Canada on the brink of terminal gridlock
The majority of Wet’suwet’en First Nation members support the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline project, and they are in an objectively peculiar situation. On the one hand, the RCMP is doing its best to clear away the protesters and let construction proceed. On the other hand, anti-pipeline protesters claiming solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en have created chaos in their name — most notably the total shutdown of CN Rail’s eastern Canadian network, the cancellation of nearly every Canadian passenger train, and the layoffs and untold economic costs that go with that.
If protesters acknowledge the diversity of opinion among the Wet’suwet’en at all, they will defer to the authority of five hereditary chiefs who oppose the project, or observe that the five elected Wet’suwet’en band councils — all of which have signed community benefits agreements — represent a form of settler democracy imposed by the Indian Act.
They’re not wrong. But had Cabot and Cartier stayed home and farmed potatoes, surely Canada’s First Nations would not govern themselves today as they did 450 years ago. Settler Canadians know something of hereditary rule, after all: It tends to evolve, and often in the direction of democracy. You don’t have to like Western democracy to deplore the tyranny of a minority.
Theresa Tait-Day is in an especially peculiar situation. She holds a hereditary title under the Laksilyu clan of the Wet’suwet’en — or at least, she did.
Nowadays it depends who you talk to. Tait-Day, along with hereditary house chiefs Gloria George and Darlene Glaim, formed the Wet’suwet’en Matrilineal Coalition (WMC) in 2015 — an effort, they say, to build a more democratic partnership between the hereditary chiefs and the elected band councils, and to get the former on board with the pipeline project.
In response, they claim, the five male hereditary chiefs simply stripped them of their titles. The practical effect, Tait-Day says — and the male chiefs’ goal — was to shut women out of the decision-making process.
The Wet’suwet’en are largely poor, Tait-Day observes, with many concrete problems that money, jobs and skills training associated with the natural resources industry can help solve. “We want to share our (land) wealth,” she says. “We want to live in prosperity.”
Asked what she would tell anti-pipeline protesters claiming to support her people, Tait-Day suggests they simply “disengage.”
“They’re not truly informed,” she says. “It’s none of their business.”
Clearly the Wet’suwet’en are a divided community, including on the most basic questions of how they should be governed. It’s a mess. Mind you, look at the state of Canada as a whole.
Just as the RCMP have court authorization to clear protesters and encampments along the pipeline route, the Ontario Provincial Police have court authorization to clear the Mohawk rail blockade near Belleville, Ont. Unlike the RCMP, the OPP refuses to exercise its authority. And we just have to live with that. Conservative politicians are barking at Justin Trudeau to “enforce the law,” but he doesn’t give orders to the OPP, and neither does Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and nor should we want them to.
Still, you might expect senior ministers to have moderately stern words for folks illegally causing economic harm. You might expect the prime minister, at minimum, to be in the country. Instead, Trudeau spent the week swanning around Africa drumming up support for the UN Security Council seat with which he remains unaccountably obsessed, then decamped for the Munich Security Conference, where he was photographed warmly embracing Iranian foreign affairs minister Mohammad
Javad Zarif, five weeks after Iran blew an airliner full of Canadians out of the sky over Tehran.
“We will ensure everything is done to resolve this through dialogue and constructive outcomes,” Trudeau cooed in Munich. Back on the home front, Transport Minister Marc Garneau sounded like he had joined the blockaders: “Freedom of expression and peaceful protest are among the most fundamental and cherished rights in a democracy such as a Canada,” he said. He very unhelpfully recalled the OPP’s disastrous intervention during the occupation of Ipperwash Provincial Park in 1995, during which an officer shot unarmed Ojibway protester Dudley George to death.
And then, bewilderingly, he averred that “the injunctions have to be respected because we are a country of the rule of law.”
The OPP, meanwhile, went Full Orwell: “The proper exercise of police discretion should not be confused with a lack of enforcement,” a spokesperson told CBC on Friday. War is peace, freedom is slavery, etc.
When it comes to the rail blockade, the message boils down to this: “We hope they lose interest and leave.” And perhaps they will. Other blockades and protests came and went over the course of the week. But it seems like that would be a tactical error. The Mohawks have made specific and plausible demands: The RCMP vacating Wet’suwet’en territory, and the cancellation of the pipeline project. The cops charged with chasing them off have done nothing but ask nicely and offer them maple syrup.
The pipeline is a provincial project, not a federal one, but if the OPP won’t end the blockade and the feds aren’t willing to take truly extraordinary measures, then at some point in the foreseeable future it may well make short-term economic sense to give in to their demands. Maybe the feds can buy the pipeline from Coastal GasLink and shut it down.
And what if the Mohawks do lose interest, or are somehow induced to stand down? That now counts as the best-case scenario, and it will have involved shutting down the CN railway for at least a week — maybe two, maybe three — with enormous consequences for people’s livelihoods and the economy as a whole, all in the name of killing a project supported by the vast majority of Indigenous people affected by it. And it will happen again, as many times as any group wants it to, on whatever issue they want it to, for as long as they want it to.
Unless someone in power does something unusually bold and concrete in the very near future — and it’s not even clear what that thing would be — we are well on the road as a country to being terminally screwed. In the meantime, we certainly have no lessons on accountable government to give the Wet’suwet’en.
THE MESSAGE BOILS DOWN TO THIS: ‘WE HOPE THEY LOSE INTEREST.’