Theresa Spence’s resolve versus Stephen Harper’s stony silence: it is still the only really big story in Canada right now.My good friends over at CP got it wrong — or rather the editors they consulted did. Luka Rocco Magnotta was not the Newsmaker of the Year. He was just a Hannibal Lecter who slipped off the screen into real life and temporarily diverted the public’s attention for a few weeks last spring. He is Robert Pickton with terminal narcissism and a cellphone.
Will he be the newsmaker again next year should he go to trial? He shouldn’t be. A monster with an exhibitionistic streak is still just a monster.
One of the true contenders for Newsmaker of the Year was Chief Theresa Spence. A year has 365 days and the fact that she started her hunger strike with only 20 days left in 2012 makes no difference. Then again, she is aboriginal and hardly anyone noticed what she was doing. It goes with the territory.
Why is she so important? For one thing, she has young people interested in politics again. For another, she believes in standing up for her rights in a peaceable way. For a third, she knows that official BS is still BS.
At the most basic level, it comes down to this: In a lethargic nation, dazed by a neo-conservative blitzkrieg on the country’s democratic practices, the environment, science, foreign policy and public probity, an aboriginal woman has made people think about the nature of their country and government again — and about their own power and value as citizens.
That’s no mean feat in these soul-numbing, corporate political times.
Whatever happens during federal elections these days, most of the official participants act more like candidates for building superintendent than for national leadership.
Except in that ghastly, boilerplate rhetoric that leaves normal people semi-conscious after just a few seconds of ‘moving forward together’, no ideas regarding our national identity are ever discussed. Instead, there is fuzzy talk about jobs, future budgetary targets, and a sense that rearranging public borrowing at better rates on the bond market will solve all our problems.
And promises, of course. They all promise like champions. Has anyone else noticed that the bigger political promises now play out on timeframes that outlive the mandates the would-be governors are seeking? It’s all a little like being placed on a gurney in a hospital run by Stephen King. You know someone is taking you someplace — but you don’t quite know where or why. Elections don’t inform and inspire — they depress or incite.
So last December 11, it was shocking to see someone actually want to talk to the prime minister as the country’s most important employee, not as an imperial figure who lives at the top of an unapproachable mountain shrouded in mist. Chief Spence had the audacity to think that she was important because her concerns were important. She was also sufficiently committed to the notion of democracy (however battered it may be in Canada) that she believed talking to the prime minister — nation to nation, as promised — might benefit everyone.
The prime minister has more than a few things to answer for. What happened to those exalted promises of a new, respectful relationship with Canada’s aboriginal people made so recently by the government? Where is the vision to replace the one the federal government smashed when it abandoned the Kelowna Accord? What did Harper’s apology for the sadistic residential school system really amount to, if he won’t even pick up the phone and talk to one of its survivors?
When she was a student in that hideous system, Theresa Spence’s mother died on Christmas Day. Spence was nine years old. Officials at her school barred her from attending her mother’s funeral. Had the PM called Chief Spence on Christmas Day 2012, one wonders what ghosts he might have helped exorcise. Instead, he was working on his New Year’s Eve message about how his government “continued to strengthen First Nation relationships in 2012.”
George Orwell and his Ministry of Truth never offered as complete a disconnect between reality and the agenda of Big Brother as you can find in those pitiful words. What could the PM have been talking about? Granted, no one enjoys writing his own report card more than Harper, but even he must have blushed at such utter nonsense. He did such a good job of “strengthening” the relationship with aboriginal peoples that 2012 ended in roadblocks, national and international protests, rallies, round-dances and a life-and-death hunger strike.
Remember those First Nation chiefs bringing it to the doors of Parliament? Remember how the chiefs panned that Crown-First Nations gathering the PM likes to crow about? Remember Idle No More? And as APTN reported this week, First Nations chiefs are planning a campaign of economic disruption beginning January 16 if the prime minister doesn’t agree to a significant meeting. Which is precisely what Chief Spence is asking for — and the Anglican Church thinks it’s a good idea.
In Robert Bolt’s great play A Man for all Seasons, the prosecutor asks the jury a question about Thomas More’s unspoken opinion of the king’s marriage: “What does it betoken, this silence?” Well, what does Stephen Harper’s silence betoken? At one level it is obviously a contest of wills, precisely the kind of brick-wall standoff the PM so enjoys. He likes his political opposition in powder form. But there is another, much darker aspect to a leader’s silence when powerful emotions are running through the land.
There are some Canadians who have interpreted the prime minister’s silence as an opportunity to denounce, degrade and attack aboriginals in this country. The MacKenzie Institute, a group with great access to the prime minister, is muttering in its December newsletter that “perhaps some aboriginal figures have been amateurishly chumming around with some Iranian government officials.”
Elsewhere, all of the ugly stereotypes have been on display: Indians as lazy, Indians “freeloading” (that quote belongs to former Manitoba Tory youth leader Braydon Mazurkiewich), drinking all day, fighting all night and living lives that are just one long flight from responsible living. As for their leaders, we’re told they steal from their own people, are profligate with public money and try to hide from public accountability.
Here is a representative example of how those who do not like Chief Spence and what she stands for view aboriginals. It was sent to me by someone who thinks my columns on this subject have missed the mark.
“You failed to point out the double standard that exists here. Indians can misappropriate millions and not be held accountable to anyone. A white person would be investigated by the RCMP and likely jailed. Certainly not handed more money as we do the Indians. Or they can block highways and RR tracks and not be jailed, where a white man would be … It is clear that many, not all, of the Indians of Canada cannot function without the people of Canada (Mr. Harper) to hold their hands or give them a handout. This nonsense of dependency has to end … We the people are not responsible for their every need …”
Which is to say (in the opinion of the author of those words): he’s too heavy, he’s not my brother and buzz off. But a few quibbles arise. If the writer is unhappy about Indians getting away with things that a white man couldn’t, he ought to explain why 18.5 per cent of the federal prison population is of aboriginal descent, while aboriginal people make up just 2.7 per cent of the overall adult population in Canada. Surely the lesson is that, in relative terms, far more aboriginals go to jail than white men, not fewer.
And if native leaders have been guilty of stealing from their own people, wasting public money and avoiding accountability, who have been their ablest teachers if not the federal politicians who brought us Adscam, purchased those dud subs, invested millions in promoting old wars, gave us the F-35 fiasco, and spent like drunken white guys on the G20 and G8? Who has been less accountable, for that matter, on issues of public policy than Stephen Harper? Isn’t that why he was found in contempt of Parliament?
For me, my correspondent fails to make his case. Nowhere in his words is there any sense of Canada’s treaty obligations to aboriginal peoples. Nowhere is there a sense that the prime minister spoke duplicitously when he promised not to unilaterally amend the Indian Act.
Nowhere is it mentioned that the government of Canada violated its constitutional duty when it failed to consult with First Nations peoples before jamming through omnibus legislation that clearly affected indigenous rights and land title. And nowhere is it mentioned that the Harper government committed at the UN to a much better treatment of aboriginal peoples than they’ve been dispensing.
Perhaps there is some element of truth in Stephen Harper’s silence. Perhaps he just has nothing to say.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris
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