monovillage
Diamond Member
- Jul 3, 2008
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Just like in the States you get different stories, it makes some people wonder which is the more accurate one.
http://www.canada.com/opinion/columnists/obstructionists+will+stop+nothing/7829377/story.html
http://www.canada.com/opinion/columnists/obstructionists+will+stop+nothing/7829377/story.html
AFN obstructionists will stop at nothing
By Terry Glavin, Ottawa Citizen January 16, 2013
Let’s say that somehow, the eruption we’ve all agreed to call Idle No More results in a historic breakthrough between Ottawa and Canada’s diverse and deeply troubled First Nations.
Let’s say the covenant recognizes and affirms aboriginal and treaty rights and contains a specific, collaborative action plan to deal with the urgent challenges of aboriginal childhood education, economic development, First Nations governance and accountability. Plus it comes with a startup $275 million just to be sure the rubber hits the road. And it’s announced at a historic gathering in Ottawa with the senior First Nations chiefs, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and even Governor-General David Johnston.
Now let’s say along comes an obstructionist “movement” that masquerades as militant but is really a minority faction of eccentric and reactionary Indian band chiefs who are hopelessly devoted to the status quo. They set out to methodically undermine the agreement. They hijack the work plan. Within a year they’ve pretty well sabotaged the whole thing.
You would not know it for all the pageantry and the rhetoric about genocide and treaties and insurrection, but that’s just one untold story of Idle No More so far. There was such an agreement. It was called the Joint Action Plan, dated June 9, 2011. It was systematically derailed, piece by piece, and its saboteurs are now among the loudest and most theatrical characters in the Idle No More drama.
It’s what British Columbia regional chief Jody Wilson-Raybould was talking about when she told the CBC last Sunday: “No one should use those movements as political opportunities to play power politics within the AFN.” But the opportunities have been taken, the power politics have been played, and for all the unhinged activist denunciations of the ruling Conservatives, it is the Assembly of First Nations that has been nearly riven asunder by all this.
It is not our sinister genius of a prime minister who’s in sick bay on doctor’s orders this week (pollster Ipsos-Reid reported Tuesday that the prime minister’s approval ratings are just fine). It’s Shawn Atleo, the visionary 46-year-old AFN national chief and co-author of the 2011 Joint Action Plan. Chief Atleo is expected to be off work pulling knives out of his back for perhaps two weeks.
This is not to traduce those four Saskatoon women whose earnest if unhelpfully paranoid reading of the 457-page parliamentary indignity packaged as Bill C-45 set off the Idle No More flash mobs in the first place. And great tribute is owed those thousands of aboriginal people who have marched in the snow, jingle danced at the mall and paraded down Main Street.
But to regard every harmless sidewalk gathering of drummers and singers as somehow ominously newsworthy is tolerable only until actual “news” occurs and it isn’t even noticed. Like last Sunday, when Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan unveiled a $330.8-million investment in water and sewer systems in First Nations communities across the country, along with a long-term strategy to fix the drinking-water mess that afflicts so many Indian reserves.