Theresa Spence ends her protest 13 days too late for victory

It is a testament to Bob Rae’s decency that he chose to take up the cudgel of diplomacy, so to speak, to help bring about a more-or-less graceful end to Chief Theresa Spence’s six-week broth fast. No amount of sermonizing and back-patting, however, can obscure that Spence and her more radical supporters in the Assembly of First Nations have in the past thirteen days, after initially bringing the aboriginal cause a great deal of good, done it a great deal of harm.

Spence ends her fast on Victoria Island largely discredited as a national political force, not because of any perceived ill intent on her part, but because she lost the thread in a muddle of often-times contradictory, poorly conceived demands, and failed to see the superb opportunity for declaring victory, gift-wrapped and handed to her with a flourish by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on January 11. With the thread of a logical objective went public support. In politics – any politics, anywhere – inconstancy is lethal.

The movement Spence briefly galvanized and brought to national attention, Idle No More, may yet recover – but not without a sharp change in its methods, structure and aims. Failing this, it is bound for the same historical dustbin as the Occupy movement. And the Harper government will continue rolling out piecemeal reforms to the Indian Act and First Nations governance as it has been for the past seven years, in fits and starts.

Let’s examine, first, the 13-point declaration endorsed Thursday by Spence, the AFN, the Liberal and New Democrat caucuses (though again, curiously enough, with Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair off doing his laundry, or some other pressing chore.) Set next to anything else that has emerged from Spence’s camp since the fractious conclave in Ottawa two weeks ago, this declaration was a marvel of clarity and pragmatism.

For starters, it tacitly abandons the insistence that Governor General David Johnston, despite the past couple of centuries of history and precedent and law and the reality of constitutional monarchies in Britain and Canada, is somehow the correct executor of practical resolutions to unresolved treaty issues.

The declaration demands a meeting between “The Crown, federal governments, provincial governments and all First Nations to discuss the treaty relationship, as well as for non-treaty area relationship.” There is no mention of the Governor General or Queen Elizabeth II, per se. The Crown in this construct may therefore be taken, for practical purposes, as synonymous with the government of Canada. That is certainly how the Harper government will choose to interpret it.

Second, the declaration calls for consultation with respect to the government’s two 2012 omnibus bills, C-38 and C-45, “to ensure [they are] consistent with Section 35 of the Constitution Act (1982),” in other words, in accordance with aboriginal and treaty rights. As demands go that is considerably more realistic, and therefore more credible, than a call to repeal the budget bills, which would have required the Harper government essentially to overthrow itself.

As well, the declaration calls for a “dedicated cabinet committee and secretariat within the Privy Council office with specific responsibility for the First Nation Crown relationship to ensure implementation.” This is an excellent idea and also something the Conservatives, given their genuine interest in finding a way forward on resource revenue sharing, might deliver.

Finally, the declaration implicitly acknowledges there is no quick fix. In the preamble the authors cite five years as a long-term timetable. Such a timeline, with measurable targets in areas such as housing, education, water quality, self-government agreements and land-claim resolution, is both reasonable and achievable, given effort on all sides.

That said, there’s an underlying obstacle now, partially acknowledged at yesterday’s news conference in Ottawa. Any change from the status quo requires a concerted application of political will. Political will, in a democracy, is fed by popular sentiment. And popular sentiment, thanks to a hunger strike that lasted 13 days too long, and a smattering of illegal road, bridge and rail blockades, is now very much a mixed bag.

This, then, is the challenge facing “the movement”: How to maintain pressure on the Harper government, without resorting to tactics that will exacerbate or incite a destructive popular backlash. There is a way, it seems to me; legal, peaceful demonstrations, systematic engagement and persuasion through the media, combined with the formation of a national political coalition with common principles and leadership, perhaps built initially around the 13 points, but leading inexorably towards eventual abolition of the Indian Act.

Such an effort would require time and much painstaking work. It would lack the ersatz punch of a vow to die for the cause, or a blockade on Highway 401. Is any leader in Canada, except for Bob Rae of course, prepared to do that difficult work? This is the sad irony: After six weeks of hearing about Chief Spence and her fish broth, we still don’t know.