Get ordinary Canadians onside, says Adam Goldenberg,

When I was a speech writer in Ottawa, part of my job was “stakeholder relations.” If my boss was slated to speak to some constituency of Canadians — unionized workers, perhaps, or community health nurses, or farmers, or Jews — I was dispatched in advance to find out what his audience wanted to hear. My task was to listen, then to draft a speech for my boss that would make clear that I had.

Every political organization does this. Some do so successfully, as when the federal NDP wooed soft sovereigntist support in Quebec before the last election. Others try and fail — a recent Liberal habit.

But no political party in Canada has ever been so scrupulous, so systematic, in its relationships with stakeholders as Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. The well-known case-in-point is Jason Kenney; the government’s ethnic-event-hopping immigration minister styles himself as his party’s “minister for curry in a hurry.” It fits.

So when Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence threatens to starve herself to death unless she gets a meeting with the prime minister, the Conservatives apply their usual stakeholder calculus: Who is this person? What does she want? And most importantly, what is at stake for our party?

Critics complain that the Tories too easily confuse government and politics. They campaign between elections and call it governing. Their response to the hunger-striking Chief Spence — and to the Idle No More movement of which she has become an icon — is proving that point.

Aboriginal Canadians make up less than four per cent of the population, spread thinly across our country’s cities, wide-open spaces — and our federal ridings, too. On First Nations reserves, voter turnout is notoriously low.

Politically, the Conservatives risk little by refusing to meet with Chief Spence. They might conclude, based on polling data and past election results, that the Canadians who support her are unlikely ever to vote Tory, regardless of whether the prime minister takes the meeting or not. The government’s electoral math may be right; First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people may be idle no more, but they remain few in number and far from the polls.

For the Idle No More protesters to have a political impact, they will have to hit the Tories where it hurts — by turning their non-aboriginal supporters against them. And this is where some activists are overplaying their hand; blockading train tracks and threatening, as one group is now doing on Facebook, “to escalate this to a point where we shut down the country,” is unlikely to win friends or influence people. Spawning widespread frustration risks squandering public sympathy for Chief Spence and her cause. Canadians who support the protesters’ message but object to their tactics may end up neutralized politically, to the Tories’ advantage.

If that happens, the country will be worse off for it, because there is more at stake in Idle No More than the protests’ own success. A bona fide movement for reconciliation between aboriginal peoples and the Crown should be a meaningful opportunity to teach Canadians that aboriginal rights are constitutionally guaranteed, that the legal relationship between First Nations peoples and the federal government predates the latter, and that Canada’s success as a multinational society depends on our ability to reckon with the difference and injustice that have always defined us. This could be a moment, in other words, to talk seriously about the burden of our own history.

But none of it will come to pass if Idle No More loses its coherence, or if it becomes an unwieldy dog’s breakfast of protest and pageantry that alienates the very Canadians who should be its audience. The movement’s first task should be to resist the easy analogies of ordinary politics — of “stakeholder relations” — by making its case not to the Conservatives, but to the people who put them in office.

We will know when it succeeds. When no Canadian is able to shrug off as unreasonable a demand from an aboriginal leader to meet with the government officials who advise and represent the Crown — namely, the prime minister and the Governor

Send to: Fax: Phone: General — and not with some lesser minister in their stead; when First Nations no longer need to hire professional lobbyists in Ottawa to make their case to the government of Canada; and when the federal government recognizes, once and for all, that aboriginal peoples are partners in Confederation, not just stakeholders in politics, then Idle No More will have made an important and lasting contribution to the way we understand and govern our country.

Yet, in the meantime, Idle No More is up against a government for whom governing is politics by other means. If aboriginal Canadians can convince the rest of the country that the honour of the Crown deserves better, then they will have done all of us a great service.