Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

  I mention this, of course, because the loyalty of Madame Jean and her husband later became an issue, as a result of separatist mischief. Aghast that members of the creative community in Montreal would take such a prominent symbolic role as Canadians, hard-line separatists tried to shatter the enthusiasm Madame Jean’s appointment had received in both Quebec and the rest of Canada. Instead of recognizing this for what it was — a backhanded tribute from the most determined enemies of Canada — some of the unreconstructed Reformers in the Conservative caucus, such as Jason Kenney, chimed in on cue to question the appointment, which was precisely what the separatists wanted. Fortunately, when I spoke to Stephen Harper and told him that I was completely convinced of her love for Canada, and that the frustration of the separatists proved how important a role model she could be in Quebec for a stronger Canada, he simply said, “That’s all I want to hear.”

  In the end we waited out the furore and in time, it became clear that the allegations against Madame Jean’s loyalty, and that of her husband, were unfounded. As the public got to know her, her charm and compassion came through. Her appointment was one of the most important and successful that I made as prime minister.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Keeping Faith

  Soon after I stepped down as leader of the Liberal Party, I began working to fulfill a wish I had put on hold for more than forty years — trying to make a personal difference to the lives of those who need help most: people in Africa and our Aboriginal peoples here at home. I’ll talk about this in greater detail later, but the experience of working in these two areas simultaneously has revealed a sad reality. While Canadians continue to have their hearts and consciences tugged by the plight of people in the Third World abroad, the same is not true of those living in Third World conditions here at home. Somehow, we have reached a point of despair, or at least a sense of futility with the problems that confront the First Nations. In our comfort, we would prefer to forget these people, who are our fellow citizens and who have had so much taken away from them to allow us to live our prosperous lives in what we like to think of as the best country in the world. Part of it boils down to apathy. Part of it boils down to a moral blindness. The world may have awakened to the weight of its collective responsibility to those who live in poverty abroad, but if Canadians don’t care about their fellow citizens who happen to be of Aboriginal descent, who will?

  It is important to understand that Aboriginal Canadians do not want handouts. What they want is that we work with them to reverse the legacy of colonial governments that has carried into this day — a heritage that said, “Assimilation is your only way out, and everything we do to achieve that end is justified.”

  Like a lot of urban Canadian kids growing up in central Canada, I did not have much direct contact with native people in my early years. The places I knew — Windsor, Colchester, Ottawa, and Pembroke — had small native communities, if any at all. My father had a close friend, Buster Ribberdy, who was Métis. He was probably the first Aboriginal person I ever met. I also used to go fishing with my dad occasionally at Walpole Island, not far from Windsor, where some of the guides were Indian. None of this prepared me for what I saw when I went to work on the Mid-Canada Line one summer near Winisk on Hudson Bay. We lived in a workers’ camp, but there was a Cree community nearby. For the first time, I saw the shocking conditions typical of reserves. I began to understand that there was another set of Canadians who lived in an utterly different world, in which the comforts we considered normal and the opportunities we saw as a birthright did not exist and perhaps could not even be imagined. I learned that it is one thing to read about a problem but quite another to come face to face with it.

  Later, while still a teenager, I happened to be on a station stop at the old CP train station in Winnipeg’s North End. Someone told me I shouldn’t walk around the area, so of course I did exactly that. I saw with my own eyes that the appalling divide between native people and the rest of us was not just a question of the state of our reserves. This world apart — this Third World slum — existed in the heart of a major Canadian city, in which non-Aboriginal peoples went about their lives a short walk away, unperturbed and perhaps even wilfully unaware.

  Subsequently when I entered the business world I developed an interest in Aboriginal entrepreneurship. I invested in a group trying to support Aboriginal business and I backed a bid to create a local Mohawk television station being mounted by a young entrepreneur on the Kanesatake reserve near Montreal. In the end, it couldn’t get the requisite licence. Perhaps the most lasting consequence of these efforts was when my friend Murray Koffler of Shopper’s Drug Mart fame asked me to become a founding director of what has evolved into the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business. This was Murray’s vision and I was but a bit player, but it’s a bit I’m very proud of.

  Later on, when I entered political life, I was exposed to Aboriginal issues from a very different perspective. The Liberal Party has long attracted many of the most able and politically active people from the native community, and this is how I met some exceptional leaders, including Donnie Ross, Mark Leclair, and Jim Sinclair, a non-status Indian from Saskatchewan. Jim went to court to have people such as himself represented at constitutional negotiations under Pierre Trudeau and reached an out-of-court settlement that became an important milestone for a growing community that was too easy to overlook.

  It was also in these early political years that I met two very influential Métis leaders from Manitoba: Dave Chartrand, now the president of the Manitoba Métis Federation, and Phil Fontaine. Phil would eventually become national chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN). I met Phil through his cousin, Jerry Fontaine, who was for a time chief of the Sagkeeng First Nation (formerly Fort Alexander) east of Lake Winnipeg and a supporter of mine in the 1990 leadership race. At the time, Phil was grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs and I was very impressed with him from the start. I have known many First Nations leaders over the years — Ovide Mercredi, Matthew Coon Come, and George Erasmus, just to mention some of the grand chiefs of the AFN — all of them people of great passion and ability, just as there are in bands throughout the land.

