Failures of Duty
The Review of a Bad Week for Respecting Indigenous Rights & the Principle of Good Governance
I’ve now been around “official Ottawa” for going on 14 years, between my time working on Parliament Hill and now working in the same circles in the private sector. During my time I’ve seen a lot and experienced plenty as an Indigenous person in this space. That’s not always been the greatest experience but there have been times when it has been harder than others. This week has been one of those for me, mostly because of a consistent theme that played out in the Nations capital and elsewhere.
This week was a depressing reminder about despite how far we have come as a country and how much progress Indigenous nations have made in the past 20 years or so, we still have so much further to go. And what’s probably worse, it’s been examples of simple, wilful ignorance on the behalf of government and others. So where to start with this? Let me set the scene this way.
This week the Assembly of First Nations held their annual winter assembly in Ottawa, as they do every year. It usually happens on the same week every year and is a cornerstone of the Holiday political calendar in the city. Most of the political parties actually plan their own Holiday parties during that week, just because they know how many people will be in town, to give you an idea of its importance. This year’s assembly ended up driving the debate on many issues, but they all came back to one, recurring theme for all parties in Parliament; the governments Duty to Consult and upholding the Honour of the Crown.
The Chiefs in Assembly passed a couple of resolutions that never should have been needed if governments were upholding said honour and fulfilling their duties. The first was a resolution calling for the proposed Alberta Sovereignty Act and the Saskatchewan First Act to be withdrawn. The Alberta bill passed, debated in the dead of night while the assembly was taking place, while the Saskatchewan bill is still being debated in their legislature. Both bills propose radical steps that would clearly infringe on the first of First Nations in both provinces, unilaterally and without any consent from the affected First Nations.
The Alberta bill is clearly unconstitutional, but you can add to that the fact that they run completely counter to the treaties signed with First Nations which gives Alberta the legal right to exist to begin with. When you listen to the comments of Barry Cooper, one of Premier Danielle Smith’s advisors on this bill, you can quickly see how problematic this gets. Firstly, he stated he believes Canada's Constitution is not a legitimate document, that he wants it changed and if not, “that means the threat of leaving.” It is clearly at attempt to create a constitutional crisis and push for the separation of Alberta.
But Mr. Cooper, Premier Smith, and all advocating for this seem to forget something; you can’t do any of that without First Nations being on board. The disturbing irony of this turn of events is that Premier Smith proposes to do this to ensure that “Alberta is not taken advantage of by Canada,” while she willfully ignores the Constitutional and Treaty rights of the First Nations and Métis peoples that call Alberta home. When faced with that fact by the media, she denied that anything in this bill would affect Indigenous rights. But at the same time, she also stated at the same time that “It's not like Ottawa is a national government,” which just shows how much she either knows or cares about these matters.
The threat in both Alberta and Saskatchewan are clear for First Nations and Métis peoples and surely so would the inherent duty of both governments to consult with said Indigenous nations. Yet, in both cases, neither government could be bothered to do so. They simply ignored them, acting as if this was 1922, not 2022. There is zero excuse for that approach, regardless of how First Nations and Métis governments would react to the proposed legislation. Sure, its pretty obvious that both would likely oppose what’s being proposed, but that doesn’t remove the duty for those provincial governments. You don’t only have to do it when its on easy issues or ones which you agree. You’ve got to do it across the board, on issues of major governance and the status of a province, like we see out west, or even legislation on topics that are usually more normal, like Doug Ford’s Bill 23 on Housing in Ontario. Yep, his PC government didn’t do any consultations on that too, and now the Chiefs of Ontario are calling them out for it because a bill that affects lands surely affects those who the government signed treaties within those lands.
If this was just a problem with “Conservative” governments and how they tend to act towards Indigenous governments, that wouldn’t have made this week so bad. I mean, all those governments have had their issues with respecting, recognizing or in some cases, just being decent to Indigenous governments. But this week we also saw just how badly the other side can at when they take the same approach to their duty to consult.
