disputes that “Indigenous peoples have the collective right to live in freedom, peace and security” or to “not be subjected to any act of genocide” (Article 7), or “to practise and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs” (Article 11), or “to (use) their traditional medicines and to maintain their health practices” (Article 24), or “to establish their own media in their own languages” (Article 16), or “to participate in decision-making in matters which would affect their rights” (Article 18).
The question is to what extent these rights are protected and reinforced in real life. In theory, the UNDRIP could provide a framework for discussing how better to realize those rights. But it's much easier to imagine future governments using their fulsome agreement with UNDRIP as a symbolic fig leaf to cover very basic failures the sort Miller conceded on Thursday.
Nothing in any of UNDRIP'S 46 articles is going to build a water-treatment plant, school, road, runway, high-speed internet connection or competent and humane family services infrastructure any faster. And there is no more penalty for violating UNDRIP than there is for breaking a promise to build, staff and maintain a water-treatment plant. International human rights agencies routinely condemn Canada's treatment of Indigenous peoples as it stands.
“I'm cautiously optimistic that this could be beneficial for Indigenous people in Canada,” Kenneth Deer, a Kahnawake Mohawk who worked at the UN on the declaration's development, told CBC this week. That's probably about as optimistic as anyone should be, with emphasis on “cautiously.” “Incautiously cynical, suspicious and embittered” would be every bit as justified. A government that can't provide clean water is unlikely to spearhead a human rights revolution.