  Even a brief glance at the history of our country shows how much of the civilization we have built here in the northern half of North America was erected in partnership with Aboriginal peoples. From the start, we needed native knowhow even to survive the first winters. The fur trade, which was the source of so much wealth in the early centuries, was built along well-established native trading routes and based on the work of Aboriginal trappers and traders. In the wars fought to defend Canada from the encroachments of the American Revolution and the “manifest destiny” of the United States, Aboriginal warriors were an indispensable element to our military success. We signed treaties with many First Nations because their co-operation and their lands were essential to the growth and success of our communities. And then, when our economic and military needs changed, and the peoples with whom we had contracted solemn oaths had been enfeebled by us, we simply abandoned our honour, ignored our agreements, and did what we damned well pleased. It is our national disgrace.

  Of course, it was not just about breaking our promises to native peoples. It was also about attempts to break their societies. We tried to strip them of their languages and traditions, we attacked not only their system of government but their religion. We systematically ripped children from the bosom of their families to cut them off from their heritage, and than subjected many of these children to degradation and abuse. Yet, for all the fearsome efforts we have made over the centuries, we have failed to destroy them.

  At the same time as we adopted policies calculated to dismantle their traditional societies, we were not exactly welcoming Aboriginal peoples into our own. Tommy Prince, born on a Ojibwa reserve in Manitoba, was decorated eleven times for his heroism in the Second World War, including one medal bestowed personally by King George VI. He re-enlisted for the Korean War and was de
corated several times again. But when he returned to Canada — unbelievable as it may seem — as a so-called “status Indian” he was not entitled to vote. When I was a young student, preparing for university, the rule for Aboriginals was that they had to forfeit their treaty status under the Indian Act if they wanted to pursue a university education. Incredibly, this government policy was only abandoned in 1953.

  As minister of finance, I spared Indian Affairs from the absolute cuts in the 1995 budget — alone among the departments of government. I did, however, impose a spending cap, which made things difficult for growing Aboriginal communities. In the years after that, as the government began to have greater flexibility, we also began to reinvest. For instance, in 1998, the government created the Aboriginal Healing Fund and contributed $350 million, which represented a turning point in acknowledging the profound hurt that had been caused by the residential school system, its physical and sexual abuse as well as family dislocation. I don’t think anyone could have remained unmoved by National Chief Phil Fontaine’s very obvious emotion at the time we made the announcement, springing not only from the suffering of his communities but also from his own childhood experiences.

  That being said, we had three hundred years of history to make up for and clearly a long way to go. So when I became prime minister I was not prepared to brook any delay. Initially I asked Andy Mitchell, who had a deep understanding of these issues, to be minister of Indian and northern affairs. After the 2004 election when Mitchell moved over to Agriculture (where he was required after Bob Speller’s unfortunate defeat at the polls), I asked Andy Scott to assume the portfolio.

  I had been struck by Andy’s passionate interventions as Solicitor General under Jean Chrétien, when he often argued at the cabinet table that the over-representation of Aboriginal peoples in our correctional institutions was mainly a social and economic rather than a justice issue. He was perfect for the job. He told me later that he quickly realized that he was the first Maritimer to hold the position since Joseph Howe, one of Nova Scotia’s greatest statesmen, who had fiercely opposed Confederation but later joined the federal cabinet. When a reporter asked him how he knew about all this, Andy replied, “I have a couple of files on my desk with his name on them because that’s the department of Indian Affairs: some of those files are more than a hundred years old, and still open.”

  Because Andy was going to be asked to break a lot of new ground and would need the full support of all the federal government machinery, and to make sure that I could make my presence felt wherever it was needed, I also appointed John Watson, a former senior public servant at Indian Affairs, as head of the newly created Aboriginal Affairs Secretariat in the PCO, and Jeff Copenace as special adviser in the PMO.

  Andy came at the job very much from the perspective that Aboriginal policy had to be grounded not on rules but on a relationship of respect and trust. Part of his challenge, as for any Indian Affairs minister, was that the federal government is not solely concerned with so-called status Indians living on reserve. There is a large and growing off-reserve population, and then there are the Inuit and Métis peoples, each of whom has different concerns and are affected by different laws and policies. To complicate all this further, the federal Department of Finance was always particularly wary of any financial commitment we might make to the Métis, whom they regarded as a provincial responsibility. From my point of view, I have always believed Louis Riel was a true Canadian hero, whose defence of his people continues to have relevance today. Even when I was in Finance, I had begun referring to the “Métis nation,” which my officials regarded as a threat to the federal purse.

