Party of One (40 page)

Stephen Harper had promised a new respectful relationship between Ottawa and First Nations, but instead he set out to vilify an icon of the Idle No More movement. After a year in which he had done nothing to improve the life of Canada’s Aboriginals, he reserved his final mockery for his New Year’s message, boasting that his government “continued to strengthen First Nations relations in 2012.” Joining in Stephen Harper’s idea of relationship building, Canada’s spy agency, CSIS, kept close watch on Idle No More from December 2012 to February 2013, which included making lists of planned demonstrations.
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The policy of watching native protesters would soon be expanded to include all public demonstrations in the country by anyone.

Unlike other Canadians, many of whom disagreed with Harper’s steamroller politics but felt there was little they could do about it, First Nations employed another powerful tactic to fight back: the law. While Chief Spence was fasting on Victoria Island, two bands, the Mikisew Cree and the Frog Lake First Nation, began legal action against the federal government over Bills C-38 and C-45. The bands believed that the changes brought in by the bills violated their right to be consulted before native lands are affected by development. While both the NDP and the Liberals committed to resolving key native issues within a five-year time frame, the prime minister continued his personal version of the game Cowboys and Indians.

First Nations replied again with the litigation card. On January 30, 2014, it was reported that five more challenges were
filed in Federal Court by groups arguing against a green light for the $7-billion Enbridge project. Four environmental groups and three native bands were trying to get the court to set aside the federally appointed review panel’s report. They noted that the proposed twin 1,177-kilometre pipelines, one for the bitumen, the other for the toxic product that thins it, would cross more than 360 water courses in Alberta and 850 in BC—some of the least contaminated rivers in the world. A high proportion of the proposed route crosses lands traditionally used by Aboriginals.

Things got even more complicated for the Harper government when, on January 8, 2013, the Federal Court ruled that Métis and non-status Indians living off-reserve were “Indians” under section 91(24) of the Constitution Act of 1867, and that they fell under federal jurisdiction. The
Daniels v. Canada
case had taken fifteen years to work its way through the courts. It was launched in 1999 by the late Harry Daniels and the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (CAP), the organization former senator Patrick Brazeau once headed. The court decision affected six hundred thousand people. The Harper government appealed, but the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the decision of the lower court on April 17, 2014. An estimated $9 million was spent by the federal government to fight the
Daniels
case. CAP, which had spent $2 million during the court battle, announced that if the Harper government decided to appeal the case to the Supreme Court of Canada, the congress would continue the fight “in order to address the wrongs of the past.”

Today, over 75 percent of Aboriginal people in Canada live off-reserve. Paul Martin applauded the Supreme Court of Canada after its historic ruling backing Métis land claims in Manitoba in March 2013.
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“Thank heaven for the Supreme Court. But I would rather have the government of Canada remember its honour in these matters than have the Supreme Court remind the government of its obligation of honour.”

With trust levels for Ottawa at an all-time low, Stephen Harper appeared to blink. With the deadlines closing in for Northern Gateway, and his envoy telling him he needed the First Nations to close the deal, the prime minister offered an olive branch. The new First Nations education bill was announced with great fanfare on February 7, 2014. It had the support of national AFN chief Shawn Atleo, but Harper had hung Atleo out to dry during the Idle No More protests in Ottawa by giving him nothing. Atleo had lost respect and support among his own people. They viewed his endorsement of the new bill with anger rather than appreciation.

Meanwhile, the Harper government repeated a fundamental error in judgment. It had failed to consult First Nations on an earlier draft of the legislation, and then did the same thing again with the new bill. And the legislation had another political aspect that wasn’t missed by First Nation chiefs. None of the money attached to it, $1.9 billion over three years, would be spent until 2016— after the next election. Further, the new bill tabled in Parliament as “The First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act” gave only the illusion of native control. The minister of Aboriginal affairs and northern development still had sweeping powers. Manitoba chief Derek Nepinak laid down the cultural reality in an opinion piece for CBC News: “Only through the development of our own education systems based in our indigenous pedagogy and ways of being will our students thrive in a school system.” Nepinak emphasized that there had been a long history of colonial lawmakers in Canada “creating laws and policies in the pursuit of making indigenous peoples more like them.” That agenda had led by a direct route to the tragedy of the residential schools.

