Former prime minister Brian Mulroney, in Toronto, on Nov. 5, 2015.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Russ Diabo is a member of the Mohawk Nation at Kahnawake, and a First Nations policy analyst.
There will likely be few accolades offered by Indigenous people at the coming funeral for former prime minister Brian Mulroney. While his government’s tortuous dealings with Indigenous peoples ended with moves toward conciliation – albeit ones that remain unfulfilled – they began with disregard and duplicity. And they will forever be seared with the image of soldiers confronting an Indigenous community for the sake of a golf course.
Mr. Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives won a majority government in 1984, just as Canada was grappling with the constitutional status and the meaning of self-government of Aboriginal peoples. In the Constitution created two years before, Section 35 “recognized and affirmed the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of aboriginal peoples,” while Section 37 mandated four constitutional conferences between first ministers and the leaders of the four national Aboriginal organizations to identify and define these rights. The first two conferences were held in 1983 and 1984; Mr. Mulroney would chair the ones in 1985 and 1987.
The talks were contentious. In 1983, a special House committee on Indian self-government recommended amending the Constitution to recognize First Nations self-government as a distinct order of government with defined jurisdiction. Yet, Crown representatives took an adversarial approach during the conferences, asserting that Section 35 rights were an “empty box” until filled by negotiated agreements. The four national Aboriginal organizations countered that the “box” had always been full, and that self-government was an inherent right that the Crown needed to recognize before negotiations could proceed.
What’s more, shortly after the 1985 talks, a leaked cabinet document revealed a plan that a federal official nicknamed the “Buffalo Jump of the 1980s,” a reference to a practice of herding unsuspecting buffalo over a cliff to their deaths. It contained recommendations to Mr. Mulroney’s cabinet from the Nielsen Task Force on Indian and Native Programs, and contradicted statements the prime minister had made in support of Native self-government earlier that month.
The “Buffalo Jump” report proposed a “management approach” for First Nations policy and programs with the goal of limiting and eventually terminating federal trust obligations, as well as a reduction of federal expenditures for First Nations and a prohibition on deficit financing. First Nations condemned these plans to ignore the government’s constitutional obligations, particularly for the most impoverished communities in Canada.
Around the same time, the Mulroney government began promoting a legislated municipal model of self-government, culminating in 1986 with a community-based self-government policy championed by David Crombie, then the minister of Indian Affairs. Many Aboriginal leaders viewed this as a strategy to undermine the constitutional process that was under way, and a unilateral denial of Aboriginal self-government as a distinct order of government.
Shortly after the 1987 First Ministers’ Conference ended without a resolution to the question of whether self-government was a delegated or inherent right, the details of the Meech Lake accord was released, revealing that Ottawa had been meeting with the Quebec government to recognize the province’s “distinct society” status.
In 1989, the Mulroney government announced plans to continue to ignore its obligations by cutting and capping the First Nations Post-Secondary Student Assistance Program. This sparked a hunger strike among students from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., setting off countrywide protests and eventually forcing a retreat on the cuts.
The relationship got even more confrontational from there. Meech Lake required unanimous consent by the 10 provinces, but in June, 1990, Elijah Harper, a Cree MLA in Manitoba, stopped the constitutional amendment from passing in the province by the deadline. Then, weeks later, a Sûreté du Québec tactical unit armed with tear gas and automatic weapons stormed a peaceful Mohawk blockade of men, women and children opposing the expansion of a golf course on their land at the Quebec village of Oka. This action prompted a gunfight between the Quebec police and the Mohawk people, leading to a 78-day standoff that inspired national support actions by First Nations across Canada. In response, Mr. Mulroney deployed the army.
When Parliament resumed in September, 1990, Mr. Mulroney announced his “Four Pillars of Native Policy”: accelerating settlement of land claims; improving economic and social conditions on Reserves; strengthening relationships between Aboriginal peoples and governments; and examining the concerns of Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples’ in contemporary Canadian life (which led to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples).
In 1992, Mr. Mulroney tried to include Aboriginal self-government in the Charlottetown accord, but the accord failed in a national referendum, leaving the issue of self-government unresolved to this day.
The former prime minister’s legacy endures, even after his death. His approach of using funding levers to coerce Indigenous communities persists in modern Ottawa, and his response to Oka presaged the use of militarized police to enforce non-Indigenous claims at Indigenous peoples’ expense. But for Indigenous people, he threw fuel on fires of resistance that also endure today, as the debate in Canada now turns to interpreting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
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