Image: Nova Scotia lobster boats. Via NSPaul, Wikimedia Commons.
Written by Inroads Contributors Ian Peach and David Perley
The year 2021 was marked by conflict between the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqi (formerly commonly known as Maliseet) lobster fishers in the Maritime provinces, provoked by DFO’s failure to respect treaty rights. Under the 18th-century Peace and Friendship Treaties between the Wabanaki Confederacy – which includes the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqi nations – and the British Crown, those nations have a treaty right to fish “as usual” or “as formerly.” The Wabanaki Confederacy agreed to share the use and “fruits” of their lands with the British, but not to transfer control or ownership. In summary, DFO persists in claiming the right to unilaterally regulate a fishery that does not belong to the federal Crown. The department needs to sit down with Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqi fishers and negotiate a comanagement system, based on a mutual commitment to sharing.
On March 3, 2021, Bernadette Jordan, then Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, announced that her department would work with Wabanaki communities to develop Moderate Livelihood Fishing Plans. Jordan promised to “license activities under these fishing plans, opening up the ability for First Nation harvesters to fish and sell their catch, and the opportunity to earn a moderate livelihood.” But she also announced that a key element of these fishing plans would be that the Indigenous fishery would have to operate within the commercial fishing season. Her justification was that this would help ensure “that fish species are harvested sustainably and maintain orderly, predictable, and well-managed fisheries.”¹ Under the treaties, this was not up to DFO to decide.
Perry Bellegarde, at the time Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief, wrote to Prime Minister Trudeau two days after the Minister’s announcement, demanding that the federal government restart negotiations with the Nova Scotia Mi’kmaw. He described Jordan as having “badly mismanaged” the matter because, instead of consulting meaningfully with the Mi’kmaw, she was trying to impose a policy on them. He also called out DFO’s plan to increase federal enforcement of this policy as “overtly hostile actions,” and contrasted this policy with the federal government’s public commitments to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.²
Mike Sack, Chief of Sipekne’katik First Nation, a Mi’kmaw First Nation in Nova Scotia, said that his community’s fishery would continue to operate outside DFO seasons, and he urged all Mi’kmaw First Nations to reject the federal position.³ PEI Mi’kmaw chiefs also denounced the federal government’s plan.⁴ PEI Senator Brian Francis commented that the federal position “will not reduce the potential for hostility or even violence against the Mi’kmaq but rather increase the surveillance and policing of our fishers and communities … I am left deeply troubled and concerned that the Mi’kmaq and/or other First Nations will be forced to once again resort to the courts to ensure our rights are honoured. That, to me, is not how we achieve real reconciliation.”⁵
Senators Francis and Dan Christmas, along with Liberal MP Jaime Battiste, had earlier recommended that DFO create an Atlantic First Nations Fishing Authority to protect the treaty rights of Atlantic First Nations. Minister Jordan had indicated that she was open to exploring the idea. But the March announcement showed that this openness had given way to DFO’s traditional culture of unilateralism.
In early August, Canadian Press reported that several Mi’kmaq-owned lobster boats were cut loose from their moorings at a Nova Scotia wharf and their catch taken. Chief Sack alleged that the boats were cut loose to damage the Mi’kmaq’s property and intimidate their fishers: “This is unfortunately what we have to deal with, harassment and property damage with no recourse or substantive protection to safeguard our people.”⁶ Later that month, DFO officials arrested Chief Sack, seized his lobster traps and detained him for 45 minutes. The reason for the arrest was the decision of the Sipekne’katik to expand their self-regulated “treaty fishery,” which would begin before the non-Indigenous lobster fishing season opened.⁷
Chief Sack was undeterred in response to his detention. He said that his First Nation would operate under the guidelines of its own fisheries management plan, based on sound conservation principles. Minister Jordan called the “unauthorized” First Nations fishery “concerning” and declared that DFO would enforce the federal Fisheries Act. Chief Sack retorted, “It’s unfortunate they come in, push their weight around and do what they want and aren’t held accountable. For me, it’s systemic racism.”⁸
Wolastoqi chiefs in New Brunswick have repeatedly decried harassment and aggressive intimidation of First Nations fishers by DFO conservation officers, such as their seizure in September 2021 of a small boat owned by members of the St. Mary’s First Nation. The chiefs said conservation officers have stated that “their instructions are to focus on Indigenous fishers.”⁹
Back to the treaties
To really understand the rules that are meant to govern resource management on the territories of the member nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy,¹⁰ one should not begin with what the Supreme Court of Canada has said about treaties but with the Peace and Friendship Treaties themselves. In R. v. Sparrow, the Court invented the idea that the Crown could interfere with an Aboriginal right to fish without Indigenous consent. In R. v. Marshall, the Court invented the idea that Indigenous commercial fishers are limited to earning a “moderate livelihood.”¹¹
But in the Peace and Friendship Treaties, the British made a commitment to allow the nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy to fish “as usual”: in other words, to fish and manage the fishery for the benefit of the people of the nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy as they had always done prior to contact. The limitations on the rights of Indigenous peoples that the Supreme Court of Canada created in Sparrow, Marshall and other cases are not consistent with the terms of the treaties agreed to by the nations of the Wabanaki Confederacy and the British Crown.
As the Wabanaki Nations, never conquered, were parties to treaties with the Crown, these treaties are constitutional documents – constitutive of the terms on which the relationship between the Wabanaki Nations and the British Crown was established and, therefore, the source of whatever rights the Crown has in Wabanaki territory. The Supreme Court of Canada has no more authority than any other institution to change these terms without the consent of the signatories.
Wabanaki people view the Peace and Friendship Treaties as solemn international agreements between the Wabanaki Nations and the British Crown. As historian Sarah Isabel Wallace explains, the French readily established alliances with the Wabanaki that emphasized peace and collaboration in trade.¹² As a consequence of these alliances, the Wabanaki Confederacy fought on the side of France against English colonial forces in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
By the summer of 1725, both the British and the Wabanaki wanted to end the escalating violence. In December 1725, the Penobscot and some other allied nations in the northeastern United States signed what became known as the Treaty of Boston (or Dummer’s Treaty). The following year, the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (as well as the Abenaki and Passamaquoddy in Massachusetts and New Hampshire) signed essentially the same agreement, Mascarene’s Treaty. These treaties, along with others signed later in the 18th century, became known as the Peace and Friendship Treaties.
The Wabanaki consider the treaties to be sacred agreements; in the Wolastoqey language, treaties are referred to as “kci lakutuwakonol,” which means “making sacred relations as long as the sun and moon shall endure.” The Supreme Court of Canada correctly ruled that the Peace and Friendship Treaties are just as valid today as they were in the 18th century. They are timeless.
In the worldview of the Indigenous signatories, the British Crown became a “family member” of the Wabanaki Confederacy on signing the treaties. The British therefore joined the Wabanaki family in accordance with Wabanaki law. As family members, they were expected to coexist in Wabanaki territory and live in peace and harmony with the rest of their Wabanaki family. This is incompatible with unilateral infringement “justified” under a test imposed by a court obtaining its authority from British-derived law.
Wabanaki Elders have shared stories of their hunting activities within Wabanaki hunting territory. A typical hunting activity would include harvesting medicinal plants, securing materials for lodges and birchbark canoes, and following spiritual protocols for the preparation of the food supply provided by specific game found in the territory, such as moose and deer.
Wabanaki Elders further emphasized that the principle of the conservation of resources was an important aspect of hunting, fishing and fowling activities. One hunted and fished only what one needed for clan survival. Each generation was expected to save resources for future generations. This way of life ensured the survival of each succeeding generation. For the Wabanaki, their traditional lands and rivers encompassed a spirit which was tightly connected to the people. This was their identity as Wolastoqiyik, Mi’kmaq, Peskotomuhkati, Penobscot and Abenaki. The Wabanaki honoured all of creation and, in particular, traditional lands and rivers because they provided all that was required for survival.
The British, too, understood that these were the terms of the Peace and Friendship Treaties. At the treaty negotiations in November 1720, the British Treaty Commissioners, on behalf of their Government, told the Wabanaki representatives that “the English have no design to take your country or any of your lands from you; or to deprive you of any of your just Rights or Privileges.”¹³
The English text of the treaties demonstrates that these treaties are treaties of peace and alliance, not agreements to cede the lands or the political sovereignty of the Wabanaki to the Crown. In the English text of the Treaties of 1725 and 1726, for example, the Wabanaki Nations agreed to
forbear all Acts of Hostility Injuries and Discords towards all the Subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, & not offer the least hurt Violence or Molestation to them or any of them in their Persons or Estates, But will hence forward hold & maintain a firm and Constant Amity and Friendship with all the English and will never Confederate or Combine with any other Nation to their prejudice … That His Majesties Subjects the English shall and may peaceably and Quietly Enter upon, Improve & forever Enjoy … their rights of Land and former Settlements Properties & possessions within the Eastern parts of the said Province of the Massachusetts Bay … without any Molestation or Claims by us, or any other Indians.
In exchange, the British promised:
Saving unto the Penoscot, Narridgewalk And other Tribes within His Majesties Province aforesaid and their Natural descendants respectively All their Lands, liberties & properties not by them Conveyed or sold to, or possess’d by any of the English Subjects or aforesaid As also the Privelege of Fishing, Hunting & Fowling as formerly.
The Treaty of 1752 reaffirmed the relationship of peace and friendship, stating that the terms of the treaties of 1725 and 1726
are hereby from this time forward renewed, reiterated, and forever Confirmed … That all Transactions during the Late War shall on both sides be buried in Oblivion with the Hatchet, And that the said Indians shall have all favour, Friendship & Protection shewn them from this His Majesty’s Government … It is agreed that the said Tribe of Indians shall not be hindered from, but have free liberty of Hunting and Fishing as usual and that if they shall think a Truck house needful at the River Chibenaccadie … they shall have the same built and proper Merchandize, lodged therein to be exchanged for what the Indians shall have to dispose of and that in the meantime the Indians shall have free liberty to bring to Sale to Halifax or any other Settlement within this Province, Skins, feathers, fowl, fish or any other thing they shall have to sell, where they shall have liberty to dispose thereof to the best Advantage.
The 1760–61 treaties also provided:
No person or persons belonging to the said Tribes shall at any time hereafter aid or Assist any of the Enemies of His most Sacred Majesty King George the Second or of his Heirs and successors nor shall hold any Correspondence or Commerce with any such His Majesty’s Enemies in any way or manner whatsoever and that, for the more effectually preventing any such Correspondence and Commerce with any of His Majesty’s Enemies, the said Tribes shall at all times hereafter Traffic and barter and exchange Commodities with the Managers of such Truckhouses as shall be established for that purpose by his Majesty’s Governors of this Province at Fort Frederick or elsewhere within the Said Province and at no other place.
While there are differences between the terms of the agreements negotiated with the Wabanaki Nations as understood by those nations and the terms recorded in English, it is clear from both understandings that the Peace and Friendship Treaties did not impede the freedom of the Wabanaki peoples to hunt, fish, trap and gather as they had always done. Nor did they transfer what the common law would understand as “ownership” of their territories and the fruits of those territories to the British Crown.
Rather, the treaties established and confirmed the military alliance between the Wabanaki and the British, and provided that British settlers who had already occupied lands would be allowed to continue to occupy those lands while the rest of the Wabanaki territory not sold to British settlers would remain Wabanaki land. The treaties guaranteed the Wabanaki the right to continue to hunt, fish, trap and gather on their territories as they had always done. The later treaties also promised that the Wabanaki would trade all of the goods that they wished to sell to the British and that “truckhouses” (trading posts) would be established to allow them to do so, so that they did not trade with anyone else.
As the Supreme Court of Canada noted in the 1985 case of Simon v. the Queen,
The Treaty was entered into for the benefit of both the British Crown and the Micmac (sic) people, to maintain peace and order as well as to recognize and confirm the existing hunting and fishing rights of the Micmac … The Treaty, by providing that the Micmac should not be hindered from but should have free liberty of hunting and fishing as usual, constitutes a positive source of protection against infringements on hunting rights … Article 4 of the Treaty appears to contemplate hunting for commercial purposes when it refers to the construction of a truck house as a place of exchange and mentions the liberty of the Micmac to bring game for sale.¹⁴
As well, the Court stated, “None of the Maritime treaties of the eighteenth century cedes land … The treaty was an exchange of solemn promises between the Micmacs and the King’s representative entered into to achieve and guarantee peace. It is an enforceable obligation between the Indians and the white man.”¹⁵
Thus, logic dictates that the terms of the treaties prevent the Crown from regulating the hunting, fishing, trapping and gathering of the Wabanaki, as such regulation would “hinder” their freedom to hunt, fish, trap and gather “as usual.” Only the Wabanaki have the authority to regulate the hunting, fishing, trapping and gathering of Wabanaki people. Indeed, the Treaty of 1752 says that the Wabanaki can sell anything that they have to dispose of to the British at truckhouses or, until truckhouses are built, at Halifax or any other settlement “where they shall have liberty to dispose thereof to the best Advantage.”
