Our Scandalous Senate. J. Patrick Boyer
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for a Canadian government with crippling annual deficits, Stephen Harper believed deeper change was needed. The Conservatives wanted to ensure that public funds already committed led to better results in the lives of First Nations peoples, and as part of that, would seek to establish financial accountability in band-council governance, along lines similar to the budget discipline required of municipal governments. The Conservatives would “support the principles and objectives” of the Kelowna Accord, said Mr. Harper, but would not commit to spend another $5.1 billion.
Stephen Harper’s senior policy adviser, American-born and American-educated political scientist Tom Flanagan, had come to believe it necessary to revamp Aboriginal governance and the reserve system. In his 2000 book entitled First Nations? Second Thoughts, the political scientist at the University of Calgary described the reserve system as “anomalous and dysfunctional.” He said, “Governments should help the reserves to run as honestly and efficiently as possible, but should not flood them with even more money.” He added that government should focus attention and money on improving the lives of the eight hundred thousand Aboriginals who live off the reserves. In this, Tom Flanagan and the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples held carbon copies of each other’s position.
On January 10, less than two weeks before voting day in the 2006 general election, Stephen Harper called for “a realignment of federal Aboriginal expenditures to include appropriate and adequate distribution of resources in order to accommodate the needs of off-reserve and non-status Indians.” Only days before balloting began, CAP endorsed the Conservatives. A letter signed by National Chief Dwight Dorey and Vice-Chief Patrick Brazeau called Mr. Harper’s position a “promising and respectful alternative to the status quo.” On election night, January 23, Conservatives gathered in a Calgary hotel, and among those present, celebrating with prime minister–elect Stephen Harper the party’s break-through victory at the polls, was Chief Dorey.
This Conservative-Congress alliance, founded on mutual agreement about a fundamental Canadian policy, meant the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples’s voice in Ottawa would now be heard more attentively than that of its rival, the Assembly of First Nations. In November 2006, the Harper government increased CAP’s annual budget from $5 million to $6.3 million, ensuring the Congress would have the resources needed for their common cause.
The Conservatives had gained strong backing from one of Canada’s main Aboriginal groups, which meant the Harper government could take fresh approaches to Aboriginal issues “without appearing to be indifferent to native suffering,” noted Ira Basen of CBC News, “or supporting the assimilationist positions advanced by Tom Flanagan.” Even though CAP had been at the Kelowna conference, added Basen, “the Accord itself was a one-page document that no one had actually signed their names to,” a fact that allowed the new government to say it was not bound by the agreement, making it easier for “Patrick Brazeau to help Stephen Harper drive a stake into it.”
In February 2006, National Chief Dwight Dorey stepped down, and Brazeau’s swift ascent continued as he was promoted to the position of acting chief. At CAP’s annual convention that November, delegates keen for a new direction formalized the move, unanimously electing Patrick Brazeau their national chief.
From this country-wide platform, Chief Brazeau accelerated his radical campaign to dismantle the Indian reserve system across Canada, abolish the Indian Act, and reconstitute the traditional Aboriginal nations.
Chief Brazeau, speaking to a parliamentary committee about the Accord in November 2006, the same month his organization received significant increased funding from the Conservative government, said that while the process for the agreement seemed to be inclusive, the reality was that “Kelowna provided false hope for grassroots people — real people, in real need — while enriching organizations and the Aboriginal elite.” The chief echoed the Conservative critique that the accord did not demand enough accountability for the billions of dollars that would flow to First Nations, nor break down how much would stay on reserves or go to natives living off reserves.
“The reserve system as we know it is broken and needs to be replaced,” Brazeau had already told Ron Corbett in a 2007 Ottawa Citizen feature article. “Billions of dollars are poured every year into that system and what do we have to show for it? Reserves that are scandals, that’s what.”
Chief Brazeau’s bold campaign to advance his message of a new day for Canada’s First Peoples incorporated filmed messages, newspaper op-ed features, radio and television interviews, speeches, work at the United Nations, and addresses to such international conferences as a Chilean gathering on problems facing “urban indigenous peoples.” Everywhere in Canada he told audiences that “anybody serious” about solving the problems on Canada’s reserves “needed to get rid of a lot of chiefs.”
The Indian Act should be replaced by “more progressive legislation,” Brazeau argued, not only to reconstitute true Indian Nations, but also “to reflect the tenets of modern-day governance.” Such reforms were needed “to end the status quo which overwhelmingly supports a system of Indian Reserves where poverty and hopelessness remain pervasive.”
In tandem with abolishing the Indian Act, Chief Brazeau advocated the amalgamation of many First Nations communities “to restore the traditional Aboriginal nations,” consolidating the 633 native communities in Canada into perhaps sixty or eighty. Why did it make sense to keep living on the scattered parcels of mostly marginal land onto which non-Aboriginals had relegated them? He envisaged how the ten Algonquin reserves in Québec and Ontario would become one, with something similar for the Cree people, the Mohawks, and other Indian nations across the land.
Upon re-establishing the traditional structure of Aboriginal societies, to help harmonize these communities among themselves and create First Nations that were no longer divided and weakened but indigenous nations of self-reliant peoples, Patrick Brazeau envisaged a far more rational and responsive allocation of the nearly $10 billion in federal funding going to Aboriginal programs and services in Canada every year. This would include substantial redirection of resources to natives living off reserve: a large, ignored, generally impoverished, and trouble-plagued component of Canadian society.
“The lion’s share of the federal government’s more than $9-billion investment in Aboriginal programs and services supports the system of Indian Act reserves,” Chief Brazeau reminded policy makers in an op-ed explanation of his program for the Ottawa Citizen. “Yet Statistics Canada census data show that 79 percent of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples live away from reserve communities.” In the article, the chief complimented Prime Minister Stephen Harper for having “committed” his Conservative government to addressing this imbalance. The chief knew his goal of fundamental reordering of Canada’s governance structure for Aboriginal peoples would require a prime minister’s full support.
The Prime Minister’s Office, tasked with developing the Conservative government’s revamped approach to First Nations, which included band council financial management and budget accountability similar to that of municipal councils across Canada, took due note of Chief Brazeau’s clearly articulated agenda. It was rare to find an Aboriginal leader with clear-eyed analysis and candid expression of views about a fundamental Canadian issue that, in political Ottawa, was a toxic topic. It was also encouraging that Chief Brazeau’s program coincided on key points with recommendations of the PM’s senior adviser, Tom Flanagan.
Right on cue, many chiefs across Canada, whose positions derive from the status quo that brash young Brazeau was vigorously challenging, responded in an orchestrated attack. Their power and income, flowing from the Indian Act and existing patterns of federal government funding, would be undermined if such radical ideas gained traction, let alone ever got implemented. Brazeau’s message was that Canada’s Aboriginal communities needed to be brought under “the tenets of modern-day governance.” Representatives of band councils and the Assembly of First Nations leadership flooded Indian and Northern Affairs Minister Jim Prentice with letters. They also began a wider campaign to derail Patrick Brazeau, knowing the easiest way to stop a message is to discredit
its messenger.
As radical and threatening as CAP’s national chief appeared, Patrick Brazeau had not come up with his plan to overcome the stagnant life for many of Canada’s Aboriginal