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DEBATE | JANUARY 19, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 2 |
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Two, Three, Many Nations Behind the apology to aborigines, is Ottawa preparing a negotiations binge? By ANDREW COYNE
Still, it is a curiously stilted thing--not an apology as such but a "statement of reconciliation." The government expresses its "profound regret" for past injuries, "acknowledges" in particular "the role it played" in the disastrous residential-schools experiment, even confesses it is "deeply sorry" to former students who were physically and sexually abused at the schools, but never actually accepts responsibility for any of it. The explanation offered is that this would expose the government to possible legal liability in the dozens of civil suits brought by the victims. But if you really meant to apologize, wouldn't you be more than willing to make amends? For all the misty-eyed rhetoric of the Minister of Indian Affairs, Jane Stewart, the government is in fact engaged in a bit of plea bargaining out of a desire less to right old wrongs than to limit its damages. That may account in part for the tepid, even hostile response the statement received from most of the native leaders gathered for the formal presentation. The $250 million "healing fund" that went with it was less, said one, than Japanese Canadians received in 1988 in compensation for their wartime internment. It was less, said another, than "what they have paid the helicopter company not to build helicopters" (a reference to the $341 million penalty the government was forced to pay a European manufacturer to cancel the EH-101 contract). Indeed, for what was billed as the government's response to the mammoth 1996 report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the whole package looked mighty slim. An aboriginal health institute, a program to preserve native languages, more water and sewerage systems on reserves--these are all very well, but they hardly add up to the $1.43 billion annual increase in spending the royal commission recommended, let alone the status of a "third order of government." A good thing too. The more than 400 recommendations drawn up by the royal commission would fundamentally recast the relationship between natives and other Canadians, not as full and equal citizens but as inhabitants, almost, of separate countries. There would be a separate aboriginal parliament, separate aboriginal justice systems, a guaranteed aboriginal seat on the supreme court, not to mention the transfer of vast amounts of Crown land to 60 to 80 self-governing aboriginal "nations." These hazily defined entities would take on rather more powers than the provinces, including responsibility for health, education, welfare and economic development. Even the more than 60% of natives living off-reserve in cities and towns would be entitled to self-government. If Ottawa is indeed reluctant to go this far, Canadians can be much relieved. The Canada that would emerge from this process could not properly be called a nation-state, in any meaningful sense, but rather would devolve, as the political scientist Tom Flanagan has observed, into a sort of loose "multinational confederacy." No one wants to preserve the paternalist regime embodied in the Indian Act, which has kept native bands in the thrall of a vastly intrusive set of federal regulations and edicts. But the present government has been wise to avoid radical constitutional surgery, confining its offer of self-government to much the same powers as might be enjoyed by any other community of citizens--namely, those of a town or municipality. Or has it? While the drama of the "statement of reconciliation" was being played out for the cameras, a quite different document was making the rounds in private. Titled "A National First Nations Agenda," the nine-page Indian Affairs policy paper commits the federal government to a new relationship with aboriginal peoples, to be negotiated "government-to-government, nation-to-nation." Or rather, not all aboriginal peoples but only the half a million or so natives living on reserves, so-called status Indians--or, in the parlance of the aboriginal proponents, First Nations. This is said to mark the first official reference to natives as "nations" or "governments," at least on a par with the nation and government of Canada. It's not at all clear what this means, or will mean, but it sure looks like the sort of thing the royal commission had in mind--though limited only to status Indians, not the Metis, Inuit or urban natives. In any event, it would leave the federal government with yet another item to be negotiated on an already crowded agenda of national disintegration. Is it really advisable, given the delicacies surrounding Quebec's claim to be a nation, if not a nation-state, to be conferring the title so lightly upon native peoples? What, come to that, are we to make of the government's declared willingness to make some sort of official pronouncement on the role of the 19th century Metis leader Louis Riel in Canada's history, perhaps even to honor him as one of the country's founders? If a delusional zealot who not once but twice led an armed insurrection against the government and constitution of Canada is a Father of Confederation, then so is Jacques Parizeau. Andrew Coyne, based in Toronto, is a national-affairs columnist with Southam News.
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odern politics is as much about psychotherapy as about anything
else. So, much healing power will be attributed to the federal
government's formal apology to aboriginal Canadians for their
historic mistreatment at the hands of European settlers.
"Closure" used to be a high-handed parliamentary tactic. In the
age of Oprah, it is the balm for every injustice, a Cabinet
portfolio all on its own.