A way forward: Fisheries comanagement
The Wabanaki could simply rely on the terms of the Peace and Friendship Treaties and insist that, since their right to fish as they always had, unhindered by the Crown, is primary, the non-Indigenous commercial fishery must accommodate the Indigenous treaty fishery, not the other way around. The treaty texts (including the English texts) suggest that this is a perfectly valid argument. Furthermore, the history of Indigenous fishery litigation in the United States Pacific Northwest presents an interesting parallel suggesting that such an argument might be worth making in seeking a negotiated solution.
In February 1974, Federal District Judge George Boldt decided a legal challenge by the U.S. federal government against the state of Washington designed to protect the treaty fishing rights of the First Nations that fished in Puget Sound. Judge Boldt decided that the treaty provisions authorizing the First Nations to fish “in common with the citizens of the (Washington) territory” meant that the First Nations had the right to catch half of the harvestable salmon and steelhead trout in their traditional fishing grounds beyond their reserves and that the treaties guaranteed the protection of the salmon’s habitat from destruction.¹⁶
Washington state challenged the decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in 1979 the Supreme Court upheld Judge Boldt’s decision, with its interpretation of the 1853 Stevens Treaty that gave the First Nations significant control over their traditional fishery grounds.¹⁷ This decision led the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest to establish the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission to regulate the treaty fishery in an orderly way and act as the voice for the Northwest First Nations in fisheries management and conservation matters.
Ultimately, this Commission led to the establishment of fisheries comanagement, first through Fishery Advisory Boards and finally, in 1983, through the establishment of a formal fisheries comanagement regime between the state government and the First Nations. In establishing such a regime, the state government acknowledged the First Nations’ right and capacity to regulate their fishery.¹⁸
In Atlantic Canada, to retain the amity that is at the heart of the Peace and Friendship Treaty relationship and avoid conflict, the treaty parties need to recognize that they have an obligation to consult with each other. Consultation should be required for any activities that each party wishes to undertake that could harm the other or that, if undertaken by both parties in an uncoordinated way, could harm the land, water or air (along with beings that are part of the land, water or air). In this way, the parties would come to shared regulatory decisions.
For the Wabanaki Nations, the U.S. v. Washington decision could be a useful example supporting insistence that the federal government create a fisheries comanagement regime, if Ottawa persists in engaging in an unproductive dispute. Wouldn’t it be better, though, for the federal government to simply emulate fisheries management in Washington state in the aftermath of U.S. v. Washington and establish a genuine comanagement regime through negotiation?
This would certainly be the approach most consistent with the federal Attorney General of Canada’s Directive on Civil Litigation Involving Indigenous Peoples. Litigation guideline #3 in this directive states,
Litigation is by its nature an adversarial process, and cannot be the primary forum for broad reconciliation and the renewal of the Crown-Indigenous relationship. One of the goals of reconciliation in legal matters is to make conflict and litigation the exception, by promoting respectful and meaningful dialogue outside of the courts … Working with the client and other departmental counsel, counsel must develop a coordinated approach with the aim of achieving a resolution that avoids litigation.¹⁹
According to litigation guideline #4, “Counsel’s primary goal must be to resolve the issues, using the court process as a last resort and in the narrowest way possible … Counsel must work with client departments and agencies to develop problem-solving approaches that promote reconciliation. These approaches should include alternative dispute resolution processes such as negotiations and mediations.”²⁰
In regulating the use of the fruits of their territory, the Wabanaki may well have a duty to consult with the officials of the Crown, as do the officials of the Crown with the Wabanaki, and negotiate agreements on how the two parties will fairly and sustainably share the fruits of Wabanaki territory to abide by the relationship of peace and friendship that was at the root of the Peace and Friendship Treaties.
This approach would also be consistent with how the Wabanaki traditionally made decisions about how the fruits of the lands, waters and air of Wabanaki territories were to be used. Traditionally, Wabanaki clans were assigned hunting territories by the grand council, consisting of the Grand Chief, village Chiefs, Elders and Clan Mothers (or in some cases, by village Chiefs, Elders and Clan Mothers after discussion). Regardless of which group made an individual decision, it was always emphasized that conservation of resources such as game, fish, medicines and wildlife in general had to be considered. This was “Seventh Generation Thinking” or, in Wolastoqey, “‘Ciw Weckuwapasihtit.” This traditional process of managing resource use would be a valuable guide to modern sustainable resource management processes.
The best approach to managing the Atlantic fishery would be for the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik to negotiate a joint process for determining catch limits and seasons with the federal government. In this way, overfishing as a consequence of uncoordinated regulation of the East Coast fishery could be avoided. Such a joint process will require the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik to have the resources necessary to allow them to contribute to the comanagement process based on evidence about sustainable harvesting levels, for example.
From existing Canadian jurisprudence on the Crown’s duty to consult and accommodate Indigenous interests, we know that a party’s duty to consult another party does not give that other party a right of veto over the consulting party’s chosen course of action. Nor does the treaty relationship give the federal government a right to veto the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqey governments’ decisions about managing the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqey fishery. It certainly does not give them the power to impose licensing regimes, seasonal restrictions and “moderate livelihood” catch limits on Mi’kmaq or Wolastoqi fishers. Thus, DFO’s current attempts to restrict the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqey lobster fishery are, simply, inconsistent with the terms of the Peace and Friendship Treaties, which are – let us not forget – part of the Constitution of Canada.
Ian Peach is a constitutional law and public policy scholar who has worked as a policy adviser and negotiator in federal, provincial and territorial governments across Canada. David Perley is cofounder of the Wolastoq Lanquage and Culture Center, Tobique First Nation, New Brunswick.
Image: the pictures of Damien and Myles Sanderson shown by the RCMP during a September 4th 2022 press conference.
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On September 4, ten people were stabbed to death in the James Smith Cree Nation and the nearby village of Weldon, Saskatchewan, midway between Prince Albert and Melfort. Police identified two brothers, Damien and Myles Sanderson, as the suspected killers. The next day, Damien was found dead with multiple wounds. Myles was taken into custody on September 7 and died of a drug overdose hours later. Police eventually determined that Myles Sanderson was responsible for all the deaths, including that of his brother.
John Richards wrote an op-ed on the tragedy and shared it with the Inroads listserv. It sparked a discussion, highlights of which are presented here. This version of John’s op-ed was revised and expanded by Pierre Fortin and appeared under their joint byline in French in Le Devoir on September 12 and in English in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix on September 27, and subsequently in Saskatchewan’s other major newspaper, the Regina Leader-Post.¹
John Richards | September 6
Gabriel Wortman, who killed 22 in Nova Scotia, was White. Myles Sanderson, who has killed 11 and injured 18 in the James Smith reserve east of Prince Albert, has Indigenous ancestry. I have no insight into the factors that predispose people to go on a killing spree. Pathological killers are, fortunately, a very small share among all ethnic communities.
However, there is more to this tragedy than analyzing the psychology of Myles Sanderson. Over the years 2016–18, the average annual number of homicide victims in Canada was 472. Nearly a quarter of all victims (109) were Indigenous; among the Indigenous victims, two thirds (73) were in the Prairie provinces. Overall, the Canadian homicide victim rate is low. Among the non-Indigenous, the average annual rate was just above 1 per 100,000. Among Indigenous people living outside the Prairies, the rate was just below 5 per 100,000; among Indigenous people in the Prairies, the rate was 14 per 100,000. The Prairie homicide victim rate is not low! What is the explanation?
Harold Johnson, a First Nation lawyer who grew up in northwestern Saskatchewan, was for many years crown prosecutor in the northern half of the province. In 2016 he published his memoir, Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People (and Yours). The title refers to the dominant theme throughout the book – the need for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders to address the abuse of alcohol and drugs among Indigenous peoples in northern Saskatchewan. We could blame it all on White settlers and residential schools. But, he argued, that implies history is the only relevant explanation for today’s problems: Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders have no agency, no ability to undo the damage. He emphasized rehabilitation of Indigenous identity and temperance – “safe houses” where the residents commit to abstinence.
Johnson’s policy recommendations deserve serious attention. A third way of looking at the syndrome of high homicide, suicide and alcohol/drug abuse rates is to attack the persistence of high unemployment rates, low education rates and low earnings among those in remote Indigenous communities – in particular in the Prairies.
Based on careful analysis at the county level in “rust belt” U.S. states over the last quarter century, Angus Deaton concluded that factory shutdowns were a central factor in explaining increased local rates of suicide, alcohol/drug abuse and low health status. Factory shutdowns led to higher local unemployment rates and lower wages for those with a job. On the basis of this work, Deaton won the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics. He insisted that his wife, Anne Case, deserved half the prize. They have summarized their analysis in a widely read book, Deaths of Despair. They do not claim that the deterioration of social conditions over the last quarter century in small towns is the only problem, but undeniably “employment at good wages matters.”
The chief of the James Smith reserve east of Prince Albert has acknowledged that use of drugs and alcohol on his reserve is widespread and amounts to a very serious problem. Maybe the motivation of Myles Sanderson’s murders was his participation in the drug trade. Maybe the explanation lies elsewhere. Whatever his motivation, the underlying lack of employment in many remote reserves, such as James Smith, is a factor conducive to “deaths of despair.”
I conclude with a quote from a 2017 parliamentary report on suicide:
For those living in remote communities, the Committee heard there is clear connection between unemployment and hopelessness. For example, when the Weeneebakyo Area Health Authority (near James Bay) asked a young First Nation woman why there are many suicides in her reserve she replied, “It is simple, no jobs, no future and no hope.”
Frances Abele | September 7
Another perspective appears on the op-ed page of this morning’s Globe, written by Ken Coates.²
John, I would respond to you that you are presenting only part of the truth. What you leave out are the sources of strength and positive change.
Steven Davis | September 9
John,
Education and jobs on reserves, you say, are part of the solution. I suppose that the possibility of a job is part of the motivation for someone to get educated, but what kind of jobs can there be on remote reserves? Not all of them have natural resources nearby that can generate jobs.
John Richards | September 9
I wrote an op-ed on the James Smith Cree reserve tragedy on Tuesday. Frances admonished me for presenting only part of the truth and advised me to read the op-ed by Ken Coates in the Globe. Ken has written a great deal about economic development on reserves that succeed in establishing business arrangements, often with resource-sector firms. I agree that this is happening. A comprehensive exploration of “communal capitalism” is Tom Flanagan’s latest book, The Wealth of First Nations (a clever play on Adam Smith). The trouble with Ken and Tom is that they pay attention only to the “sources of strength and positive change.” Tom undertakes an assessment of all Canadian reserves and emphasizes that only two dozen have the administrative capacity to assure success with communal capitalism. He and Ken are reluctant to discuss the severe social problems and the evident close association of “deaths of despair” with low levels of employment and education.
Le Devoir has agreed to publish my op-ed. Its editor requested further detail on regional Indigenous homicide rates across Canada. Here is my original paragraph reworked with revised statistics for 2016–18:
However, there is more to this tragedy (in the James Smith Cree Nation) than analyzing the psychology of Myles Sanderson. Over the years 2016–18, the average annual number of homicide victims in Canada was 580. A quarter of all victims (146) were Indigenous; among the Indigenous victims, two thirds (95) were in the Prairie provinces. Overall, the Canadian homicide victim rate is low. Among the non-Indigenous, the average annual rate over the three years was just above 1 per 100,000. Among the Indigenous in the Prairies, it was 14, which is not low! Other than the Territories, the average annual Indigenous rates were high but much lower than in the Prairies: Atlantic (1), Quebec (4), Ontario (5), B.C. (5), Territories (19). Among all homicide perpetrators, approximately a third were Indigenous. Among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, the great majority of victims were killed by family members and acquaintances.
Incidentally, Tanya Talaga, an Indigenous frequent contributor to the Globe, has an op-ed today. Her title sums up the reality on many reserves: “The Beast of Addiction in Indigenous Communities Remains Untamed.”³ I acknowledge the importance of cultural rehabilitation and affirmation. I acknowledge that some communal capitalism ventures are succeeding. I would like to see acknowledgement that employment and education matter, and that two thirds of those who identify as Indigenous do not live on a reserve; over half live in a city.
Geoff White | September 9
I have been following the discussion of John’s draft op-ed with interest.
I am inclined to agree with John with respect to the need for improved education, but what form should that take? On First Nations territories (formerly known as reserves), there would appear to be a need for a major investment in facilities and hiring of teachers, especially for primary schools. This should be under the leadership of First Nations residents and give space to traditional Indigenous knowledge. Still, mathematics, science and literacy in one of Canada’s official languages (appropriate to location) must lie at the core of the curriculum.
I am not familiar with achievement rates of Indigenous students not living on First Nations territories relative to their non-Indigenous peers in public education. Since I expect the rates are lower for Indigenous students, additional resources need to be injected under the clear leadership of members of the Indigenous community, but once again stressing mathematics, science and literacy.
With respect to employment, I admit to having doubts similar to others with respect to there being so little opportunity for economic activity on a large number of First Nations territories. Can this be remedied in this era of remote “working from home” by vastly improving the digital infrastructure on First Nations territories? Whatever the case, remote workers must be invested with some sense of the meaningfulness of such work, including feeling a positive connection with life outside of their territorial homes.
