IDLE NO MORE
First Nations and PM meet, pledge more talks, as protests held across Canada.
OTTAWA – They’ll meet again.
Stephen Harper and aboriginal leaders didn’t see eye to eye on everything at their talks Friday, but they have agreed that the prime minister and Shawn Atleo, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, will meet in the coming weeks to have further “high- level” discussions.
Statements from Harper’s office and from Atleo dubbed the meeting — held in Ottawa amid high tensions and with noisy demonstrations taking place right outside the gathering — a successful first step after a week that thrust aboriginal issues into the national spotlight.
“We have achieved some movement today,” Atleo said in a statement Friday night, adding Harper, “for the first time, provided a clear mandate for high- level talks on treaty implementation.”
As Atleo and Harper heralded the progress of their official meeting, Theresa Spence, the controversial northern Ontario chief whose refusal to eat solid food set her as the standardbearer of the Idle No More protest movement, emerged from her own meeting, of sorts, with Gov. Gen. David Johnston.
Spence was one of 150 chiefs who attended a ceremony with the Queen’s representative in Canada on Friday night at Rideau Hall. Johnston addressed the chiefs at the gathering, which lasted about 90 minutes, but Spence and her supporters left early, and said the chief would continue to subsist on her liquids- only diet.
“Sadly the hunger strike continues because I didn’t feel that honour, I didn’t feel that privilege,” said Spence’s spokesman, Danny Metatawabin, said, with the chief sitting behind him at a downtown hotel. He said Spence and her supporters walked out of Rideau Hall before the closing ceremonies, because “somehow, it felt like a show.”
After weeks of protest around the country, the meetings between aboriginal leaders and the federal government were hailed by some as signs of progress.
But there was no agreement on a key concern from aboriginals: Rescinding portions of the Harper government’s two budget bills that make changes to environmental assessments and the Indian Act. And with chiefs in Ontario and Alberta threatening blockades next week, the unrest appears to not yet have abated.
Speaking to APTN News, Atleo said he believed the government now recognizes it may have trod on treaty rights with its resource- development plans.
“I think there’s a strong recognition that the power of First Nations have … that the power is there in the people in the way that they’re rising up,” Atleo said in the television interview.
He also said he recognized the “difficult moment this presented,” and the unity challenges within the AFN. A majority of regions were represented at the meeting in Harper’s office, but regional chiefs from Manitoba and Saskatchewan, for example, refused to attend.
The government agreed to three of the eight requests chiefs put forward Friday, including a “comprehensive” process to review claims and treaty implementation, which would also include potentially giving First Nations a bigger slice of revenues from the development of natural resources in their territories, which the AFN said is needed to help bring many aboriginal communities out of poverty.
Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan emerged from four hours of discussion Friday night to say the government doesn’t plan changes to current budget legislation that First Nations oppose.
Duncan told reporters in Ottawa: “We agreed to have a meeting, we agreed to meet with people in order to talk about those things that will assist in working with aboriginal leadership that will help in terms of the community level for jobs, growth and economic opportunity.”
Oversight is also expected to be enhanced, with Harper’s office and the Privy Council Office, the central bureaucracy that aides Harper and his cabinet, more involved in providing “direction from the centre” on “sticky items,” Duncan said.