If the prime minister had really wanted to talk to native leaders, he wouldn’t have sent Enbridge executives to assume Ottawa’s constitutional role of consulting about pipelines — a company’s whose reputation for stewardship of the environment is well known. Nor would Stephen Harper have tried a second time to delegate his responsibilities to Vancouver lawyer Doug Eyford, setting him the impossible task of trying again after his corporate envoys failed to buy off the chiefs with a boatload of beads and baloney. Here’s the skinny. If the PM really wanted to negotiate, he would have invested his own political capital. He would have held a face-to-face meeting with native leaders. As the Syria crisis has shown, proxies are for pussies: Real leaders take off their shirts and wade in, right Vlad? Since Stephen Harper has never travelled to B.C. to meet chiefs since his election in 2006, sending his men out to do it now smacks of calculating tokenism. It also betrays a certain grandiosity about the PM’s self-image. After all, he is a prime minister who only answers questions from leaders in Parliament, not those peons known as MPs. So why would he talk to the chiefs? Even the way Ottawa approached the B.C. chiefs betrays the Harper government’s emotional deficit on this file. Ceremony and respect mean a great deal in aboriginal culture. Yet they were summoned like busboys to a September 23 meeting without a peep about what was on Ottawa’s mind. If this was supposed to be a political demonstration of shock and awe, it won’t work. Would the PM attend a summit where there was no indication of what was going to be discussed and no way to be properly briefed? Would Stephen Harper summon the Chinese leadership, out of the blue, to talk oilsands without an agenda? Bottom line? Harper clearly doesn’t see Canada’s aboriginals as a third level of government, and the words “First Nations” — as Preston Manning observed — don’t mean much to him. Words generally don’t.
Posted on: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 13:39:02 +0000