Frances Abele | September 9
I’d like to offer two observations:
In April 2020, Gabriel Wortman killed 22 of his neighbours in Portapique, Nova Scotia. The impact of this murderous spree is of course still being suffered by the people there. But one thing that they have not had to suffer is being pathologized as members of the same ethnic group as the killer. No one introduced statistics about literacy rates, murder rates or drug abuse rates in their region, and no one offered employment programs and the like as a means of avoiding future murders. No one assumed that they all needed the same treatment that might have suppressed Wortman’s insanity.
Ken Coates’s article in the Globe and Mail – the one I recommended for reading – was not a discussion of economic development as a solution. It was an attempt to help people see beyond the murders to the normal and hospitable community that endured this horror. Ken had been there for a visit with some students (international and Canadian) just a couple of weeks before the murders. He was attempting to head off group pathologizing and to help us see the people who were harmed as people, like us. The community leadership did the same thing. Chief Mark Arcand of the Saskatoon Tribal Council, whose sister and nephew were murdered, talked through his pain in a similar effort. Why? I think it is because they know how quickly “Oh God, innocent people murdered!” turns into clinical discussions of “What is wrong with these people? What can we do to fix them?”
This happens again and again in our country and it needs to stop. It’s damaging.
Claire Durand | September 9
With my student, I carried out an analysis of education, employment, income and housing in 26 Quebec First Nations and surrounding communities.
Our conclusion: With the same level of education, First Nations have a similar employment rate and an income that is only slightly lower. The problem is access to education. I have been in a few First Nations communities and noticed how there is now much emphasis on education. The federal government failed incredibly in providing real access to education to First Nations. In fact, when First Nations communities are near a city, people in these communities are often more educated than in communities around them. The problem is access in isolated communities.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine worked as a teacher in Nunavik in the 1970s. They looked for the most educated person in the village to teach Inuktitut to the kids. The most educated person had completed Grade 3!
The second problem that we could see in our data is housing. People were 40 times more likely to live in an overcrowded residence in First Nations communities than in the surrounding communities. This means that any problem – mental health, alcoholism, etc. – has an effect on many more people in First Nations communities. In Manawan, for example, there are 300 houses for 2,300 people.⁴
Finally, in another research project, we analyzed income in different First Nations communities in Quebec. The Cree had much higher incomes on average (seven times the average income of Abenakis). They are the only ones who have some control over development on their territory because of the James Bay and “Paix des Braves” agreements. They have agreements with companies that want to establish mines on their territories. They get part of the profits and the companies need to train and hire First Nations people, usually a third of their employees.
We tend to think that there are no jobs up there. It is not quite true, at least not all the time. There are mines where they bring workers from the south – the “fly in fly out” system – instead of hiring First Nations people who live nearby. When communities can control their territories, they can start to change things.
Henry Milner | September 9
Frances,
I am trying to understand your post. Are you saying that it should be irrelevant that this crime was committed against Indigenous members of a particular community by one of its members? Are you saying that the circumstances of life in that community and the background of the killers should not be taken into account? This is probably the sentiment of most Canadians, but I didn’t think it was yours. I thought you supported the Supreme Court’s position that an individual’s Indigenous identity should be taken into account in sentencing. Clearly that was the rationale for the relatively lenient treatment of Sanderson, which left him free to go on a murderous spree.
Frances Abele | September 9
Thank you for trying to understand me. I will try to be clearer. This means I might be offensive. I am sorry for that.
I was not objecting to taking a murderer’s life circumstances into account in understanding his behaviour. I was noticing that the standard and practice applied to Indigenous people are different from those applied to the rest of us, and I was inviting all of you to think about whether that is okay.
When we marshal all of those statistics in response to a tragedy, we lose sight of the humanity of the people who were involved. An Indigenous person or community should not be reduced to a syndrome or a social problem. It is dehumanizing.
If you could know the people involved, you would know they are like any other Canadians. Further, like all of us, they have the capacity to respond to tragedy – you can see that this week. They do not need us to fix them. They need our solidarity and, in particular, they need us to get out of their face while we listen and learn. That is all.
These are my own views. I don’t mean to judge or chide. I was hoping to provoke thought, to see if a crack would appear between our confident analyses and the human lives we are talking about.
Arthur Milner | September 9
I would add:
The killings in Portapique were treated as an aberration, as was the motor vehicle accident that killed 16 young hockey players in Saskatchewan in 2018.
The murders at James Smith reserve were also an aberration, and perhaps they should have been treated as such, followed only by further police investigation and a long period of concern and caring for the victims and their families. Perhaps it was rude to turn immediately to the alleged causes of violence on the James Smith reserve. Is that what you’re saying, Frances: that no one should have called attention to “literacy rates, murder rates or drug abuse rates”?
But that was never going to happen. James Smith Chief Wally Burns quickly commented on the reserve’s drug problems, and Tanya Talaga wrote about addiction problems in the Globe article John cited.
The murders presented an opportunity to talk about violence on reserves. Are you saying Indigenous observers should not have taken it
Jared Milne | September 11
Building on Professor Durand’s point, isn’t another part of the problem the fact that Indigenous housing, education, etc. are grossly underfunded by Ottawa compared to what the provinces spend on their own housing and education systems for non-Indigenous populations?
It’s also kind of hard to make financial decisions when so many reserves are under third-party management.
This may or may not be germane to the discussion, but I wonder if part of the problem too is that Indigenous people are constantly scapegoated as being solely responsible for all the problems their communities face, despite much of it coming from non-Indigenous government activities. It’s assumed that Indigenous people prefer to sit on their backsides getting sloshed than do any honest work, that they can’t be trusted to manage themselves or money responsibly, that they need “proper oversight.”
I started my research on Indigenous statistics after a student came to my office stating, “We are sociologists, we know that any society cannot be only negative. So why do we see only negative statistics about Indigenous people?”
It started a research project with three students that lasted a few years. I called it “The Social Impact of Statistics.” When you look at averages, White people are always first, and White men even more. There are perceptions and representations that remain in people’s minds when they see these statistics.
So I told my students that they were forbidden to do research about Indigenous people’s “problems.” There are enough people speaking about their problems; we were going to do research about what goes right. Why do some people manage to get by? Why are some Indigenous communities functioning very well?
These communities usually decided to stop relying on the government. They bought outfitters, campgrounds, etc., as in Essipit, or they managed agreements with Hydro-Québec, as in Masteuiash, or they could profit from the resources on their land, like the Cree people. These communities have no unemployment and they even are more educated and have more jobs than non-Indigenous people in surrounding communities. The villages are clean and you don’t see any drunk people around.
The point is that when we speak of a group of people as if they are all the same, we homogenize and essentialize them, as if it was a question of culture, while there is heterogeneity among Indigenous people as among non-Indigenous people.
The peak number of farms in Saskatchewan was 127,000, in 1941. At the 2016 census, the total had declined to 35,000. Corresponding to the decline in number of farms is an increase in farm size, from an average of three quarters of a square mile in 1941 to three square miles in 2016. You write, “There can be no denying the importance of productivity growth.” You qualify the value of productivity (per farmer) with a discussion of dying rural towns and lost sense of community among those who remain. We have more or less accepted this loss of rural community life in the Prairies. In continental Europe, policy has been protectionist; the decline in farm numbers is much slower than in the Prairies. Should we have copied Europe? Should we have treated Prairie grain farmers as we have treated dairy farmers?
Dale Eisler
For several reasons I don’t believe that a small Canadian province like Saskatchewan, even though it is a major grain producer and exporter, could have resisted the forces of the market-based policies emerging globally. You might recall the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations in the 1980s, which focused heavily on reducing trade-distorting agricultural subsidies. So for a trading nation like Canada, which sought to expand export access to global markets, it didn’t make sense, for economic, political and social reasons, to resist the forces of change.
The comparison with the European Union and its approach to the agriculture sector is really apples and oranges. In the case of Europe, agriculture and the social pattern of rural life were deeply embedded in its culture and economy over many centuries. Such was not the case on the Canadian Prairies. The Saskatchewan farm economy was fundamentally different, economically and socially.
It was a recent immigrant settler society and a largely one-crop grain economy. Consider the simple fact that in the 1980s much of the Saskatchewan farm economy was only in its second, or early stages of its third, generation of farmers. It was an economy where scale was critical to viability, land for expansion was plentiful, and post–Second World War mechanization had transformed agriculture.
Productivity grew rapidly as equipment replaced labour, making larger farm units inevitable. When you couple that with the rise of globalization, the opening of world markets, and the fact that farmers by their nature are private landowners, entrepreneurs and risk takers, the constraints of orderly marketing were doomed.
The proof is in the outcome we see today. For governments to resist those facts was not politically sustainable, which explains in large measure why the NDP lost power in 1982 and has never been able to regain its foothold in rural Saskatchewan.
While it might be nice to romanticize family farms and the pattern of rural life that made small rural communities viable, to believe that that society was economically and socially sustainable is misguided. The mechanization of farming that greatly increased productivity while dramatically reducing the number of people needed to work on farms, coupled with the global inertia to expand trade, meant rural Saskatchewan had little choice other than to adapt if it was to be a modern farm economy and society.
John Richards
One important theme of your book is Saskatchewan as a small place, subject to international market realities that have condemned to death most mid-20th-century rural communities. A second theme is your portrayals of Saskatchewan premiers – from Allan Blakeney in the 1970s and early 1980s to Scott Moe, the current Premier. If any of the premiers tried to be Canute and preserve farmers from drowning with the rising tide of farm technology, it was Blakeney. He hoped that the “family of crown corporations” would create new jobs for displaced farmers. His successors, including the two NDP premiers after him, were not interested in this strategy. Now, the sombre reality facing Saskatchewan arises from climate change: phasing out of oil and gas, rising summer temperatures and drought. Am I right about Blakeney? How successful are more recent premiers in addressing climate change?
Dale Eisler
I must say that “condemned to death” strikes me as an excessively subjective term to describe the evolution of a modern 21st-century agricultural economy. We’re producing more from Saskatchewan farms than ever and doing it with fewer people. Granted, it inevitably led to larger farms and rural depopulation, which some might characterize as the inescapable byproducts of economic progress.
But leaving that aside, I agree with your point that, as Premier, Allan Blakeney sought to preserve the rural society and economy of the 1970s as much as possible. The core to achieving that was saving the “family farm,” which was the foundation of the rural society and economy built in Saskatchewan in the early decades of the 20th century. It is why Blakeney’s government staked so much of its agriculture policy on “orderly marketing.” The most critical dimension was “saving the Crow,” the statutory grain freight rate that set in law the amount railway companies could charge Prairie farmers to ship their grain. By 1980, the rate was about 20 per cent of the cost of grain transport, and it hadn’t changed for much of the 20th century.
While nostalgia and the desire to prevent economic disruption can be a powerful urge, especially for a politician in power, the question is whether that’s sound, visionary policy. One effect of the Crow was to stunt diversification in the farm economy. Keeping grain freight rates artificially low ensured producers did not diversify into other crops and impeded investment into food processing. Admittedly, economic progress in the form of higher productivity, which drives higher standards of living, inevitably brings winners and losers. The role of government is not to prevent progress, but to help smooth economic transition by assisting those negatively affected by it.
You mention Blakeney’s family of crown corporations as instruments to provide gainful employment for displaced farmers. I don’t recall that being cited as a key justification for the public investment in crowns, although I would grant it could be a result. What I would say is that private sector investment in the resource sector in the province since the 1970s has been massive.
Potash is a prime example. There has been huge expansion of existing mines, and creation of new ones. A current example is the Jansen mine under construction. A $7.5 billion investment by Australia-based BHP Billiton, it will be the largest potash mine in the world and is expected to employ 600 people. In many ways, the growth of the potash mining sector throughout central Saskatchewan, which now totals 11 mines and ranks Saskatchewan as the largest potash producer in the world, is another example of the modernization of the rural Saskatchewan economy. One can argue whether today Saskatchewan gets the royalties it should from potash production, but there is no questioning the employment gains for rural Saskatchewan that have resulted.
As for climate change, it really wasn’t a significant issue on the provincial policy agenda until Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister and made it one of his government’s key priorities. So, judging premiers on climate change really didn’t become an important factor until the latter years of the Brad Wall government, followed now by Scott Moe. Like so much in current Saskatchewan politics, climate change is put into the context of federal-provincial relations and seen as a point of division.
The Saskatchewan Party government, under both Wall and Moe, has characterized Trudeau as someone whose priorities, particularly as related to climate change and Saskatchewan’s energy and agriculture economy, are aligned against the best interests of the province. The prime example has been opposition to the federal price on carbon emissions. Underlying that stance is that many in the Saskatchewan Party government border on being climate deniers and are only willing to do the least possible in terms of policy to address climate change.
John Richards
Recently, an angry middle-aged man in Grande Prairie harassed Chrystia Freeland as she entered an elevator in the city. “What the f—k are you doing in Alberta?” he asked. “You f—in’ traitor! You f—in’ b—ch! Get the f—k out of this province!”
