Aboriginal revolt threat ‘very real’
OTTAWA — Canada faces a potentially “catastrophic” uprising unless aboriginal Canadians become full participants in natural resource extraction, a prominent thinktank warned Wednesday.
Former Canadian senior military officer Douglas Bland, who is now professor emeritus at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., pointed to a “direct action” threat this week by a B.C. First Nation to block a copper mine’s expansion as a small sign of the kind of backlash he’s suggesting.
Bland, in one of two reports on natural resource development and First Nations published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, argued that Canadians should take heed of the Idle No More movement that triggered cross-country protests earlier this year against federal government inaction on key issues.
“An idea that most Canadians would have seen as preposterous a year ago ... is now very real,” he wrote.
“The possibility of a catastrophic confrontation between Canada’s settler and aboriginal communities, spurred not by yesterday’s grievances but by the central features and consequences of our national policies, have the potential to make such an uprising feasible if not ... inevitable.”
Bland, a retired lieutenant-colonel and author of a 2009 book about a fictional armed aboriginal insurgency in Canada, said determined young “warriors” could cause huge economic damage by targeting pipelines, ports and key arteries. “Unfortunately for Canada, the interwoven economic/national resources/ transportation matrix is irreversibly vulnerable.”
He argued that the revolt, either “armed or unarmed,” could be far more organized and national in scope than sporadic and largely localized acts of violent resistance such as the armed standoff at Oka, Que., in 1990, the confrontation at Gustafsen Lake in B.C. in 1995, a clash between non-native lobster fishermen and the Burnt Church First Nation in New Brunswick in 1999, and the land dispute involving the Six Nations Confederacy in Caledonia, Ont., in 2006.
On Tuesday, the Wet’suwet’en First Nation threatened to shut down a $455-million expansion of the Huckleberry Mines Ltd. copper/molybdenum operation that’s located 123 kilometres southwest of Houston, B.C.
Chief Karen Ogen said none of the 230 full-time and 30 contract positions at the mine, nor any of the 70 new jobs to be created with the expansion, will go to members of her community despite numerous meetings with the company.
Huckleberry vice-president Randall Thompson said roughly 15 to 18 per cent of the company’s 270-person workforce are aboriginal, but they are primarily members of other First Nations communities near the mine.
However, he said one recent contract involved members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation.
“The problem is, we have five first nations we have to deal with,” said Thompson.