This spring, New Brunswick took down road signs leading to Squaw Cap, a tiny town near the Quebec border whose name, like that of a nearby mountain, contains an offensive slur. At some point this summer, the hamlet and mountain will be renamed.
This is a welcome (and long overdue) step in the process that falls under the broad sweep of reconciliation – the act of coming to terms with Canada’s past and continuing discrimination against Indigenous peoples, and redressing related harms.
It’s a word that leapt into the public consciousness with the release of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015. The commission had spent seven years investigating the lasting damage that residential schools inflicted on thousands of Indigenous people, and recommended 94 calls to action.
Changing derogatory place names was not one of the calls to action. But it is done in the same spirit, although far too slowly. The fact is that it took the New Brunswick government years to respond to complaints about the names. And even now it says it will not remove the word from five other similar place names until it sees how the process of changing the first two goes.
These things take time, is the message from the provincial government. And sometimes that’s true.
But here’s the thing about governments: They can move slowly and they can move quickly, depending on what suits their agendas. And when it comes to reconciliation, it seems they’re all too happy to coast – until their interests are in play.
You can see this at the federal level. From 2015 to 2019, the Trudeau Liberals implemented four calls to action involving the federal government, based on a tally kept by the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led research and education centre in Toronto.
In 2020, the Liberals adopted none. And then, after the May, 2021, discovery of 200 potential unmarked graves on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, and with an eye to calling a snap election that summer, the Trudeau government immediately implemented three low-hanging calls to action: the creation of an Indigenous languages commissioner; the creation of an annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation; and the addition of a reference to Indigenous treaties in the country’s oath of citizenship. It was “more action on the calls to action in three weeks than the last three years,” the Yellowhead Institute pointed out in a report in late 2021.
Since then, there have been more acts of reconciliation by various parties. One occurred in March, when the Pope renounced the Doctrine of Discovery and related papal bulls that were used to legitimize the colonial-era seizure of Indigenous lands.
Other things will take time. In 2021, Ottawa adopted a law obliging the federal government to ensure its laws are consistent with the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, but the implementation of that reform has barely begun and will require years to complete.
In 2019, Ottawa passed Bill C-92, which gives First Nations, Inuit and Métis people the self-governing right to manage child and family services. But Quebec is challenging the law on constitutional grounds at the Supreme Court of Canada, with a decision expected this year.
In the meantime, little progress has been made on other issues of real substance, in particular the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in prisons, and the persistent gap between Indigenous peoples and the general population when it comes to education outcomes, infant mortality, suicide, mental health, addiction, chronic diseases and injury.
When a government slow-walks the elimination of racist place names or makes a show of implementing painless calls to action in an election year, it reinforces a message to the public that reconciliation isn’t a serious matter.
Reconciliation doesn’t mean governments have to abandon legitimate processes, such as a province’s right to challenge laws in court or the need to consult the public on some issues, in order to demonstrate their conviction.
But it does mean they need to move quickly on issues that will genuinely help Indigenous people start to enjoy the same living standards and freedom from discrimination that others do. Anything short of that reduces reconciliation to political theatre.