Here is a passage from Freeland’s Wikipedia biography:
Born in Peace River, Alberta, Freeland completed a bachelor’s degree at Harvard University, studying Russian history and literature before earning a master’s degree in Slavonic studies from Oxford University. She began her career in journalism in editorial positions at the Financial Times, The Globe and Mail and Reuters, becoming managing director of the latter. Freeland is the author of Sale of the Century, a 2000 book about Russia’s journey from communist state rule to capitalism, and Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else in 2012.
Freeland is a very smart cosmopolitan woman. Currently Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister, she is MP for Rosedale, probably the most prosperous Toronto riding. The verbal attack on her has prompted considerable media attention, most of it referring to male sexism and pathological violence. Is that an adequate analysis? Her attacker emphasized the idea that she has abandoned her Prairie identity and allied herself with the cosmopolitan woke government of Justin Trudeau, a government that has ignored Prairie interests. What do you think of all this? Had she been visiting, say, Prince Albert, might she have received a similar verbal denunciation
Dale Eisler
The verbal abuse and threatening behaviour that Chrystia Freeland faced must be condemned and never accepted. But when it comes to the current state of politics – in Canada, the United States and many other countries – it can be understood. I’ve long believed that views which many see as abhorrent are now being expressed, whereas before they were not. Many Canadians, many more than we’d like to think, have harboured them for years. They were simply suppressed by the public agenda and the parameters established by those seen as opinion leaders and the traditional media. The rise of the “political correctness” ethic also inhibited people from speaking their true thoughts. All that changed with the emergence of social media and the likes of Donald Trump. Suddenly, people were liberated to express their true feelings and beliefs.
Underlying this development has been resentment of the “educated elites” who were seen as controlling the agenda and setting the terms of acceptable speech. These days it’s popularized as the woke agenda, which many believe characterizes the Trudeau government. As you note, Freeland fits the elite cosmopolitan description. The fact that she’s originally from Alberta, went to the finest international universities, worked in the media and now represents an affluent downtown Toronto riding makes her a prime target in the minds of the angry mob.
Is the treatment Freeland faced somehow unique to Alberta? I suggest it is not. It’s obvious that Alberta is ground zero for the venting of anti–Trudeau government hatred, but I have no doubt that the same sentiment exists in Saskatchewan, particularly but not exclusively in rural areas. It’s important to recognize that grievance culture has long been at the root of Prairie politics. The sense of alienation from the centres of power – whether political or economic – runs deep and has often been expressed by populist parties. The most obvious examples are the CCF-NDP and Social Credit. More recently it was expressed in the rise of the Reform Party.
As you suggest, there is a widespread perception in Saskatchewan and Alberta that Prairie interests are not reflected in the Trudeau government, a sentiment consistent with Prairie populism. I personally believe it is rooted more in emotion than reality, but you need to ask why that perception exists. The Trudeau government, and especially Trudeau himself, have done an extremely poor job communicating that they have the region’s best interests in mind.
Trudeau’s climate change agenda is seen as a direct challenge to the Alberta-Saskatchewan economies built on oil and gas and agriculture. On one of his first visits as PM to Alberta, Trudeau talked about the need to “phase out” the oil sands. While that might some day happen, to deliver that message instead of saying he would have Alberta’s back and defend its economic interests, including the energy sector, was a recipe for ill-will. Add that to the history of his father Pierre’s National Energy Program and the economic misfortune it created for Alberta, and it’s not hard to understand how we got to Chrystia Freeland, the Deputy Prime Minister, being verbally assaulted in her home province.
John Richards
I agree with most of your discussion on the Grande Prairie incident, but not all. Surely, over the next generation, Canada should “phase out” its entire oil and gas sector, not only the oil sands. My critique of Trudeau’s statements on the century’s most urgent policy problem is that they come off as vague woke aspirations. Nearly seven years after his having rushed to Paris (in December 2015), his government has never frankly discussed the scale of economic disruption implied by the Paris Accord commitments – particularly in the Prairies.
His Natural Resources Minister, Jonathan Wilkinson, is another very smart politician. He grew up in Saskatchewan, but has a Vancouver riding. Wilkinson knows a great deal about renewable energy, and has implemented a small carbon tax. There are no prominent Prairie-based politicians in the federal government publicly discussing the economic future of the oil and gas sector. The closest we have is Jason Kenney – now replaced by a more conservative Alberta Premier – generously funding carbon capture and storage so that oil and gas can be a “low GHG” technology for power generation. (At present, this is by far the most costly “green” technology.) I compare Trudeau with Mulroney in the 1980s on fishing out the Grand Banks, admittedly a much less important issue. He let John Crosbie design fantasy fisheries policy – until we fished out the last cod.
Dale Eisler
On climate, my view has long been that we’ve never had anything approaching an honest and realistic debate about what addressing climate change means in practical economic and social terms. What we’re talking about is a fundamental retooling of the global economy in less than 30 years. It is mind-boggling. Nothing of that sort or scale has ever been done in human history. You acknowledge (sort of) that rather large fact with your reference to the cod fishery. But if that’s the best example – which by the way was designed to save the cod fishery, not eliminate it – to argue for an end to oil and gas, I think we need a better case study.
Phasing out our entire oil and gas sector – never mind just the oil sands – over the next generation, I would say, is fantasy. The International Energy Agency, which is easily the most authoritative global voice on the energy issue, says that fossil fuels will still represent a majority source of energy in 2040. The IEA’s sustainable development scenario predicts daily oil consumption will be about 65 million barrels a day in 20 years. That’s down from current levels – which by the way are growing – of slightly more than 100 million barrels a day. I would add that fossil fuels today represent about 80 per cent of global primary energy demand. This is not to say we shouldn’t be getting off fossil fuels. We must. But can we at least be honest about what it means and the effects it is going to have on economies, societies and people, especially those in the Third World who live in conditions of energy poverty? As someone who spends time each year teaching in Bangladesh, I’m sure you know this better than anyone.
I tend to be of the view expressed by Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba emeritus professor who has studied energy transitions through history and what energy means to society. Smil delves into the thermal dynamics of energy. He says if we’re serious about climate change, and he believes we need to be (as do I), then we must accept an end to economic growth as we have seen it for the past century. Smil talks of the intractable challenges that come with decarbonization of industries that produce what he calls “the four pillars of modern civilization: ammonia, cement, steels, plastics.”¹
Among Smil’s many books, his most recent is Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities,² which The Guardian calls “an epic multidisciplinary analysis of growth, and why humanity’s endless expansion must stop.” In an interview with the Guardian, Smil says bluntly, “Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realize that.”³ He goes on to say, “Economists will tell you we can decouple growth from material consumption, but that is total nonsense.” It’s worth noting that Bill Gates, who is deeply committed to climate issues and whose foundation has invested heavily into climate change solutions, calls Smil his favourite author.
Like it or not, cheap, abundant, portable fossil fuels, which are the most energy-dense next to nuclear, have been the foundation for our high standards of living and quality of life. Yet we have this fanciful notion that we can reach net zero emissions in less than 30 years and there will be no massive economic disruptions with social consequences. Much of that belief is based on the idea that new technology, not yet discovered or applied, will make it all possible.
The truth is, reaching our climate goals means lower standards of living. But no government dares speak the words. The reason is obvious. Politicians know that being truthful about what it’s going to take and the impact it’s going to have will lead to a public backlash and electoral defeat. So instead, we’re presented with this fanciful notion that we can “phase out” fossil fuels and reach net zero with “green” sources of energy such as solar and wind, or other sources like hydrogen that are nowhere close to being a practical alternative.
Of course, another factor that makes the politics of climate change such a challenge is what Mark Carney calls the “tragedy of the horizon.” We’re talking about action now and its negative impact on living standards to achieve a goal 30 years or more hence. What’s required is to dramatically change people’s energy consumption behaviour. The carbon price is but a small and insignificant example of that. The carbon price is nowhere near the level it needs to be, and the embedded costs of energy in everything from the food we eat to the clothes we wear to the houses we live in (to name only a few) must be taken into account. So, by all means, let’s pursue policies that will aggressively deal with the climate issue. But can we at least be honest about what is achievable, and the sacrifices it will take to get there?
A final point. My book discusses the Saskatchewan Party’s aggressive opposition to federal climate change policy, and the federal carbon price in particular. The party’s stance against the carbon tax unambiguously reflects the popular will in the province.
Inroads co-publisher John Richards, recently retired from the School of Public Policy at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, was a member of the Saskatchewan legislature in the 1970s. Dale Eisler has been a journalist, novelist, senior federal civil servant and Senior Policy Fellow at the Johnson Shoyama School of Public Policy in Regina; his latest book is on Saskatchewan’s political and economic evolution.
Image: Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. Via Frankie Fouganthin, Wikimedia Commons
How much influence the populist Sweden Democrats will have remains unclear
In mid-September an election took place in a very divided Sweden. The governing Social Democrats and their allies fell two seats short of a majority, opening the door to the right. A month later, Conservative Party leader and incoming Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson announced the signing of the four-party Tidö Agreement, named after the palace in which the negotiations were held. This agreement binds the Christian Democrats and Liberals, who join his government with six and five ministers respectively in the 24-member cabinet.
The fourth party to the deal is the populist Sverigedemokraterna or Sweden Democrats (SD). Though not in the cabinet, SD will have a secretariat in the administration, with a mandate to be involved in drafting bills, directing agencies and carrying on inquiries in all matters connected with crime and justice, immigration, economic growth and household economy, education, health care, climate and energy and a group of disparate issues. It will also have control of the annual government budget on par with the parties in the cabinet. Moreover, SD is well represented in parliamentary committees, several of which its members get to chair. There is an added wrinkle that is striking: the agreement sets out that there will be an “inner cabinet” consisting of the four party leaders. Membership in this inner cabinet will give SD leader Jimmie Åkesson added clout.
SD had a major impact on a number of topics dealt with in the agreement, especially immigration. For instance, repatriation of those who have entered as refugees was brought up, although this issue was not present in the electoral manifestos of the three parties in the cabinet, but has been on the SD agenda for many years.
Many prominent Liberals expressed misgivings about the influence of SD in the government, including one who was appointed to the cabinet – 26-year-old Romina Pourmokhtari, named Minister of the Environment (though it no longer exists as a separate ministry). One appointment that reduced concerns about the direction of the new government was that of a veteran Conservative, unlikely to change course, to head the foreign office. With these and other appointments, there have been mixed signals about the course of the new government. Nevertheless, the overwhelming attitude of the media and opposition supporters has been distrust.
As far as application of the agreement is concerned, the immediate step consists of comprehensive inquiries. The usual procedures are to be followed, which means that any implementation of the reforms will take time and may be put on hold. First on the list is an inquiry into the pros and cons of nationalizing health care. Since the four parties disagree on this issue, it is not likely anything along these lines will happen. Other, less controversial, reforms in health care can be expected. These could to some extent strengthen the position of the national government vis-à-vis the second tier of democratic government, the regions, which are responsible for carrying out health care management.
Though the agreement stresses the new government’s concern about climate change, the energy section’s emphasis on lowering the price of electricity tends to run counter to that objective. There is some focus on research on emerging energy technologies such as carbon capture and storage, but the main emphasis is on nuclear power. A very large sum, 300 billion Swedish kronor ($30 billion USD), is set aside for loan guarantees for nuclear power, while other nonfossil forms of energy such as wind power will need to charge a price based on the full cost of production, including transmission of electricity through the national grid.
Nothing is said about the existing general agreement on climate policy passed by parliament, which includes several programs that especially affect industry, agriculture and forestry. In that agreement, goals are set for five-year cycles of net CO2 emissions gradually working their way to zero. How this will be attained is left vague.
Policies on crime are focused on gangs, shootings and juvenile delinquency. After Ulf Kristersson introduced the new government at a press conference, SD leader Åkesson read out the bits of the Tidö Agreement his party liked best: longer prison sentences, temporary zones in which police have special powers, anonymous witnesses, more frequent deportations. Can a law-abiding society rely on searches of people’s homes without any solid basis of suspicion? Many Liberals, including Romina Pourmokhtari, are uncomfortable with this part of the agreement. The Stockholm district of the Liberal Party has called for a party conference to discuss the agreement, since it violates several “red lines” that the Liberal Party congress decided on prior to the election.
Immigration is, of course, the centrepiece. The agenda includes expelling immigrants from Sweden for breaking the law, belonging to a gang, using drugs and similar actions. Illegial immigrants are to be detected and deported, and immigrants are to be encouraged to return to their ”home countries.”
It is stated in the introduction that asylum should be reserved for those fleeing Sweden´s neighbouring countries, and then only temporarily. People from countries such as Afghanistan, Somalia and Ukraine are out. Asylum should be restricted as far as possible, down to the minimum requirements of European Union legislation. The number of UN-quota refugees welcomed will be no more than 900 a year (down from 6.400). There is a lot more that will discourage fleeing people from coming to Sweden, including a requirement to stay in ”transit centres” as long as the judicial procedure goes on. Asylum seekers will be required to pay for their health insurance, and for interpreters.
If all these reforms are implemented Sweden will get closer to being a police state, one in which anyone can be stopped and searched anywhere at any time. There is, however, some hope that the inquiries planned to take place in advance will temper the actual application of the reforms.
