With the re-election of Shawn Atleo as the head of the Assembly of First Nations, the AFN has recognized – barely – that continual protests and complaints are not likely to improve conditions for Canada’s aboriginal peoples. (I say barely, because it was a narrow win for Atleo.)
Still, despite his win, Atleo had plenty of critics. One defeated candidate, Pam Palmater, said Atleo sold his soul to the Devil.
Satan, in the mind of Ms. Palmater, equates with the federal Conservative government in general, if not Prime Minister Stephen Harper in particular. This is because of how Atleo and the prime minister co-operated to try to move the aboriginal issue into the economic development file and away from the culture-of-protest file.
Protests and anti-capitalism won’t pay the bills, any more than the Occupy protesters last year could do anything positive while they were busy squatting.
But beyond comparisons to Occupy, maybe the more apt illustration for Canada’s native chiefs to ponder is Quebec. A semi-permanent protest culture, based on the separatist cause, has long existed there.
Too many Quebecers have engaged in a quasi-protest culture by dancing with a separation referendum every two decades. Then, between referendums, their politicians respond to the sovereigntist movement by protesting this or that action by the feds or some imagined slight from English Canada.
And the result? Wealth creators fled the province. That action was followed by a delusion in Quebec, that “sovereignty” would solve all that ails Quebec. All of the nonsense has added up to a much poorer province.
Instead of looking inward and asking where Quebec messed up, Quebec’s sovereigntists chose to ignore homegrown Quebec problems in favour of blaming the outside world.
Thus the proud province of Jacques Cartier and Wilfrid Laurier, once the commercial hub of North America’s northeast, has been reduced to a simpering, subsidized, whining shadow of its former self.
But if the tendency of (some) Quebecois to raise the drawbridge, proclaim sovereignty and yet demand cash from the rest of Canada sounds familiar, that’s because the same game is also played by more than few aboriginal leaders.
It’s not a healthy way to run a community and it harms aboriginals on reserve more than anyone else. This blame-the-world tack, the lack of attention to important things – economic development, proper governance and accountability – is why, for example, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) routinely receives brown envelopes from people on reserves revealing the latest high-paid native leader. Because they’re about the only ones left who benefit from the current system.
Several weeks back, the CTF received information on the CEO of Innu Development Limited Partnership, a sort of Crown corporation operated and owned by the Sheshatshiu and Mushuau First Nations in Newfoundland and Labrador. The recently departed CEO was paid $658,847 last year (tax-free) and $348,427 the previous year (tax-free).
The problem that afflicts Canada’s native people has little to do with whether this or that AFN grand chief talks nice or nasty to the prime minister. It’s more basic: many of the problems on Canada’s reserves result from running those collectives as collectives and/or for the almost sole benefit of leaders and those that support them on reserve. Here’s the additional conundrum: too many of those native chiefs benefit from the status quo. •