The other big resolution to come out of the assembly in Ottawa, when an emergency resolution passed to oppose Bill C-21, a bill initially proposed to ban handguns. But thanks to the Liberal governments’ own actions, they introduced hundreds of amendments at the very last minute as the bill was being studied in committee that widely expanded the scope of the bill to include many common hunting rifles. You know for years how the Conservatives kept telling hunters that “the Liberals want your hunting rifle” while they never actually did? Well, the Liberals put forward amendments that brought that trope to life and set us off down this road.
For Indigenous peoples this is an issue of particular importance because hunting is not a sport in our communities; it is a part of our culture and our ways of life. We hunt to feed our families and our neighbours, especially in times like these when the cost of food is rising out of control. In some regions, entire communities shut down for certain hunts. On the James Bay coast during the Fall, communities shut down for what is called the “Goose Break.” It is not called that for some cutesy reasons; it is called that because entire communities shut down and go out on the land to hunt geese. Whole families, children, everyone goes out. Schools, businesses, everything shut down for it. Those are the hallmarks of something that are a key part of a nations culture, not just some sport to do for fun.
And when nations like that completely shut down for such activities, or they just go out on the land during a weekend to get a deer or moose to fill the freezer, they have hunting rifles. These hunters, young and old, are not going out there with AR-15’s and “assault rifles” to hunt. Many of those hunters use rifles like the Simonov SKS, a Soviet-era rifle that was designed back in 1945 and lacks features common to modern military rifles. You see there is a long history of Canadian hunters using what were once military rifles to hunt, rifles like the Lee-Enfield. Anyone who has learned history in school would remember those because they were used in both the First and Second World Wars and replaced the infamous Ross Rifle in World War One, which weren’t exactly known for its quality. They became a standard Canadian hunting rifle, as soldiers returned from the wars with them. In Indigenous communities where soldiers returned with little means, it is not like most could afford to buy fancy rifles. So, those rifles that came home became tools to help sustain and feed their families, which is why they remain common, particularly in the North, to this day.
Yet despite all of that in this last-minute move, the amendments brought by the Liberals would outlaw tools like those too. As someone who spent a decade working in Parliamentary committees, I can tell you that is terrible governance and is exactly the kind of act you take if you don’t want your amendments to receive proper review or questioning. That’s what you try to do if you’re wanting to push something through you know will get major blow-back and hope no one will notice. It’s especially the kind of think you do when you’re trying to skirt your legal duties towards Indigenous peoples. It’s an example of bad faith governance that just as bad as what Premiers Smith, Moe and Ford have correctly been called out for.
What makes this even worse though is the fact that this is a Liberal government, one with a Prime Minister who constantly talks about how the relationship with Indigenous Peoples is the most important in his eyes. Yet again, his government “proves” that by ignoring their duties to consult with Indigenous nations on something as fundamental as practising their culture and feeding their bloody families. Add to that the fact that Prime Minister then says “they are only consulting” with this list of amendments which he knows full well isn’t how consultation works. When you show up at a committee with amendments, you’re moving to changing the law. That is not a consultation, that is a step you are supposed to take long after the consultations are done.
With the final insult to make it all worse, you get Public Safety Minister Marc Medicino constantly saying that he’s not doing what he clearly is doing and when he gets called out on it, he accuses those speaking out as falling for “Conservative fear-mongering.” The fact that when Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre appeared at the AFN assembly (by video, not in person, the only leader to do so by the way) and was roundly booed is a clear a sign of what those leaders think about what the Conservatives say on the matter. It’s gas-lighting of the highest order and coming from a government that claims to be the ones who care about us the most.
But it wasn’t just the Liberals who did their part in gas-lighting and patronizing Indigenous concerns about this. When Montreal Canadiens star goalie Carey Price, who is First Nations and whose mother is the chief of Ulkatcho First Nation in B.C, raised his concerns about this issue on social media, the attacks that came his way were just as noteworthy and concerning to me. Putting aside the association with the Canadian Shooting Sports Association and their actions on use of offensive promo codes (something I condemn and the kind of loathsome activity that group is known for), Price’s comments on the issue of the legislation were remarkably similar to what you hear from the chiefs in assembly this week.
