Harper shrewdly dodges vision thing

OTTAWA -- Ovide Mercredi didn't like the word "incremental." When it came his turn to speak at Tuesday's aboriginal conference in Ottawa, the former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations tartly noted that "to us, the answer is not about incremental change."

It was a not-so-subtle dig at Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who just a few minutes earlier had offered precisely that. After ruling out a holus-bolus scrapping of the Indian Act, Harper promised "creative ways, collaborative ways, ways that involve consultation between our government, the provinces, and First Nations leadership and communities... ways that provide options within the (Indian) Act, or outside of it, for practical, incremental and real change."

Phew. A mouthful. But it encapsulates in a few short lines the Harper government's strategy for addressing the endemic misery and suffering engendered by the reserve system. Here's a bet: Harper will get hammered in the days to come by those who believe he should have outlined a grand vision, or at least a few bold measures. But the PM may be crazy like a fox here.

Does the Indian Act have to go? Absolutely. This relic of 1876 (though it has undergone "updates" since the original) is unabashedly, explicitly racist. It is an abomination, in fact. And no one can credibly deny that the system it underpins perpetuates misery. Consider the numbers, all of which have been reported before, by me among others. They bear repeating.

In 2000, the rate of aboriginal mortality was twice that among non-aboriginals. In 2004, aboriginal Canadians were twice as likely as non-natives to be a repeat victim of crime and nearly four times as likely to be the victim of spousal violence. Even within the aboriginal population there is great disparity in quality of life, based on whether an individual lives on reserve or off. In 2004, violent crimes reported by aboriginals living off-reserve registered at 953 per 100,000. For residents of reserves the number was nearly seven times higher, a staggering 7,108 per 100,000 people.

The current national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn Atleo, has made no secret of his revulsion for the Indian Act and for the system in general. Indeed last summer he called for the act to be abolished, along with the federal department of Aboriginal Affairs.

So, why would Harper not have been bolder?

In avoiding the grand gesture, in my view, Harper dodged a bullet. For had he made a sweeping pledge to abolish the Indian Act, rather than work within and around it as he did, he'd have roused suspicion and anger from at least some band chiefs, of whom there are about 600 across Canada (about 400 attended the meeting in Ottawa). They would have charged that he intended to reboot Jean Chrétien's White Paper of 1969.

The White Paper, in keeping with Pierre Trudeau's Just Society, proposed that the Indian Act and the reserves be done away with so that all Canadians could be equal under the law. It was shelved due to opposition from the chiefs. The White Paper is remembered and reviled by many aboriginal leaders today as having been assimilationist and paternalistic. It's one thing for Atleo to say the Indian Act should be scrapped. It would be viewed as another entirely, within the aboriginal community, for Harper to do so.

Likewise, Harper avoided the charged topic of private property. He touched a lot on economics ("it is therefore in all of our interests to see aboriginal people educated, skilled and employed,") and did so in expressly conservative terms ("our goal is self-sufficient citizens and self-governing communities.") But he dodged the biggest economic issue of all, which is that most aboriginals living on-reserve are deprived of the Canadian middle class's basic tool for creating wealth -- building equity in a home.

Here again, Harper was probably wise to leave this alone, for now -- because the pressure for greater access to private property is already bubbling up from within the native community, with reformers such as Chief Manny Jules, chief commissioner of the First Nations Tax Commission, leading the way. Had Harper pushed for it from his bully pulpit as prime minister, he would simply have coalesced opposition.

What's emerging is an oddly Canadian-libertarian approach to social reform: Put the principals in a room, listen, establish some basic ground rules (on the health-care file the rules were budgetary), then back off and let them find their own solutions. At the very least it avoids the suggestion that Ottawa is being a bully.

If it works in native affairs, even modestly, the potential political payoff for Harper is significant. For starters, it would establish that he has objectives that extend beyond minding the store. And it would raise his stock in centrist, vote-rich Ontario -- still the key to his winning a second majority.

Michael Den Tandt is a

Postmedia News columnist.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 25, 2012 A10