When it comes to education, the schools have come in for criticism for being focused too little on ”facts” and too much on reasoning, critical analysis and independent inquiry. This is where the Liberals, who have pushed for ”fact-based” schooling, have had the most input. Since many of the specific measures are in line with what some Social Democrats have proposed, educational policy will not be a very controversial matter.
Economic growth is to be fostered by limiting household subsidies – though because of the current inflation caused by Russia´s aggression against Ukraine, there will be subsidies to households to compensate them for rising prices of food, electricity and loans. In addition, the program calls for lower income taxes for low- and middle-income earners, while at the same time reducing social benefits. Since lowering social benefits is something SD opposes, it remains uncertain what will come out of this. Various efforts will be made to promote economic efficiency and competitiveness in the form of administrative deregulation (nothing much happened after previous such efforts were undertaken). While there has been talk of reducing corporate taxes, nothing specific is included.
A series of lesser reforms are noted at the end. One is of special interest for anyone who has worked with public administration: reintroduction of a strict code of civil servant responsibility – including being penalized for giving false information.
— Richard Murray and Henry Milner
The debate in the Liberal Party
I circulated a draft of the above to several Swedish colleagues and incorporated their suggestions, most of which were minor. Here I present excerpts from my correspondence with two colleagues who disagreed strongly about the likely consequences of the new government’s taking power. They reflect the divisions within the Liberal Party.
— Henry Milner
An awkward compromise, but not a puppet government under SD
A few reflections from a – probably – dissident liberal.
The governance agreement seems to be the only possible solution to the election outcome. Until now, the growth of SD from an insignificant and extremist party to 20 per cent backing has been extremely unfortunate in that it caused an almost total refusal by all the other parties to grapple with the obvious chaos in the immigration situation. Now the centre-right parties, supported to some extent by the Social Democrats, seem to have endorsed a restrictive policy. It is a compromise and some parts seem awkward, especially to Liberals, but to describe it as a puppet government under SD (as some in the new opposition do) is just rubbish.
The campaign against the three coalition parties, especially in Dagens Nyheter, has been worse than rubbish. SD has been called a fascist, neofascist, protofascist party with Nazi roots by people who seem to think that everything nasty is fascism. There are even allegations of antisemitism – based on false interpretations of the minority laws. There are many reasons to be cautious about SD and some of its followers are simply ignorant, but unfortunately, many more than just the 20 per cent who voted for them favour a tougher immigration policy and are not put off by the party’s antagonistic message.
Listening to Social Democratic leader Magdalena Andersson, I was happy to hear something of a repudiation of the worst accusations against SD for being authoritarian. The loser of this sad story is Annie Lööf and the traditionally agrarian and now environmental-protection-focused Centre Party. Her concentration on ostracizing SD took attention away from the party’s own political program. One such attack was on the SD’s Björn Söder’s statement that the Sámi were Swedish. But in fact, Söder is right: the Sámi in Sweden are a national minority with exclusive rights. They can decide themselves if they want to call themselves Sámi or Swedes or both, but unlike the Kurds in Turkey, they are not expected to be assimilated into the majority population.
— Thomas Lunden
A surrender to the main goals of SD
The Tidö Agreement is not a compromise, as Thomas and the right-wing parties maintain. It is more or less a surrender to the main goals of the Sweden Democrats (SD). Migration, crime policy and denial of the climate threat – those are the main profile issues of the agreement. Admittedly, the Social Democrats were also influenced by the right-wing tendencies – they support allowing searches of people´s houses without any clear suspicions, more control of individuals, intruding ”trojans” in private computers, etc. – still far from what the new right-wing government is planning.
Thomas maintains that the critique the largest morning paper, the Liberal Dagens Nyheter, has presented against SD for being neofascist with Nazi roots is ”worse than rubbish.” But that is exactly true! The leadership has its roots in neo-Nazi groups in the 1980s. As late as January and February 2022, the SD’s very strategic leader, Jimmie Åkesson, could not choose between favouring Putin or Biden! But after February 24 he got quiet …
Thomas maintains that the right-wing coalition with strong SD influence was ”the only possible solution.” Well, certainly for those Liberals who identify as “borgerliga,” bourgeois, as some sort of friendly half-conservatives. But strong social Liberal leaders such as Bertil Ohlin and Bengt Westerberg never labelled themselves borgerliga – they saw their party as a third force.
Unfortunately the right-wing Liberals were able to take over the party in 2019, rejecting the possibility of forming a ”middle” force, as Annie Lööf proposed. So she was left alone to defend Liberal values and stand up against any form of cooperation with the SD. The Centre Party lost many of its traditional regional strongholds outside the big cities to the populists in SD. In my view it was not so much the liberal social values that Annie Lööf stressed that were rejected, but the rather neoliberal economic policy of the party.
Finally, on foreign policy, I think we should be more concerned. The new Conservative Foreign Minister states that Swedish policy will no longer be labelled “feminist” and will concentrate on neigbouring countries and the EU. Moreover, SD will have more influence since it will chair the justice and foreign policy committees and provide the vice-chair of the defence committee – this despite the Conservatives’ promise to keep SD away from foreign policy and defence.
— Olof Kleberg
Last word
Richard and most of my correspondents tended to side with Olof, but my own view is closer to Thomas’s. As I wrote to Olof,
Perhaps because I have been observing Sweden from the outside for 40 years, I am inclined to expect (hope?) that when it comes to action rather than words – which in a multiparty agreement are typically chosen to allow each party to interpret them somewhat differently – more moderate choices will be made. Thomas points out that the new Minister of Justice, Gunnar Strömmer, a respected lawyer and a moderate, has underlined that no law will be enacted without careful and lawful scrutiny of all aspects.
Image: Maksim Sokolov, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
On January 15, 2022, the Canadian government announced that American truckers who were not vaccinated against COVID-19 would not be allowed into Canada. A week later, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced a reciprocal ban on unvaccinated Canadian truckers entering the United States. On the same day, convoys of trucks, plastered with slogans calling for “Freedom” and the end of vaccine mandates and other public health measures taken to combat the pandemic, left British Columbia’s west coast for Ottawa. Their funding was unclear and their strategy vague, but they hoped to pick up more support on the trek eastward.
Three weeks later, the “Freedom Convoy” was the biggest story in Canada and was causing ripples around the world.¹ On Valentine’s Day, the federal cabinet invoked Canada’s Emergencies Act for the first time since it was passed in 1988. By the time this happened, central Ottawa had been under noisy occupation for two and a half weeks. The Ottawa Police Department was either unable or unwilling to do much about it. A shorter-lived but highly costly blockade of the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor had been cleared by the Ontario Provincial Police on February 12. Numerous smaller protests at provincial capitals and other border crossings occurred during the same period and afterward, albeit not with the same level of disruption.
The Convoy was divisive. So was the Trudeau government’s response. While public opinion had been turning against the Convoy as the occupation wore on, the declaration of emergency divided the country, largely along partisan lines. Initial polls suggested that about two thirds of the public supported the decision, although support has fallen since then.
The partisan nature of the split in public opinion was dramatic. Supporters of the Conservative Party of Canada and the People’s Party were overwhelmingly either sympathetic to the Freedom Convoy or opposed to the emergency declaration. By contrast, most supporters of the Liberals, Bloc and NDP supported the government’s actions. The occupation coincided with the Conservative Party’s leadership review, in which Erin O’Toole was removed, no doubt in part as a result of his decision to get his party to distance itself from conservative populist opposition to COVID-19 mandates. He is highly likely to be replaced by Pierre Poilievre, who has strongly supported the Convoy in the face of criticism by his beleaguered rival, former federal Progressive Conservative leader and Quebec Premier Jean Charest.
From our perspective, there is plenty of blame to go around. The long-run effect both of the populist upsurge and the Liberal government’s decision to use vaccine mandates and its response to the occupation as wedge issues will probably make our politics nastier and our country more difficult to govern. If Canada could ever claim immunity from the populist waves that have been washing up on the shores of other democracies since the financial crisis of 2008, its holiday from history is now over.
There is no sensible scientific debate about the efficacy and safety of vaccines. They are tested rigorously before approval. Along with antibiotics, vaccines have been an incalculable boon to humanity in its struggle against infectious disease. It is only because of our immense privilege of living in a world with a massive apparatus of scientific medicine that this could even emerge as an issue. Our grandparents faced a crueller world: all the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic pales in comparison with the constant burden of infectious disease that had been the lot of humanity since the agricultural revolution. The speedy development of vaccines based on messenger RNA in the pressure of the pandemic is a modern miracle.
Viruses do not respect individual autonomy. Precisely because no vaccine is perfect, infectious diseases can only be controlled once the population as a whole has sufficient immunity. Because the safety of each depends on the immunity of all, the evolution of new forms of antiscientific disinformation is a threat as grave as the biological evolution of new variants of pathogens. We are completely opposed to people who distort these basic scientific truths.
But however clearcut the scientific issues may be, they do not resolve the value question of how much coercion is legitimate to address vaccine hesitancy and resistance. Vaccination has always inspired scepticism and opposition, no doubt because it asks people to override basic intuitions about avoiding impurity on the basis of scientific principles that all of us who are not experts must take on faith. This was not much of a problem in the high-trust societies that emerged in the West after the experience of the Second World War. Organized vaccine hesitancy began as part of the ecologically sensitized counterculture of the 1960s, in which people were sceptical of “better living through chemistry” and enthusiastic about the natural and organic.
Ideas have migrated between hippie subcultures and evangelical and libertarian ones for decades. As the social trust of the postwar years has eroded on left and right, discredited claims such as that MMR vaccines cause autism have led growing minorities of parents to try to seek exemptions for their children from shots, sometimes leading to outrbreaks of diseases thought to have been suppressed. Long before the COVID pandemic, authorities had to wage battles with dissident health care workers about annual flu vaccines.
The perpetual crises of the COVID years have turned a counterculture into a mass movement. It is therefore unfortunate that partisan politics was injected into this issue, first by Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party and then by the Liberal Party’s decision in the 2021 election to use vaccine mandates as a wedge issue. While it is perfectly reasonable to push and nudge people to use vaccines, and to require those who work with the vulnerable to do so, there is room for legitimate disagreement over the merit of requiring everyone who works in the federal public service or boards an airplane to be vaccinated on pain of losing their job or their mobility rights. While we do not pretend these questions are easy, we regret that long-term thinking about polarization dynamics goes out the window in the political hothouse.
Questions also remain about the proportionality of invoking the Emergencies Act in response to a protest that seriously disrupted life in downtown Ottawa and involved various unlawful activities, but in which no one was hurt. The Ottawa Police Department seems to have been too slow to act, but it is not clear why that creates a federal emergency. Exceptional powers need to be used exceptionally. Pierre Trudeau’s 1970 declaration of the War Measures Act in the face of the October Crisis remains divisive half a century later, and in retrospect seems to have been excessive. It remains extremely unclear why ordinary police powers could not have addressed the Ottawa occupation.
This is not to let the “Freedom” Convoy off the hook. Genuine freedom arises out of a recognition that we live in a society in which we must each respect and recognize one another. People who live and work in downtown Ottawa were disrespected by what became an unruly street party. Some of the leaders of the Convoy – notably Pat King – clearly have ties to the racist far right. All of them failed to make basic distinctions between protest and breaking the law or seeking to overturn the government. While civil disobedience is sometimes morally justified, we do not think the “Freedom” Convoy’s cause is in that league.
The real legacy of these events will be the transformation of the Conservative Party. There has of course always been an antigovernment and populist element on the right of the Canadian spectrum, exemplified by the Reform Party and its successors and domesticated by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. The focus of this antigovernment sentiment has traditionally been public spending and taxes, along with allegedly burdensome regulation of industry and individuals. Poilievre is a part of this neoliberal tradition of right populism, as his enthusiastic embrace of hard money and even cryptocurrency makes clear.
But the Trucker Convoy brought something new into play: a more paranoid sense that the government is not just expensive and intrusive but actively out to make ordinary Canadians sick for mysterious malevolent reasons. The focus is less on economic issues and the enemy becomes urban and educated Canada generally. Traditionally left-wing themes about the “working class” and “freedom” are tied into a hostility to science and technocracy. Whether or not Poilievre really believes in this new kind of populism, he – like Bernier before him – is comfortable talking its language.
As we write, in the summer of 2022, the mandate wars have died down somewhat. There is no guarantee they will not flare up again if, as expected, there is a new wave of COVID infections in the fall and governments feel obliged to take intrusive measures again. But even if they do not, the cleavage in Canadian society exposed by sounds of truck horns and images of Red Ensigns and Confederate flags are not going away soon.
Image: From Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Written by Henry Milner and John Richards
Vladimir Putin and his admirer Donald Trump have much in common. What has become clear is that both live in worlds of their own. In Ukraine, the destructive effects of this are there for all to see. In the United States, it constitutes a not-so-obvious potential threat to democracy itself.
In late 1949, George Orwell published his bleak dystopian novel 1984. He sensed his impending death from tuberculosis and was deeply pessimistic about the evolution of geopolitics. The optimism following the Allies’ victory over fascism had quickly degenerated into an ideological impasse. In 1946, Churchill introduced the image of an “iron curtain” falling over eastern Europe.
