Legault looks to be spoiling for a fight with Mohawks

During widespread student-fee protests in Quebec in 2012, a veteran union leader shared the benefit of his negotiating experience with the students.

You can get the cat to climb the pole, said Michel Arsenault, then president of Quebec’s largest labour organization, known as the FTQ. But then you have to get the cat to come down.

And for leaders seeking a negotiated end to the Wet’suwet’en crisis, that’s harder to do when somebody keeps yelling at the cat.

That’s been Quebec Premier François Legault’s approach to the Mohawks who for more than two weeks have been blocking a major rail line serving Montreal.

Indigenous people across Canada have blocked several rail lines in support of Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs in British Columbia resisting a pipeline project. The Montreal line runs through the Kahnawake Mohawk reserve on the South Shore of the St. Lawrence River opposite Montreal.

The populist, cultural-nationalist Legault has appeared to be spoiling for a fight with the Mohawks blocking the line, used by predominantly French-speaking commuters from ridings held by his governing Coalition Avenir Québec party. Trouble is, nobody wants to do his fighting for him.

Legault’s rhetoric began to escalate a week after the Kahnawake barricade went up, when he first raised the possibility of the use of force, calling on Ottawa to set a deadline for the negotiated removal of that and other blockades.

Like the classic Québécois satirical film character Elvis Gratton, Legault likes to “think big, sti!” A couple of days later, he called for what amounts to a remake of the 1990 Oka crisis, only this time, Canada-wide.

Not one to be restrained by such democratic principles as the political independence of the police, he raised the prospect of the Sûreté du Québec again being sent in against Mohawk protesters, as it had been at Oka. This time, however, to give himself political cover, he would order it in only as part of a police assault on Indigenous barricades across the country, co-ordinated by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The prime minister’s and the other premiers’ memories of Oka were stronger than that of the head of the government of the province where the crisis took place, and they immediately rejected Legault’s idea. That didn’t discourage Legault, who then appeared to be goading the SQ to go it alone.

When the Mohawk Peacekeepers refused to execute a court order to end the blockade, Legault said he expected the provincial police to do it. The SQ said it would intervene only if the Peacekeepers requested its assistance. Legault then, in effect, turned to the army.

After unsuccessfully pressuring the provincial police for a week to lift the blockade, he said they hadn’t done it yet because there were AK-47 automatic assault rifles in Kahnawake. The implication was that this was a job for the army.

(Mohawks and federal ministers carefully denied any knowledge of AK-47S — at the blockade itself. But Legault had said only that they were in the 8,000-resident, 50-square-kilometre reserve.)

The presence of military weapons in Mohawk communities has long been public knowledge in Quebec. So Legault must have been aware of it when he appeared to be urging the SQ to charge the Kahnawake barricade.

Only after the police refused did he bring up the AK-47S. It looked like an attempt to absolve his government of responsibility for allowing the blockade to continue, to justify sending in the army, and to put pressure on Trudeau to do it.

For once, Legault may have overestimated his public support. In a Canada-wide poll this week by the Angus Reid Institute, Quebecers were roughly evenly divided over Legault’s handling of the blockade, and whether force should be used to lift it.

If Legault hoped the threat of army intervention would intimidate the Mohawks, it backfired; they were alarmed, all right, but they responded by reinforcing the blockade against the threat of attack.

Apparently, yelling at the cat doesn’t work. Maybe Legault should stop.