  Indeed, from the time we came into government in 1993, Ralph Goodale argued very strongly that the federal government had a responsibility to the Métis — notwithstanding the objections at Finance. To be sure, over the years there had been moments when Ottawa had shown some concern for the Métis, but typically this interest was short-term, episodic, and inconsistent. Ralph’s view was that this was a deeply unsatisfactory half-policy. In 1997, Jean Chrétien appointed Ralph to become the federal interlocutor for Métis and non-status Indians, a responsibility that he continued to hold until I appointed him finance minister in 2004. He became convinced that the constitutional tradition that divided status Indians, to whom we had treaty and legal obligations, from the non-status Indians and Métis, to whom we didn’t, was a neat, legalistic distinction that failed to match the reality of Canadian life. Andy shared this view, as I did.

  I had carved out the residential schools issue from Andy’s responsibilities, and asked Anne McLellan to take the lead on this file. There was a huge wound there; even where the wound had partially healed, there remained a terrible scar and I wanted to deal with this in parallel to moving on the health, education, and other issues to be raised in what ultimately became known as the Kelowna Accord.

  We cannot underestimate the trauma brought on by the residential schools tragedy and its effect on successive generations. This was driven home to me again in 2008, two years after I left office, when I went to the University of Alberta to speak with graduate students at the school of native studies. Two of the students had had grandparents who attended residential schools but whose parents, unlike most, had not. I remarked that “This issue must be far removed from your own consciousness, since residential schools was not an issue for either you or your parents.” The passion of their reaction took me aback. Their grandparents had been terribly scarred by their experience in the residential schools, and that had shaped their parents, who raised them. The corrosive effect passes from generation to generation, and it has not stopped to this day.

  In May 2005, Anne McLellan appointed Frank Iacobucci, the former Supreme Court justice, to lead the discussion on residential schools, and on November 23, 2005, Anne, Irwin Cotler, the minister of justice, and Andy Scott announced an agreement in principle with the Assembly of First Nations, representatives of former students, and the involved churches. The agreement provided for a compensation payment of close to $2 billion, measures to support healing, including continuing investigation and education, which became the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and as a government we announced our intention to apologize for past abuses, which we all saw as a crucial step in the healing process.

  I am glad to say that this is one of the few areas in Aboriginal affairs in which the Conservative government had the wisdom to carry through with what we had done, although it is inexplicable that it still fails to understand that, as important as it was to apologize for yesterday’s residential schools, it is equally important to adequately fund today’s Aboriginal schools.

  In addition to his responsibilities running his department Andy was given two overriding objectives: to bring about the Northern Agreement described elsewhere, and to guide the process that would lead to a comprehensive agreement on the future of Aboriginal peoples in this country, among the federal government, provincial and territorial governments, and the Aboriginal leaders. That process began when we held a meeting of all the pertinent members of cabinet with the Aboriginal leadership of the country. It continued when the Aboriginal leadership met with me and the provincial and territorial premiers to conclude a groundbreaking agreement on Aboriginal health.

  This was all part of building a relationship of trust in preparation for what came to be called the Kelowna Accord. My goal was quite simply to redress the history of centuries of broken promises. It was clear to me that no comprehensive approach was going to succeed without the full support of native peoples themselves and their leaders.

  Andy created a series of discussion tables, including all the parties, on health, lifelong learning, housing, economic opportunities, negotiations, and accountability for results. In each of these areas we came to important conclusions, but what was equally important was how we got there. It was crucial to our success that everyone be involved in the process — Aboriginal leaders, the provinces and the territories, and our own bureaucrats.

/>   The heavy historical legacy and the scale of the current challenges facing Canada’s Aboriginal peoples are obviously inseparably intertwined, and sometimes there is a tension between them. Even the most well-intentioned and well-constructed reforms can collapse because of what may appear to be a lack of respect or sensitivity. Worse yet is to launch into a program of change without full consultation and without developing the capacity to implement the change. The trick must be to address historic grievances in a way that will promote the future prospects of young Aboriginal peoples. We shouldn’t make the same mistakes we have been making for 250 years. This is at the root of my approach. I support the inherent right to self-government. Aboriginal peoples need to be given the levers to determine their own destiny. They governed themselves for thousands of years before Europeans arrived here. What we did was bring a halt to the evolution of their systems of government. It is worth remembering that in an increasingly globalized world, most societies — both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal — seek some balance in their lives by emphasizing their traditions.

  At the same time as we worked to build trust with our Aboriginal peoples, we had a job to do with the provinces as well. The reality of the challenges we faced did not fit in the neat little boxes some would make of our Constitution. Two of the most important areas in which we have failed our Aboriginal peoples — education and health — are really handled by the provinces rather than the federal government. Yet, legally, it is Ottawa’s responsibility to ensure these services on reserve, which far too often we did badly. Moreover, many Aboriginal peoples no longer live on reserve, so they fall into provincial jurisdiction for most social services. Yet these “urban Aboriginal” peoples continued to have close personal, economic, and cultural ties with their extended families on the reserves. Many of them move back and forth between the city and the reserve several times during their lives.