The parallel with present geopolitics is obvious. The geopolitical optimism of the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall has disintegrated.
In a recent press conference convened by the Russian foreign ministry, Maria Zakharova, a senior Russian diplomat, was asked about 1984. She replied, “Orwell did not write about the USSR, it wasn’t about us. He wrote about the society in which he lived, about the collapse of the ideas of liberalism. And you were made to believe that Orwell wrote it about you.”¹
We are in an ideological hall of mirrors, with no obvious exit. If Zakharova has read the novel – which is doubtful – she is lying about Orwell’s intent. On the other hand, she is telling the truth in asserting a collapse of liberal ideas, now if not in the late 1940s. The liberal Russians who ran Russia in the 1990s created chaos. They presided over a dramatic rise in unemployment, expropriation of public assets by emerging oligarchs and a decline in life expectancy (from 65 to 58 for men and from 75 to 71 for women between 1985 and 1995). Boris Yeltsin yielded power to a KGB colonel who knew how to create an effective dictatorship that would enjoy majority support. Among his tactics has been near-total control of the media. The Economist has published a sample of typical of Russian media reporting on the war in Ukraine (see box).
The U.S. equivalent of Zakharova is Donald Trump’s persistent claim that liberal elites running the Democrats won the 2020 presidential election by electoral fraud. There is no credible evidence about major Democratic fraud that could have affected the results. On the other hand, there is irrefutable evidence that Trump attempted to win reelection by fraud. Perhaps, the most significant evidence is the recorded telephone call between Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Trump.² Over a lengthy conversation, Trump attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade Raffensperger to shift state vote totals sufficiently for Trump to win Georgia’s electoral votes.
The attempt at fraud is bad enough. More disconcerting is that, a year after the election, more than a third of Americans, including two thirds of Republican supporters, believe Trump’s lie. In December 2021, Ipsos conducted a professional survey on behalf of NPR. Table 1 shows results in response to the question “Do you agree or disagree voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election?”
Most Russians will never learn how much they were lied to, though they will surely realize that, however legitimate the invasion, the cost in lives and rubles will have been too high. The effects of Trump’s lies in the United States will be harder to gauge. What if the two thirds of Republican supporters who believe in Biden’s “steal” of the 2020 election conclude that the 2024 election is valid only if their side wins? The future of American democracy is seriously in doubt.
Box 1: The Putin Show and Tucker Carlson Tonight
Excerpts from “The Putin Show: How the War in Ukraine Appears to Russians,” published in the Economist on May 17:
8:00 AM
You wake in your flat in a new high-rise on the outskirts of Moscow. Your ageing mother has left a copy of Izvestia, a popular conservative daily, on the kitchen table. Scanning the front page, you encounter familiar storylines.
“My ancestors defended the Motherland from Nazism, and I will defend it too”. So says Vladimir Mashkov, a famous actor. You read that “Azov”, a Ukrainian battalion with far-right ties, has left a trail of war crimes and civilian murders in its wake. According to the newspaper, British troops created and trained the group, fostering its Nazi ideology and adherence to neo-pagan cults.
You learn that Russian volunteer medics are hard at work in the Donetsk People’s Republic. Russians are saving lives in Ukraine.
You learn that Russia’s budget surplus reached 800bn roubles, thanks to plentiful oil revenues. So much for Western sanctions.
11:30 AM
You scan your phone while at work. The trending news tab on VK, Russia’s most popular social network, points you to a channel on the “situation around Ukraine”. The official explains that it is the will of the people of southern Ukraine to rejoin the motherland, and that Ukrainian rule has only brought repression and suffering.
You see officers of Russia’s security services capturing a Ukrainian Nazi sympathiser who planned a terrorist attack on Victory Day. Early in the war reporting was triumphalist. Journalists implied the “special operation” would be concluded within days or weeks. Commentators questioned Ukraine’s statehood, warned of Nazis, accused the West of cultivating said Nazis and insisted the Ukrainian people were awaiting liberation. Many repeated one of Mr Putin’s first explanations for the invasion: if Russia had not made a preventive strike, it would have been attacked.
As the conflict has dragged on, the tone has become increasingly hysterical. The fighting is portrayed as but one front in a war with the West. Sanctions are proof of the West’s intention to bring down Russia.
Civilians in Bucha, a town north of Kyiv, were massacred by … Ukrainian soldiers. Western secret services arranged the bodies on the roads for journalists to find. Russian media “tell about a Mariupol where Russian tanks are met with flowers”.
Audiences are told that Russian troops have taken extra care to avoid civilian casualties, which is difficult because Ukrainian Nazis tend to hide in apartment blocks … why the operation is taking so long.
Russia’s existence as a nation, Russian history, Russian culture and the right to be Russian are under assault. Parallels with the Great Patriotic War tap into the memory of a righteous existential struggle against Nazism. Hosts evoke the idea of a holy war, telling viewers that God is on Russia’s side against the evil Western forces that encircle it.
6:00 PM
As you drive home, stuck in traffic along the Third Ring Road, you catch the news on the radio. The talk of biolaboratories seems fanciful, like something out of science fiction. But then so much of life since the pandemic began has been. You still aren’t exactly sure who Soros is, but if he is involved, it must be bad.
9:00 PM
After dinner, you watch a talk show hosted by Vladimir Solovyov. His monologue, delivered from a sleek studio, has a clear set of messages. The West seeks nothing less than Russia’s complete destruction, Mr Putin has the trust of the Russian people and it is time for you to show your support.
Channel One has replaced entertainment with extra current events … In place of daytime shows are programmes like “Anti-Fake”, where panellists dismantle Western “disinformation”.
Russians can still access unofficial information. Yet the bans have had an effect. Before the war, around 30% of Russians used Instagram each day. The share had fallen to just 10% by late April. Many Russians, especially older ones, do not have the means or skills to use VPNs, and Western sanctions have made paying for them tricky, too.
The Report Ends:
People tend to believe stories that reinforce their existing beliefs. Mere repetition can also make information seem more believable. In today’s Russia, those mechanisms are reinforced by violence and repression. Challenging or questioning the official narrative moves you out of your comfort zone and into jeopardy.
Of course, Donald Trump does not have Putin’s means of exercising mind control. The situation is rather one of a media environment favourable to his lies. Here we rely on some equally impressive reporting from the New York Times. The first is from a detailed study of the content of all 1,150 episodes of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News published on April 30:
When you enter Mr. Carlson’s world each night, you are among his three million-plus viewers — and part of a Fox News audience that is 92 percent white and overwhelmingly older, according to Nielsen data. They are the “ruling class.” They threaten everything you believe in. They include Democratic (and some Republican) officials, members of the media, Big Tech executives, academics, sports and Hollywood stars, and others. Many … have been attacked in dozens or even hundreds of episodes.
Not only do they want to control you, Mr. Carlson warns, they want to destroy you and your way of life. They have various ways of doing this, he asserts, including importing immigrants from the “third world” to replace you with more “obedient voters.”
Another New York Times article examines the pervasiveness of lies about the 2020 election in state legislatures:
The Times’s analysis exposes how deeply rooted lies and misinformation about former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat have become in state legislatures, which play an integral role in U.S. democracy. In some, the false view that the election was stolen — either by fraud or as a result of pandemic-related changes to the process — is now widely accepted as fact among Republican lawmakers, turning statehouses into hotbeds of conspiratorial thinking and specious legal theories … Election and democracy experts say they see the rise of anti-democratic impulses in statehouses as a clear, new threat to the health of American democracy. State legislatures hold a unique position in the country’s democratic apparatus, wielding a constitutionally mandated power to set the “times, places and manner of holding elections.”
All is far from lost, the article concludes:
In most states, the lawmakers who challenged the 2020 results do not yet have the numbers, or the support of governors, secretaries of state or legislative leaders, to achieve their most audacious aims … It is only a minority of Republican lawmakers who promote the legally dubious view that they – and not the votes of the people – can select the electors who formally cast a ballot for the president in the Electoral College.
Few events have provoked as much activity on the Inroads listserv as the occupation of downtown Ottawa in late January and February. Some participants in the discussion were on the scene in Ottawa; others observed from a distance. Taken together, their contributions constitute a running commentary on what is likely to be remembered as a defining event in Canada’s political life, whatever one’s perspective on it. What follows is a small sample of the discussion.
Philip Resnick | February 7
A History Lesson
As the blockade enters its second full week,
we discover, naive Canadians that we are,
that things are not nearly what we thought they were,
disdainful of Americans with their take no prisoners politics as we’ve been,
of Europeans who’ve so often proven their inability to get along,
of Latin Americans who’ve never quite figured out where things went wrong,
of the Chinese with their new model imperial dynasty.
Instead, we find ourselves stumbling as we go,
warily aware that the ties that bind this country together
are as thin as gossamer,
that city folk and country folk live in silos apart,
that endless harping on individual rights
can prove the bane of a functioning democracy,
that our leaders, in the crunch,
scurry to the nearest rabbit hole,
that this country proves just as problematic in governance
as the ones we’ve scorned.
Reg Whitaker | February 12
As the obscene spectacle of the Trumpist insurrection in Ottawa, Windsor etc. continues in the face of pathetic rhetoric and abject surrender by so-called policing and civil authorities, I have been increasingly struck by the generally unremarked hypocrisy that infects both right and left over protest that becomes civil disobedience that morphs into interference with the rights and safety of others and finally into outright insurrection.
There is a line dividing, on the one hand, dissent that can be accommodated by a liberal democracy from, on the other hand, forms of activism that erase that line and undermine liberal democracy itself. When the authorities style themselves as liberal and tolerant of free speech, which is of course admirable, they should be careful to note that exact line and be quick to bring to a halt “protest” actions that run over that line and threaten others and the community at large. In this case the authorities have largely abandoned any efforts to enforce respect for that line, with serious consequences for the practice of liberal democracy in the future. The lesson for any other group of people seized with self-righteous zeal about the truth of their cause, whatever it might be, is obviously “go for it.” Who cares about the collateral damage to innocent third parties or the democratic constitutional process, when the authorities will crumble in the face of your determination and selfish zealotry?
Just prior to the pandemic we had a dry run of today, only from the alleged left, in the “shut down Canada” campaign on behalf of a group of hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en opposed to the Coastal Gas Link pipeline that ended in rail and road blockades across the country. The Conservative Party then demanded blood and denounced the namby-pamby hands-off liberal response of the Trudeau government. They might have made major political gains out of this, but the pandemic intervened, shutting down the shutdowns. Today, of course, with a right-wing cause to champion, the Conservatives have hypocritically moved 180 degrees to a far-right support of the insurrectionist stance.
But leftists who demand that Trudeau Jr. emulate his father in the October Crisis and bring down maximum force on the “freedom” insurrectionists were often praising defiance of the law in “shut down Canada” two years ago. Hypocrites all.
Worse, there are ongoing defiance of the law environmental protests that continue apace with the “truckers’” mob. At Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island, near where I live, there has been an ongoing attempt, in defiance of a legal injunction, to blockade logging roads, demanding an end all old-growth logging immediately and forever, at whatever cost to the workers and communities affected by such a ban. More importantly, this is also against the express views of the two First Nations on whose lands the protests have been taking place, who have both demanded the protesters leave. The B.C. NDP government is trying to work with First Nations on whose lands logging has been taking place to develop Indigenous plans for logging, but the protesters dismiss this out of hand.
It is surely time for responsible people on all sides of the ideological divides to rein in their zealot colleagues and redraw the line that separates lawful protest and dissent and legitimate civil disobedience from actions that disrespect the constitutional process and endanger the health and safety of others. That means that when the line is crossed, authority steps in and disciplines the lawbreakers. It matters not at all whether you agree or disagree with the aims of the protestors – all that matters is the legitimacy or illegitimacy of their actions.
Frances Abele | February 12
Reg, I often agree with you and here see your point, but tonight it is very hard for me to focus on this issue. Downtown Ottawa is a long way from young environmentalists blocking roads. It’s mayhem. Food stores have been overrun by maskless gangs and have been forced to shut. Pedestrians continue to be harassed. Many of you will have heard about the arson attempt a few days back. Tonight on Bank Street a resident spotted two individuals testing whether using handcuffs would work to lock the doors on an apartment building. Fuel is being openly carried to vehicles and generators on Wellington and other streets. It’s one big dance party, with an edge of hostility coming from some yelling “Freedom” from the back of pickup trucks.
Of course I don’t know that the arsonists are part of the invasion mob – or who obeys which of the six reported “organizers.” What I can say is that it appears that members of the Ottawa Police Service are aiding and abetting them. So, really, what else can the people live here do, but ask for federal aid that gets around the “command” of the Ottawa Police Service. As far as I can see, that’s the Emergencies Act. Any other suggestions?
Reg Whitaker | February 12
Frances,
Ottawa is indeed in chaos and insurrection and, yes, absolutely a public order emergency should be invoked under the Emergencies Act, since the excuse for a police force have surrendered or are complicit with the insurrectionary mob. That the Prime Minister will not do so is appalling. Apparently he wants no more to be a real PM than the Ottawa police want to police.