A rarely convened oversight body within the Assembly of First Nations, the Confederacy of Nations, met on May 14, 2014, and resolved to reject the Harper government’s native education bill, C-33. On May 27, 2014, First Nations leaders, youth, and elders
gathered in Ottawa for an AFN Special Chiefs Assembly. The chiefs debated for several hours whether to kill Bill C-33 or work for amendments. In the end, they voted unanimously to reject the government’s education bill. They wanted an honourable process that would lead to “true First Nation Control of education.” That could never happen if the minister of Aboriginal affairs still had the power, as he did under the proposed deal, to take control of a community education program based on performance outcomes. Those performance outcomes were in turn developed by provincial governments with no Aboriginal input. As the First Nations had learned on other occasions, you always had to read the fine print when dealing with Stephen Harper.

In an interview with Evan Solomon on CBC radio, Paul Martin said he was “very angry” about the federal government’s refusal to talk to First Nations about education on their own terms, and understood why Aboriginals had bristled at the Harper government’s plan. Martin believed that, had Stephen Harper invested in the Kelowna Accord, disasters such as the Attawapiskat housing crisis might have been averted and more Aboriginal young people would be in university and the workplace. Instead, ten more years had been wasted.

The Harper government wasn’t in an accommodating mood. Aboriginal affairs minister Bernie Valcourt, part of the federal team that travelled to BC to promote resource development, put the education bill, already at second reading in the House, on hold. His bottom line remained unchanged: no bill, no money. The $3,500-per-student gap between off-reserve and on-reserve education grants would remain. At the time this book is being written, the legislation continues to sit on hold in a state of parliamentary limbo.

Shawn Atleo had no choice but to resign as national chief of the Assembly of First Nations. He faced a vote that would likely
have ousted him anyway. Many of the chiefs who supported Idle No More thought that Atleo had aligned himself with a government that was working against them. Stephen Harper hadn’t even been willing to call an inquiry into hundreds of dead and missing native women. Atleo failed to deliver anything but Harper’s warmed-over rhetoric.

In May 2014, a new poll done by Forum Research found that the Prime Minister’s Office was one of the least trusted branches of the federal government, rivalled only by the Senate. The Supreme Court, where the First Nations lawsuits may end up, has a trust level four times that of the PMO.

On a chilly March day in Ottawa, with the wind blowing out of the east, the Harper government’s reputation sank to a new low among Canada’s Aboriginals. A group of Cree youth walked 1,600 kilometres to Parliament Hill from the James Bay Cree community of Whapmagoostui—a fly-in community of about eight hundred people on Hudson Bay—in support of Idle No More. They called the trek “The Journey of Nishiyuu,” meaning the journey of the people. They left their community on January 16, arriving more than two months later in Ottawa on March 25, 2013. When they started their walk through a thousand miles of winter, it was minus 54 degrees. Some days their toques froze to their heads like helmets; other days they were up to their knees in slush.

By the time the original six walkers and their guide reached Ottawa, their numbers had swollen to 270 from people who joined in along the way. Indigenous and non-native people thronged to greet the walkers in a crowd of about 4,000 on Parliament Hill. A banner emblazoned with “Keep your word” fluttered in the keen wind. Chief Theresa Spence, who had inspired the walkers, greeted them with a message: the treaties between the Crown and First Nations were not going away, and the meeting she had asked for from Victoria Island had still not happened.

Opposition leader Tom Mulcair had no coat and faced the bitter wind, waiting for hours as the walkers gave their emotional testimonials before he delivered a thirty-second speech. He said simply that he had asked the government why native children receive 30 percent less funding for education than off-reserve students. He declared he would keep on asking the question.

