Risk of aboriginal insurgency

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/07/2010 (5770 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Shawn Atleo, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, on recalling the 1990 national emergency at Oka, Que., carefully warned Canadians that "First Nations are ever-mindful of the potential that these events could be repeated." It would be a grave mistake for Canadian leaders to dismiss his words as mere political rhetoric.

Other aboriginal leaders continue to warn Canadians that unless Canada’s relations with its young, fast-growing aboriginal community are not addressed effectively and soon, then a nationwide challenge — armed or unarmed — to Canada’s sovereignty awaits us. How might such an insurgency unfold and could it succeed?

Theory suggests that where significant grievances affect a large segment of a society these so-called root causes can provide the fuel for a rebellion. Recent research suggests that root causes alone do not sufficiently explain why insurgencies erupt. The better question is: "What makes insurgencies feasible?"

Insurgencies become feasible in circumstances where a high proportion of an aggrieved population is composed of young men (15 to 34 years of age) and a nation’s economy depends on exports (meaning more than 20 per cent of GDP) that must travel through a large, rugged, under-populated and difficult-to-defend territory. In these circumstances the "feasibility of an insurgency is almost inevitable." All that is required to set the root-cause fuel ablaze is a serious security incident — Oka times 10; an overreaction by police as at Burnt Church in 2001; or the arrival in Canada’s aboriginal community of a fiery, national leader to rally "the people in a righteous campaign against the oppressor government" — a reincarnated Louis Riel, perhaps.

 

Canada’s aboriginal people live in a swamp of root causes. According to the Canada Census of 2006, 1.7 million Canadians claim to be aboriginal. Of this total about 750,000 are First Nations and of these about 50 per cent live on one of 2,700 reserves. It is Canada’s fastest growing demography, increasing by 45 per cent in the last six years, six times faster than the non-aboriginal population. It is also Canada’s youngest population — half the people are under 24 years of age and 34 per cent of aboriginal children are younger than 14 years. The median age for Canada’s non-aboriginal population is 40.

Fewer than 24 per cent of these young people graduate from high school and a large percentage simply do not go to high school. The unemployment rate for young people on reserves runs at over 40 per cent.

More than 40 per cent of houses on reserves require "major repairs" and a high percentage are habitated, uninhabitable "crowded dwellings" — meaning in reality more than 10 people live in a simple three-bedroom building with primitive facilities.

No one needs a military education to understand that Canada’s sovereignty is vulnerable because its economy is vulnerable and its economy is vulnerable because its resource-based production and transportation infrastructure (accounting for approximately 20 per cent of Canada’s GDP) is undefended and probably indefensible.

Many reserves in the West and in northwestern Ontario sit astride or adjacent to the east-west rail and road lines of communications. On the Prairies, thousands of kilometres of natural gas and oil pipelines carry the oil, petroleum and natural gas that fuels most of the industry in eastern Canada and a good deal of the economy of the midwestern United States and approximately 25 per cent of California’s economy. They are all unprotected. The James Bay power-generation facilities in Quebec are particularly vulnerable — insecure hydro-electric transmission lines run from Radisson south for nearly 1,000 kilometres to drive much of Quebec’s and America’s Atlantic seaboard economies.

There are few ways to redress these vulnerabilities or to substitute other things to diminish the harmful economic consequences of disruptions to critical resource networks. There are today nowhere near the police and military resources needed to protect all the potential infrastructure targets continuously. Canada’s "national critical infrastructure" policies are still a work-in-progress.

Most of Canada’s aboriginal people are reasonable, peaceful individuals as Chief Atleo explains and so Canadian and aboriginal leaders need not worry about "most of Canada’s aboriginal people." They do, however, need to worry about the growing number of aggrieved, angry, young ‘warrior-aged’ population that has in their own estimation reasons to think that a rebellion would cause Canada to redress their grievances.

A renegade aboriginal insurgency strategy is easy to imagine. We have seen elements of it in roadblocks on Highway 401 and barricades on the major railways near Kingston; major confrontations in Caledonia, Ont.; in the retreat by the Canadian Border Services at the Canada-U.S. border near Cornwall; and in looming law-and-order challenges to the federal, Quebec and Ontario governments on reserves in their regions. We have, indeed, taught radical leaders that these tactics work.

An easily assembled nationwide blockage of transportation and resource infrastructures that pass through or near aboriginal lands would spark a national crisis. Police attempts to overthrow them might easily lead to an armed confrontation as it did at Oka. If these events continued long enough and widely enough so as to endanger the American economy — and that threshold would be reached in weeks not months — then what might result? How would the president of the United States react to an attack from Canada on America’s vital national interests?

Other native leaders before Shawn Atleo, including past national chief Phil Fontaine, in May 2009 warned: "We have a right to be frustrated, concerned, angry — anger that’s growing…" in the First Nation community.

In December 2009, the chiefs of the Assembly of First Nations in Ottawa again warned Chuck Strahl, minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, (that) "the frustration level is mounting and people feel that this government has no desire to work with them… We told the minister that he will have to work with the people… (or) they will do it. There will be roadblocks, and other things."

In April 2008, Senator Romeo Dallaire, a member of the Senate Committee on Aboriginal People, asked then prime minister Paul Martin: "Is the internal security risk rising as the (aboriginal) youth see themselves more and more disenfranchised? In fact, if they ever coalesced, could they not bring this country to a standstill?"

To which Martin replied: "My answer, and the only one we all have, is we would hope not."

 

Former Winnipegger Douglas Bland is the chair of the defence management studies program at the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University. In March 2010 he released (Blue Butterfly Books.ca) his new book, Uprising, the depiction of a future aboriginal insurgency in Canada.