A BETTER OPTION
COMPREHENSIVE REFORM OF ABORIGINAL AFFAIRS NEEDED
Anumber of people have recently written to the National Post or directly to me taking issue with my suggestion that a comprehensive reform of Canada’s policy toward Indigenous people be negotiated with responsible and high-achievement leaders representative of all of the Aboriginal peoples. Their objection in every case has been that negotiating with any such group merely perpetuates the problems that we have had dealing with Indigenous spokesmen whose sole approach to these matters is one variation or another of victimhood. The context in which discussions of this kind take place is one of an unconditional and non-negotiable demands for reparations because of alleged past gross misconduct of the Canadian authorities.
Most of those who have written taking this viewpoint seek a straight program to assist native people in participating fully in the life of the country: we should do what we can to accelerate their assimilation to the generality of Canadians. It is impossible for someone like me who is not totally immersed in these questions to judge to what extent Aboriginal people sincerely wish to perpetuate in large measure, though with modern benefits, the lives of their ancestors. I doubt if the alternatives were clearly laid out, a majority of Indigenous people would choose to live nomadic lives tribally and eating fish and game. But whether it is a tactical masquerade to maximize compensation and reparations or a sincere commitment, native Canadians at the very least have a right not to be treated as if they were immigrants from a foreign and much different country. It hardly needs emphasis that they and their ancestral civilization antedated the arrival of the now overwhelming majority of Canadians of overseas ancestry, and as a now well recognized natural right, they’re entitled to preserve as much as they wish of their traditional civilization, as long as it does not violate fundamental principles of Canadian life.
The second problem with the argument presented by this group of objectors is that they are advocating precisely the approach that has shackled us with this hideously expensive and generally unsuccessful policy of “reconciliation,” which largely consists of endless lamentations about our collective historic guilt opposite the native peoples, accompanied by an inadequately audited deluge of financial and jurisdictional concessions to the many hundreds of tribes and bands and clans all of whom we accept as “First Nations,” no matter how diminutive and bizarre and autocratically self-governed they may be. These correspondents, and all of them were courteous, impatient with this problem but evincing no disrespect or hostility towards Indigenous people themselves, simply want to asseverate a new policy and end all discussions with First Nations representatives. Given how unsatisfactory the “reconciliation” process has been, I understand their impatience. But simply announcing and imposing a policy on the senior population group of this country without consultation has been a policy that has failed, is unjust in itself, and in any case is a ship that has sailed.
My contention is that we need a new Aboriginal affairs policy, and we have no standing legally or ethically to impose such a policy without consultation, no matter how comparatively benign and well-researched it may be if we don’t make a serious attempt to involve constructive Aboriginal leaders in the discussion of their future. Whatever policy we come up with will have no legitimacy and since those whom it is supposed to govern will not of been consulted, it will have little chance of success. One thing that absolutely everybody who has an opinion on the subject will agree is that we have had enough of failures and we certainly do not wish to embark on a course that guarantees another failure.
When Pierre Trudeau became prime minister in 1968 his policy was to collapse what was then known as the Indian Affairs department into the welfare system and anyone hired by that department had to sign a paper stating that they understood they were apt to be rendered redundant at any time. The forces of native identity and continuity induced a rethink on that policy to the point that the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples set up by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, which reported to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien in 1996, recommended that one third of the territory of Canada, approximately 1,000,000 square miles, be redefined as an autonomous jurisdiction reserved to the approximately 4.5 per cent of Canadians who have any claim to being Aboriginals, where all services would be brought up to the standards of the rest of the country, at the expense of the rest of the country and that the native inhabitants of this one third of Canada would thereafter be exempt from taxation while the rest of us paid the bills. This was so preposterous almost no one commented on it; the commissioners laid an egg that was abandoned in the nest; no one would touch this clunker.
This is how Indigenous policy now functions: outrageous positions are stated and then they are simply abandoned and the whole issue is so sensitive and volatile, no one comments. Underground radar picked up some abnormalities in an area adjacent to a residential school in Kamloops, B.C., and the theory immediately arose like a Wagnerian monster (but with no Siegfried to slay it), that hundreds of native residential schoolchildren had died because of negligence or acts of outright homicide and vanished with no account to their families and were furtively buried in unmarked graves. Justin Trudeau ordered that all official Canadian flags be lowered to half-staff and they were left in that condition for six months, causing people in all foreign capitals where Canada has an embassy mounting curiosity over our prolonged state of official national grief. Although $27 million was voted by Parliament to explore these so-called graves, it shortly emerged that that would be inconvenient to the propagators of this theory, and we were subjected to the customary pious claptrap about the inviolability of native burial grounds, despite the continued absence of any evidence whatever that anyone is buried there, let alone shamefully mistreated native children.
When it was pointed out by the Fraser Institute recently that the British Columbia government proposed to grant co-management down to the minutest details of 95 per cent of the surface area of the province to its 200 designated First Nations, after the non-denial denial of the minister, Nathan Cullen, was reduced to a Swiss cheese, the motion died. But if the provincial government is reelected, it will claim that approval of this outrageous measure was part of its mandate. When I had the temerity to tell the Liberal Banff thinktank a few years ago that Canada was not a genocidal country, a number of people including the then mayor of Calgary stormed out of the room, amidst ructions and harumphs of great theatricality.
We must stop throwing money at the problem for fanciful or exaggerated reasons. We must retract our confession that any government of Canada ever attempted any form of genocide on anyone. And we must work out with some credible interlocutors in the Aboriginal community, a plan of action to address legitimate grievances and opportunities. We must stop using this subject as a substitute for psychiatry and mass confessional therapy.
WE MUST STOP THROWING MONEY AT THE PROBLEM FOR FANCIFUL OR EXAGGERATED REASONS.