My only point was to suggest there is a more widespread complicity in this breakdown of civility, order and the rule of law than today’s headlines would indicate.
André Binette | February 12
If Trudeau does not invoke the Emergencies Act within three days, he will completely lose control. The Ottawa police chief is clearly in over his head. This is actually worse than the October Crisis. The FLQ were a handful of amateurs. This is much more organized and widespread.
Gareth Morley | February 13
While the protests are a nuisance – in both the legal and the ordinary sense – it is over the top to compare them to kidnapping a foreign diplomat and killing a senior member of the elected government.
André Binette | February 13
The FLQ never talked about overthrowing a democratically elected government and they never bore swastikas. They did not use children as human shields. They did not have an irrational view of science.
Although the violent methods they used were unacceptable, they had some public support because they denounced serious and verifiable social injustice. Cries of freedom in this case are far less credible.
I think it is over the top to deny these basic differences.
Frances Abele | February 13
It’s true, thank goodness, that no one has been kidnapped and killed yet. But what is happening here is much more than a nuisance.
It’s true that the crowds have often been cheerful – BBQs, hot tubs, music, etc. But the angry bully boys are there too; people have been harassed and spat upon. As far as one can tell from close outside observation, there are some very bad people blended in. I wish I could estimate the proportion, but I don’t really have a basis for that.
Ottawa is a small city. Lots of people – including, by design, low- income people and recent immigrants – live near Parliament Hill. There have been semi-trailer tractors blocking their streets for over a week, idling and sounding their air horns virtually all night. Imagine being a frail senior or a recently arrived family with small children. Small businesses have closed because their staff are being menaced, sometimes with racist slurs. People who cannot afford to lose even a week’s pay have been unable to work for much longer – this is Week Three. There is a pretty widespread impression growing among people who live here that the police will not protect us.
Numerous spokespeople for the occupiers – and they have tended to be the rightwing ones – insist that they are not leaving until their demands are met.
So what do you suggest?
I am sure that in the longer term some sort of effective dialogue needs to be cultivated. Maybe not with the Proud Boys etc. (outside my wheelhouse to know how that could work), but clearly there are hundreds of other people who have joined them in Ottawa because they wanted to. I think they look so happy because they feel solidarity and they feel heard. The consistent slogan is “freedom.” Why do they feel like they don’t have it? Why are they not troubled by the uglier aspects of the message? Why is it so exhilarating to cause so much pain to fellow citizens? It’s complicated and very frightening.
Philip Resnick | February 13
The kidnappings of both James Cross and Pierre Laporte were serious threats to constituted authority, whatever André Binette may believe. Was the reaction of the Trudeau gouvernement excessive? The War Measures Act was a heavy weapon to wield, and 400 or so were caught up in the arrests that followed. But Pierre Laporte was murdered, and it took months for the authorities to finally track down the house where Cross was being kept and work out the deal which allowed the kidnappers exile in Cuba in exchange for Cross’s release.
As a graduate student at the University of Toronto at the time, I was passionately opposed to the proclamation of the WMA. But with hindsight, I note two things: (1) There was no attempt to prevent the pursuit of sovereignty by nonviolent means. Indeed, the Parti Québécois went on to win the 1976 election, and subsequently those of 1981, 1994, 1998 and 2012. (2) Two referendums were held, one in 1980 the other in 1995, with the PQ government determining the question, though with the fate of Canada as a whole on the line. And the federal government and the country as a whole went along with this.
In short, if Quebec is not independent today, it is not for lack of trying by the PQ and others, nor because of the proclamation of the WMA during the October Crisis.
None of this is meant to excuse the shocking lack of leadership to date by Justin Trudeau and the federal government in the trucker convoy challenge that has paralyzed downtown Ottawa for over two weeks as well as the major border crossing between Alberta and the United States. I wish he had a quarter of the backbone of his father.
André Binette | February 13
As a young man at the elite French-speaking Montreal college his father also attended, Justin Trudeau would have encountered young men and women who expressed resentment at Trudeau the Elder’s actions. He would have also likely seen a film celebrated in Québec, called Les Ordres, which has contributed to shaping collective memory of the October Cisis. That film is about the imprisonment, without any accusation of wrongdoing, of nonviolent artists and intellectuals.
There are about 200 survivors from that dark period. There are now mythical stories about their time in prison. I heard many harrowing tales. I was part of a team of lawyers who sought recognition of wrongdoing by the federal government in Superior Court in Montreal last fall. It so happened that the judge, who is considered a safe pair of hands by the federal Department of Justice in sensitive cases, was a former teenage friend of mine in Ottawa. He was exceedingly courteous and commiserating, striking just the right note, but of course the result was expected. He would not turn his court into a historical commission of inquiry into federal state secrets.
Frances Abele | February 13
What happened this weekend in Ottawa:
1. There is labour action. The Ottawa District Labour Council and the Public Service Alliance, along with several community groups, organized a counter-protest march on Saturday. Looked like a couple of thousand people. No violence.
2. This morning a truck convoy left the occupiers’ baseball stadium camp, planning to join the protest on the Hill by driving north on Bank Street. They were stopped by 25 community people (a dog-walking group) standing on the road at Bank and Riverside. Those people tweeted asking for support, and within a couple of hours there were over 1,000 people. The convoy-stopping group were polite and firm. They spoke to people in each of the convoy vehicles, and within a few hours had convinced all of them to go home, after surrending their gas cans, flags and decals. Apparently some of the people in that convoy had no idea that the protest was not supported by Ottawa residents. The counter-protesters also explained their concerns to the police who were standing around. Early on, the police told the counter-protesters to get off the road. They said no, politely, and raised the issues we have all had with the failure of police to protect people in Ottawa. Politely. Eventually the police worked with the counter-protesters to allow convoy vehicles to leave once they surrendered their flags etc. and promised not to join the demonstration by Parliament Hill.
3. Saturday night on Wellington Street and area was party time – mayhem as usual. Drinking, loud music, dancing, with no permits, of course, for any of it.
4. Our mayor, apparently acting on his own initiative, negotiated a crazy deal with Tamara Lich, one of the occupation leaders, under which the occupiers would be allowed to stay on Wellington if they moved off the residential streets. Not sure this will happen, as (a) there is no more room on Wellington for more trucks, and (b) Lich is already calling “the media” and Watson liars and apparently walking away from the deal.
5. We were all spooked by the news out of Peterborough that a truckload of guns (no bullets apparently) was stolen.
6. Let me repeat – the trucks and all the rowdiness are on Wellington, right in front of Parliament Hill, the PMO, etc.
7. It is extremely hard to know what is up with the Ottawa police, except that clearly they are not vigorously protecting us.
Harvey Schachter | February 14
Justin Trudeau, for all his fiery rhetoric and relatively quick response to the pandemic, has been a cautious prime minister. We’re still waiting for a decision on Huawei 5G, even though it would be easy to give. He had a lot of pressure from wise Liberals to concede on Ming but he let things play out.
He does let things play out.
He falls back, when not on political rhetoric, on process, and there are process issues here. The War Measures Act was formally requested by the Mayor of Montreal and Premier of Quebec. A protest has due process requirements; an insurrection, less so. But hot tubs at an insurrection?
I have been thinking of Mackenzie King in recent years as I watch Trudeau. I remain fond of Frank Scott’s poem:
The height of his ambition Was to pile a Parliamentary Committee on a Royal Commission, To have “conscription if necessary But not necessarily conscription”, To let Parliament decide – Later.
Not quite Trudeau. Different people, different times. But Trudeau in action usually seems more W.L.M.K. than Pierre Trudeau, although Pierre Trudeau knew how to stall as well.
In the late afternoon of February 14, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced at a specially called press conference that the Emergencies Act was being invoked.
Frances Abele | February 14
I’ve been listening to the press conference. Strikes me as a measured response. All over Ottawa, I hear sighs of relief. Citizens here have been calling for cutting off the funding and insurance for over two weeks.
I find myself in the odd position of appreciating Brian Mulroney (who is responsible for the new Act) and Justin Trudeau for judicious use of it. Maybe the only day in my life this has happened. I guess an occupation will do that to you.
Philip Resnick | February 14
His Father’s Son
Of W.L.M.K.,
F.R. Scott famously wrote,
“Do nothing by halves,
Which can be done by quarters.”
This of a man
who had promised a version of medicare back in 1919
and delivered only dribs and drabs
of social reform
during his long tenure in office.
And what might one say about J.T.,
who waited weeks and weeks
as the occupation festered
and border crossings were besieged
before finally acting,
but still afraid to let the military
play even a minor role?
“Why be half his father,
when a quarter would suffice?”
Reg Whitaker | February 15
Despite complaints from civil libertarians, leftists and environmentalists warning of an alleged slippery slope to authoritarianism, the government has offered what I take to be a reasonable rationale for proclaiming a public order emergency. The conditions are all met and the threat level takes on real meaning with the arrests and seizure of an arsenal of weaponry at the Coutts crossing. The so-called Freedom Convoy has a political or ideological agenda it seeks to impose upon Canada by threatening force if necessary, in the course of which it has already inflicted huge economic losses, not to speak of terrorizing and intimidating citizens of Ottawa. Local police have proved utterly inadequate or unwilling to cope with the challenge (the resignation today of the Ottawa police chief confirms this) and extraordinary federal powers are required to compel everyone from the police to towing contractors to simply do their job, which they have signally failed to do so far.
Gareth Morley | February 15
I don’t want to weigh in on any legal issues. I question the strategy though. What the government should be doing is splitting the extremists from the mass of people who dislike Trudeau and want to see the mandates loosen. This seemed to be happening but this declaration will almost certainly reverse that. It will vindicate the extremists in their fantasy about holding back a totalitarian government and legitimize that fantasy among the 30 per cent or so of Canadians susceptible to it. I can’t see what has been gained to make that worth it.
Frances Abele | February 15
Gareth, I think Reg is right. If you had been in Ottawa for the last 19 days, you would know why it was necessary. The police were not enforcing the law. There is lots of confusion about why and no doubt blame belongs on several heads. At this point I don’t care. To get the people who are terrorizing the downtown communities out of the city, a credible force was needed. Because of the powers Reg mentions, the solution need not be violent. Cutting off the money and insurance will help a lot.
I agree we also need to think about the aftermath, and especially understand better why the people who poured into the city each weekend to support the hard core were motivated enough to do that. It seems that they just don’t believe the news – not Global, not CTV, not CBC and certainly not me. They have been schooled in suspicion and mistrust. We really are toast as a democracy if we can’t find a way out of this.
Gareth Morley | February 15
I would like to understand how this is worse than, say, the Stanley Cup hockey riots in Vancouver. It was important to react to those in a way that didn’t make things worse afterwards. The B.C. government tried to come up with punishments that involved accountability but weren’t criminogenic.
The convoy was splitting and was losing its support among the much larger group that dislikes the mandates and thinks Justin Trudeau is the face of a woke authoritarianism that disdains them. I don’t think you have to share this perspective to understand it. I just fear that order was winning and Trudeau threw that away for a performative political victory.
Arthur Milner | February 15
Over the years, I haven’t seen many comments denouncing Trudeau for authoritarianism. More likely elitism (wokeness?) and insults that imply vacuity, inexperience and weakness. To some people, there is no greater insult than “drama teacher.”
He’s now being called authoritarian and the like for bringing in “heavy-handed legislation” against “peaceful protesters.” But in the long run, which accusation is more damaging to democratic government – weakness and an inability to maintain order; or authoritarianism?
Reg Whitaker | February 15
Gareth,
You are stretching an analogy well past the breaking point.
The Stanley Cup riot was a one-off tied to an a single event, the Canucks losing to Boston. Like January 6, these convoys are a scattered, ragged but semi-organized insurrection set on overthrowing government (that’s what they have said repeatedly). As with January 6, despite their patent inability to actually pull off a violent revolution, they (a) may well try again, perhaps with better organization, if not stopped dead now; (b) pose an intolerable burden of intimidation and fear on the majority of the population they have targeted; and (c) can inflict multibillion-dollar damage on the economy if their blockades continue and grow. For all these reasons, it was straightforward for Vancouver police to go easy and assume the rioters would return to being relatively law-abiding citizens in the days following. No such assumptions can be made about the politicized wingnuts of 2022.
Nor have I never heard that any of the Vancouver rioters were financed by multimillion-dollar donations from right-wing sources in the United States and Canada bent on building resistance to the liberal democratic state.
Philip Resnick | February 16
The Abyss
Watchman, what of the night? — Isaiah 21:11
The abyss would seem to be as wide
as the country’s raging rivers,
each side knowing all too little of the other,
the one convinced of the disdain
with which those within city walls
look down on their condition,
though they labour in the heat and cold
to keep their kinsmen well supplied
with the necessities of life,
the other side adjusted to the comforts
and discontents of urban living,
with a certain insouciance in navigating
a global age’s shifting values.
A gap that two years of pandemic with its restrictions
has only widened,
as some of the freedoms and ease of movement
we all took for granted
were slowly chipped away.
One side now flies the flag
as a symbol of defiance,
the other the same flag
as a reaffirmation of the country’s underlying values,
as each awaits the watchman
to announce the ending of the night.