When Price made them, Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-François Blanchet tweeted that public comments and opposition to the bill had convince Price and "and so many others that gun control's goal or effect is to hurt hunting", acting as if somehow his concerns were misplaced or misinformed. Unfortunately, even respected voices PolySeSouvient did similar, stating on Twitter that Price had been "duped" by disinformation. They also re-tweeted articles stating that he had “fallen prey to 'misinformation',” that he “is misinformed” and that “as a hunter he knows that you don’t go after pheasant or deer with an AR-15”. All of those tweets still feature prominently on their Twitter account
All of those comments from progressive voices went after Price, came off to me as trying to infantilize him and treat him as if he was someone incapable of “knowing better”. It’s the kind of attitude I’ve seen in the past from the anti-fur or anti-seal hunt crowd, who usually make the same kind of dismissive and condescending comments towards Indigenous peoples about their cultures. They say that “you don’t need to do that” or “it’s 2022, you don’t need to hunt to feed your family anymore”. They dismiss the importance of these activities in our cultures and in the case of Carey Price, they completely devalued his experience and perspective, as a First Nations man who is steeped in his community and traditions. He knows full well you don’t hunt deer or small birds with an AR-15, and if the person writing that actually knew what the offensive amendments were about, they would know that it has nothing to do with that vile weapon.
But yesterday when the chiefs in assembly came out and made their unanimous voices clear on this matter, I didn’t hear that same kind of tut-tutting or downplaying. The government realizes that they screwed this up badly, as progressive opposition parties like the NDP and their leader Jagmeet Singh pointed out. The Liberals lack of action and lack of care on important issue is now coming back to bite them in the ass, just like we’ve seen in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario earlier.
That’s why for me this week has been so painfully difficult to watch up close. It’s been a series of examples of bad, lazy government across the board from Edmonton to Queen’s Park to Parliament Hill. It’s been watching governments just refusing to do the basics of proper government right. Over the past decade I started to get the impression from governments that fulfilling the Crown’s Duty to Consult had become one of those basics, always to be done regardless of situation or circumstance. Yet here we are with four governments falling down, all at the same time, failing to clear the most basic of legislative hurdles.
Last time I checked the motto that our country has always gone by is “peace, order and good government". It’s right there up front, yet somehow this week we’ve gotten some depressing examples of how “good government” seems to be a much lower priority than “political expedience,” “partisan ideology” or “scoring points to own the opposition”. The two bills in Alberta and Saskatchewan are all about picking political fights with Ottawa, in Alberta’s case specially in an attempt to try to run for re-election in mere months against an Ottawa bogeyman. With Bill C-21, with their snap amendments the government has taken what was a reasonable bill and turned it on it head. It appears they have given up putting forward a sensible law that the vast majority of Canadians will support and won’t run afoul of Treaty and Indigenous right. Instead, they have decided to take the Conservative approach to the issue from the past 15 years, playing to the fringes and forgoing any attempt at good legislation.
In all cases, it’s not too late for all these governments to change course and correct themselves. They all still have a chance to come back to the principle of “good governance” and get their houses in order. It shouldn’t take First Nations leaders coming together in assembly to give Canada’s Federal and Provincial governments a collective shake to act right. It shouldn’t, yet here we are seeing it again. There are many critical issues that Indigenous communities need addressed immediately. Every time our leaders need to give these government these reminders, that’s time taken away from dealing with the life and death issues before us every day. If these governments started to act right consistently and followed through on their duties consistently, that would result in good governance that would do something we’ve never seen before in the history of Canada; deliver good governance and outcomes for everyone who calls this land home, Indigenous and otherwise. That wild idea will keep giving me hope during depressing weeks like these.