No one from the Harper government welcomed the walkers to Ottawa, and the prime minister was otherwise engaged. Stephen Harper had flown to Toronto to greet a pair of panda bears he had rented from the Chinese government for $10 million, which were arriving that day at Pearson airport.

thirteen

A TANGLED WEB

L
ike a pinhole breach in a dam, the signature scandal of the Harper years began with a trickle. On November 20, 2012, a media report disclosed that Senator Patrick Brazeau was collecting a housing allowance while living in the National Capital Region, a breach of Senate rules. Two days later, the Senate appointed a bipartisan subcommittee of the Internal Economy Board to examine Brazeau’s housing expenses. Senate reform was in the air and the members of the Red Chamber did not want to give their critics more ammunition to support either radical change or outright abolition of the institution. If Senator Brazeau were indeed claiming a home in Maniwaki as his primary residence, then the Senate itself could and would put it right.

Other problems had occurred with the man Stephen Harper had made a senator at the tender age of thirty-four. Brazeau’s attendance record had not been stellar. He missed 25 percent of seventy-two sittings of the Senate and 65 percent of the Aboriginal Peoples Senate committee meetings between June 2011 and April 2012. Sensitive to any behaviour that could put the Red
Chamber in a bad light, Marjory LeBreton, government house leader in the Senate, announced that the chair of the Internal Economy Committee was reviewing Senate attendance rules.

Truancy was one thing; trashing people on Twitter, quite another. Brazeau had used the social media to strike back at his critics, sometimes in language that was less than senatorial. After Jennifer Ditchburn of Canadian Press wrote about his sketchy Senate attendance in a June 2012 article, Brazeau advised her in a tweet to change the “D” in her last name to a “B.” It did not win the young senator many friends and he later called the reporter to say he was sorry. While Brazeau was offering apologies, MP Justin Trudeau offered some advice to the flamboyant senator with a knack for getting himself in trouble: “Pat, I say this against my own self-interest, but for god’s sake stop tweeting. PMO goons hit harder than I do.”

Trudeau was referring to the charity boxing match in which he defeated the powerfully built Brazeau on the night of March 31, 2012. It shocked the gathering of Conservative heavies who watched the spectacle from tables around the ring in the Hampton Inn Convention Centre. The event was televised live on the Sun News Network, an agency sarcastically dubbed Stephen Harper’s unofficial second communications office. The network was run by the PM’s former director of communications Kory Teneyke, who was not overly critical of the Harper government on Canada’s anemic imitation of Fox News.

Stephen Harper was reportedly watching as Brazeau, not Trudeau, ended up the loser with a bloody nose and a welt under his eye. The crowd booed when the fight was stopped midway through the third round because Brazeau was taking too many head shots and was unable to defend himself. As a result of the “stunning upset,” Trudeau got to cut Brazeau’s flowing mane of raven hair in the foyer of the House of Commons, in front of
the cameras. Brazeau also had to wear a Liberal “Team Trudeau” sweater for a week on Parliament Hill. The public relations coup the Conservatives hoped to make of the boxing match—a triumphant Conservative senator standing over the prostrate body of the Great Liberal Hope—had turned into a disaster.

Trudeau had pulled off a Rocky. But it had been a close thing, as the victor subsequently told me: “The guy hit me so hard he wobbled my knees. It was a feeling I had never experienced before. But my dad taught me to keep throwing punches and that’s what I did. At first they missed, then they started landing.”

One of the reasons the Senate leadership moved so expeditiously on the allegations against Brazeau was that it had other expense problems brewing. Rumours swirled on the Hill that Senate Finance members had uncovered “a few bad apples” with respect to expense claims. An internal review of Senator Pamela Wallin’s travel expenses had begun quietly in August 2012. The review was prompted by a letter sent by Wallin’s former executive assistant to Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen, a member of the Senate Internal Economy Committee. The letter alleged improprieties in Wallin’s travel expenses. The Senate Finance branch looked into the allegations and produced a report in October 2012. It was troubling, and the Senate leadership pondered its next move.

Behind the scenes, another name was added to the “bad apple” list: Liberal senator Mac Harb. In Harb’s case, Senate authorities were focusing on his primary residence and related expense claims. News of the internal examinations leaked out and CTV’s Robert Fife ran a story about Harb. It was not flattering. Three months after he had been named to the Senate in 2003, Harb bought a house in Cobden, Ontario. Although it was virtually uninhabitable for three years, he designated it as his principal dwelling and began claiming a housing allowance. After a little shoe-leather journalism, Fife discovered from Harb’s neighbours that he didn’t live there.