Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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became a member of the advisory board of BMO Harris Bank, and the board of an obscure entity called Ideas Council. With income and honorariums from these many positions, Wallin was financially very comfortable.
She worked just as hard in charitable organizations for which she received no payment, co-chairing the National Strategy Council for the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute, and other volunteer boards such as the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the Nature Conservancy of Canada. She became a volunteer member of the Advisory Council of Breakout Educational Network, a non-profit public policy organization that I’d founded in 1995 with Manitoban Kitson Vincent.
Along the way, Wallin garnered some fourteen honorary doctorates and fifteen national and international awards, including being inducted into the Canadian Broadcasting Hall of Fame, receiving a national Visionary Award, being awarded the Toastmasters’ “Golden Gavel,” and twice being recognized by Queen Elizabeth for her public service and achievements.
If Canada had a celebrity, it was Pamela Wallin. Her work in New York had added an important international affairs component to her already impressive life. In 2007, Prime Minister Harper asked her to serve as a member of his independent advisory panel on Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, a high-level group chaired by John Manley. Their work concluded in 2008. In February that year, Pamela Wallin was inducted into the Order of Canada, our country’s highest civilian honour.
By year end, Prime Minister Harper asked Pamela Wallin if she believed in Senate reform. When she said “Yes,” he invited her to become a member of his Conservative caucus as a senator. The people of Wadena took even greater pride in seeing her name on their water tower.
Born November 11 in 1974 in the Québec town of Maniwaki, Patrick Brazeau grew up off-reserve with his father, Marcel, an Aboriginal Canadian, living over his father’s grocery store, Dépanneur Brazeau.
Originally, Maniwaki was on land that formed part of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg Reserve, where Patrick’s grandmother had been born, a full-status Algonquin Indian. Since then, the municipality had been carved out of the reserve and developed adjacent to it. When Patrick’s grandmother fell in love with a non-native and married him, she was forced off the reserve. The Indian Act stipulated that native women who married non-natives forfeited their Indian status and had to quit their reserved homeland. The policy was designed to contain Indians, not see them multiply in number. She was, to Canadian law, no longer an Indian.
In 1985, the Mulroney government amended the Indian Act to end this discrimination against Indian women. Among the many thousands touched by this reform was the Brazeau family in Maniwaki. The Indian Act change applied not only to Indian women but their families, too. Eleven years after he’d been born Algonquin, Patrick Brazeau became an Indian in law as well as in fact.
Patrick’s father did not want to move back to the reserve because he had his store in town and was conveniently settled in Maniwaki. The Kitigan Zibi reserve is large. It borders on Maniwaki at its southwest edge, is bounded along its western edge by the Eagle River, the Desert River to its north, and the Gatineau River on its east, making the heavily forested 184 square kilometers, with its many lakes and streams, the biggest Algonquin Nation in Canada, both in area and in population. Today, about half of Kitigan Zibi’s three thousand members live off the reserve, while the others enjoy a well-developed community of grocery stores and hardware markets, a gas station, elementary and secondary schools with a library accessible to all, and gift shops. The reserve’s sense of oneness is further strengthened by a local radio station, a day-care facility, the community hall, a health centre, police department, youth centre, the wildlife centre, and an educational and cultural centre.
As a young person growing up in Maniwaki, Patrick would daydream about his life and future, but in 1985 he had to confront a defining reality he faced as an Indian in Canada. He’d been an Algonquin non-status Indian living off reserve one day, and the next, because of Parliament’s change to the Indian Act, he’d become an Algonquin status Indian living off reserve. The rights he’d acquired overnight imparted a lesson in absurdity to young Patrick. Its impact would become manifest over the coming two decades, in his radical reinterpretation of established Canadian policy governing Aboriginal peoples.
Part of young Brazeau’s view resulted from the fact his theoretical upgrade in legal status meant next to nothing in real terms. The Government of Canada funded the system of reserves, and, generally speaking, chiefs within that structure along with their families and supporters were among the principal beneficiaries. Off-reserve natives like the Brazeaus, despite now gaining Indian status, were effectively excluded from this system and its financial benefits. Few spoke up for off-reserve natives, despite the fact they considerably outnumber their on-reserve counterparts. If democracy incorporated majority rule, and if fair government provided the greatest good for the greatest number, then the Indian Act system, in Patrick Brazeau’s eyes, was neither democratic nor fair.
Patrick could do nothing about the situation at the time, though, and so he simply lived his life. He became fluent in Algonquin, French, and English. Strong and athletic, he played hockey and trained in karate. After graduating from local schools, Patrick went to Ottawa and enrolled at HMCS Carleton, a unit of the Canadian Forces Naval Reserve, which each year trains about 230 sailors. Next, he completed studies in social sciences at Gatineau’s CEGEP, Heritage College. Then his desire to realign human rights, Aboriginal issues, and the outdated and dysfunctional regime imposed by the Indian Act led him to the University of Ottawa to study civil law.
In 2001, Brazeau abandoned legal studies for work with the Native Alliance of Québec, an affiliate of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, which represents native Canadians living off-reserve. He now saw a more direct way to advance Aboriginal interests, working for repeal of the Indian Act and implementing a new structure for First Nations’ governance that would be more respectful of all indigenous communities.
Working at CAP exhilarated Patrick. Other people found him clear-spoken and intelligent. His powerhouse appearance — strong face, radiator smile, athletic build, piercing blue eyes, and long black hair — also helped attract others to him, and even gave Brazeau easy extra income as a model. As an appealing spokesperson for the organization, Patrick was named vice-chief in 2005.
The congress, of which he was now a chief, represents the interests of nine provincial and territorial affiliates, whose members include more than eight hundred thousand off-reserve Indian, Inuit, and Métis people. Such a voice as CAP’s causes tensions within the Aboriginal community, however; the Assembly of First Nations, whose chiefs and band council governments speak for some 630 First Nations communities living on reserves, see themselves as the true lineal inheritors of Aboriginal rights connected to the land, and, thus, as the legitimate voice for Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Because over half of Canada’s status and non-status Indians don’t live on reserves, though, CAP says their interests are not effectively represented by the Assembly of First Nations. Many, it noted, did not choose to become dispossessed, but for generations had been driven into limbo by the Indian Act or forced to make the difficult decision of leaving their reserves to escape the poverty found there and to earn a livelihood or make a career. Moreover, because most of the $9 billion spent each year by the Government of Canada on Aboriginal programs and services goes to the reserves, CAP says this imbalanced allocation short-changes the off-reserve majority of Canadian Aboriginals. The two First Nations organizations are strong rivals.
On November 25, 2005, the Liberal government of Paul Martin, having spent a year and a-half consulting CAP, AFN, other national Aboriginal groups, and provincial and territorial governments, agreed at a meeting in Kelowna to boost funding in a big way. There would be an additional $5.1 billion over five years to improve housing, education, health services, and economic development for Aboriginal peoples.
Three days later, Prime Minister Martin’s government was defeated in the Commons and a general election called for January 23, 2006. The PM made the so-called “Kelowna Accord” a centrepiece of his campaign. It embodied stark differences between Liberal and Conservative philosophy, respectively represented by Mr. Martin and Stephen Harper, leader of the Official Opposition. The Liberals, devoted to meeting Aboriginal interests by providing for specific aching needs, believed spending more money was essential. The Conservatives, devoted to