Gareth Morley | February 16
When conservative Canadians see Trudeau as authoritarian, it is in the sense that they think he wants to coercively impose an upper-middle-class urban morality on everyone. This is what “virtue signalling” means, I think. It is particularly galling because he doesn’t seem like a morally serious person, but someone who was handed everything and just talks his way out of consequences. A rich kid who leaned all the right things to say, but one who is going to impose a narrow provincial ethic in the name of universal morality.
I hasten to say that I don’t share this perspective. But I do get why his sense of superiority is grating.
By next week the protest will have fizzled. For the protesters this will have been a great success. A small group with little popular support for their actions (though they expressed the feelings of many that Canada and the provinces had been too stringent in applying pandemic constraints) managed to attract the attention of the city, country and world for three weeks.
It is media attention that makes all the difference. There have been many protests here and abroad, some much larger than this one, that got a fraction of the media attention. They got it because they used big trucks and other vehicles to disrupt, in Ottawa and on the bridges. Had they simply sat in in front of Parliament Hill or provincial legislatures without vehicles they would have won little media attention and fizzled on their own.
It surely isn’t difficult to draft and pass legislation to make using vehicles to disrupt normal activities so costly in terms of fines, loss of permits and jail time if necessary to prevent this in the future.
Frances Abele | February 20
I agree with you about the trucks, Henry, and also the remedy.
But there are other lessons to be learned.
1. I have been unsettled by the way in which far-right nutbars maintained leadership of the occupiers, which numbered more than 5,000 on the weekends. How is it that that many people were not unsettled by swastikas and the statements of leaders preaching sedition? Something to understand there.
2. We have to think about the U.S. influence. I watched as false news was created here in Ottawa and picked up by Fox and countless right-wing social media – for example the case of the woman (not) trampled by a police horse. It did not help that the New York Times got events seriously wrong, so wrong so repeatedly that I have cancelled my subscription. Their “take” too fed the right-wing imagery. All this shows that we are not really separate from the dumpster fire that is U.S. domestic life. So what is to be done?
Arthur Milner | February 20
The police action on the Hill, which I’ve spent a lot of time watching, was pretty great. Very calm, ordered, patient – but in two days they cleared Wellington Street. (When the cops smashed the windshield of a big truck, it was a pleasure to see a great many other big trucks pull out.) Clearly, the cops learned from the disastrous G20 experience. The calm, slow, methodical action on the Hill required a great show of force, with cops from a many jurisdictions. From what I understand, the emergency legislation expedited the participation of various police forces.
Everyone acknowledges the participation and leadership of far-right individuals and groups, and also U.S. participation and influence, but we seem reluctant to acknowledge the participation and leadership of religious extremists. Three “experts” on political extremism, just now on CBC Sunday Magazine, never mentioned religion as a motivation of the Freedom truckers. Would that be impolite? Do people occupying for religious reasons have greater rights under the Charter than people occupying for political reasons?
Clearly the occupiers had been assured that what they were doing was legal and there was no way the police would intervene. The three-week occupation reinforced their beliefs. Most, it seems, were absolutely stunned when the police actually intervened. Religious or secular, delusions run rampant.
It will be interesting when various bodies review mistakes made and why the Ottawa Police and administration were paralyzed for so long. My suspicion is that a woke Chief of Police combined with many racists among the police rank and file led to inaction.
Frances Abele | February 20
Look, folks, the occupiers are not truckers. Please stop perpetuating this myth, which does not help us understand what happened and indeed is still happening. Ninety per cent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, the Canadian Truckers Association early on condemned the occupation in very strong terms, and for the last three weeks a surprising range of working truckers tweeted their opposition to the occupation. As a social group, people who own those big rigs, or are trusted to drive them, are intelligent and well informed. They need to keep working – and certainly cannot afford to take three weeks off.
From what I have been able to see, Arthur is quite right – a substantial chunk of the occupiers are people from big-box churches who are deeply confused about which country they live in and about science. They seem quite prone to breaking into tears when confronted with information, and indeed some were evidently shocked to find themselves on the wrong side of the law. I have a hunch that is who brought their kids.
Then there are the people it is hard to like – mainly young men, and some women, who probably do not have steady jobs. They bulked out the disco dance parties, took their shirts off to dance in front of the cameras (why?), harassed women and young service staff, bullied pedestrians, and are happy to hate Justin Trudeau. The mockery of Justin Trudeau, for instance their tendency to refer to him as “Justine,” does look like class resentment to me, but also plain old male rivalry – he’s pretty, he’s privileged, and he’s in charge. (Is that why they kept taking their shirts off?)
But: I saw also a lot of funding and a lot of organizational skill behind this. On the first day, I saw a woman and her kids in a car, by appearance working-class, flying a beautiful big flag on an expensive pole. How did she afford it, and so quickly? There were tons of those around town. Throughout there was a steady supply of fuel, food, saunas, entertainment and, yes, cash money, until that was cut off. Much more than the people we could see, I am worried about the people we did not see, who funded this.
There did seem to be people, especially those who came on weekends, who were simply fed up with the restrictions. Some might have been baseline libertarians. Others are ordinary Conservatives, exasperated with how we have all been living, and not convinced by the science. It’s hard to tell how many people signed on because they wanted to press all governments to relax the public health measures. Honestly, though, I don’t think people in this last group would have stayed for the show this weekend. They are people who usually obey the law. It is very unfortunate that Candice Bergen, Pierre Poilievre & Co. are condoning lawlessness in an effort to corral the votes of this group.
I probably missed some fractions of the occupiers, but these are the most obvious ones to me.
Geoff White | February 20
As is Frances, I am an Ottawa resident, pleased to see the occupiers peacefully dispersed.
As to the virtues of invocation of the Emergencies Act:
1. It enabled the assembly of a concentration of police forces from across the country and gave them enforcement powers without jurisdictional complication.
2. Organizers were deprived of financial and physical assets, which was vital, not only in taking resources away, but in punishing organizers and participants in a way they will remember. Their confiscated assets may be available to pay for some of the damages they caused.
3. Combined with the city’s and province’s declarations of emergency, invocation of the Act injected a necessary quality of urgency and purpose into the imminent police action.
Listserv contributors may wish to criticize the particular judgement call of invoking the Act, but I think it should be judged on its positive consequences. The required inquiry and debate may identify failings leading up to the occupation and identify any overreach if any. But I do not imagine that the door to casual future invocations of the Act has been opened.
An incoherent rabble’s occupation of Canada’s capital was effectively defused and dispersed, to the relief of the vast majority of this city. It is often the restoration of order and the experience of being restrained that encourages careful reflection. The animus against government is not of the sort to be changed by reasoned argument alone – or even at all.
Joe Murray | February 20
The unified command drawing officers from the RCMP, OPP and local forces in many provinces including Ottawa, Hamilton, Edmonton, Vancouver and Quebec did a very professional and commendable job in ending the protest in Ottawa.
We’ll find out later exactly how many external officers were used compared to the 1,800 requested by but not provided to the Ottawa Police in the weeks leading up to the invocation of the Emergencies Act. We also need to understand more of the backroom discussions between the police services and three orders of government that were involved in the long delay in commencing the operation.
Given the “success” of the Freedom Convoy demonstration tactic of blocking roads with hard-to-remove vehicles, we need to review the toolkit available to the Canadian state to respond. Is it really necessary to use the biggest warhammer in the national security toolkit to deal with some trucks on city streets?
When the main charge against the leaders of the group that caused the Emergencies Act to be invoked is the property crime of mischief (yes, mischief!) we have to wonder if the law and institutions and personnel and preparations are fit for purpose.
The optics of lending some of the Army’s tow trucks might have been awkward, but still preferable to forcing tow truck operators to provide services. A couple of bases stock them, and it’s only a ten-and-a-half-hour drive from one of them in the Maritimes to Ottawa. There were likely other legal means of enforcing contractual compliance of the firms on retainer by Ottawa. Governments should purchase tow trucks for civil powers to have on hand when needed, as they do with Bailey bridges.
Gareth Morley | February 20
Geoff may be right, but I still don’t see why this couldn’t have been done with more active local policing. People have been writing reports about better coordination between Parliamentary security, Ottawa police and the RCMP for decades. Ontario’s Civil Remedies Act provides for ways of going after property said to be instruments of unlawful activity, if that was truly necessary.
The big problem is that the Emergencies Act polarized what should have been a local law enforcement issue and also sent the international signal that we are prepared to suspend the normal operation of law over what almost any country in the world would regard as a trivial amount of disorder. I recognize that this sounds dismissive to Ottawa residents, but I find the comparisons to even the FLQ crisis (which itself was overreacted to) to be hyperventilating.
The PMO saw this as a good wedge issue and wanted J.T. to look tough. I honestly don’t believe there is a more serious justification for it.
Frances Abele | February 20
Gareth, the occupiers were openly preaching sedition, threatening to hang the Prime Minister and flying the Confederate and Nazi flags. None of us could know how well armed they were. (So far the police report finding only an unknown number of long guns in their possession.). It is surprising to me that you feel confident in judging that none of this warranted federal action through the Emergencies Act.
I frankly care a lot less about how we look to imagined international observers than how the crisis was dealt with here. I am sure that the future inquiry will find that the Ottawa police should have acted more quickly and that the Mayor, City Council and Police Services Board should have too. But they did not. They seemed to be paralyzed.
Arthur Milner | February 20
“When the main charge …” Joe wrote, is “mischief (yes, mischief!) we have to wonder if the law and institutions and personnel and preparations are fit for purpose.”
In 1968, 114 of us were arrested for occupying the Simon Fraser University Administration Building. We spent the night in jail.
We all snickered when we found out that we were to be charged with “public mischief.” Then we found out it was an indictable offence that came with a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison. In the end, most of us pleaded guilty to the summary offence of mischief and paid, I believe, a $250 fine.
So perhaps if the crime had a name worthy of 14 years in prison, the Emergencies Act would seem more fit for purpose.
Reg Whitaker | February 20
The use of the Emergencies Act was bound to be controversial. None of the objections strike me as terribly persuasive.
From a number of sources, some of whom are reasonably well-informed, I have heard the criticism that the Act is overreach and unnecessary since normal police powers were already adequate for the task and had succeeded in clearing the Windsor and Coutts border blockades. I find this quite unpersuasive.
The refutation of the “unnecessary” argument applied to Ottawa lies in the shocking but undeniable fact that the main police force with jurisdiction to control the Ottawa occupation, the Ottawa Police, had failed abysmally to deliver on even the minimum of their job description, to provide policing of unlawful activity and ensure the safety and protection of citizens and their property. That failure was reflected in the resignation of the police chief, resignations and turmoil on the Police Services Board, and behind this a Mayor and City Council that sometimes resembled the random flailing of a chicken with its head cut off.
The reality was that in the absence of the federal government taking charge, there was no prospect of a coordinated multilevel police response to the unendurable and unjustifiable occupation of the nation’s capital by a mob of honking, defecating yahoos, backed by well-organized and well-financed right-wing hate networks, many from Trump’s America. When those who actually claim to be insurrectionary call for the overthrow of a democratically elected government and its replacement by a “citizens’ government” (i.e. them) and camp out, in their intention permanently, right outside the Prime Ministers Office while waving “FUCK TRUDEAU” signs, there is surely a national public order emergency, which accords closely with the definition of such in the Emergencies Act.
Let me specify a number of areas where the powers of the Act have proved effective and crucial to the resolution of the crisis:
1. Federal coordination of three levels of policing and a larger number of policing and security agencies. The bumbling ineffectiveness of the Ottawa Police on their own was in stark contrast to the remarkably well-disciplined, well-organized and well-planned removal of the trucks and protestors from central Ottawa. As a quasi-military operation this was extraordinarily successful, with a minimum of force deployed and that only in response to aggression from a few protestors. Decapitation of the leadership, patient herding of the protestors into places with escape routes open to those who would leave and arrest for those resisting, getting the trucks out while taking down full information on licensing and ownership for future action, etc. – all this might in theory have been carried out by the Ottawa Police. But everyone knows they were incapable of doing it on their own, without the additional resources and coordinated planning and direction of the whole operation from the federal level.
2. Securing a perimeter around the central core and strictly controlling entry and exit from that perimeter. Without emergency powers, freedom of movement is a right. Police cannot normally tell person X they are allowed to proceed into central Ottawa but person Y is not allowed, simply on the say-so of police. But under the Act they have that power and it was very effectively used to control the situation.
3. Use of the financial power to freeze bank accounts and seize assets of funding organizations, revoke truck licences and potentially seize the vehicles. These were weapons that preempted many from staying on the line out of fear of personal financial catastrophe if they persisted, and therefore did much to defuse the entire protest. But such powers are not readily available without emergency legislation – and rightly so, as few would wish to see the state holding this kind of power over people’s livelihoods.
The latter points to a saving grace of the Emergencies Act, its reviewability and its temporary nature. The invocation of the Act has to be approved by Parliament, and reviewed by Parliament which can at any point revoke its application – not an inconsiderable matter in a minority Parliament. The Act is also reviewable by the courts, and it is clearly specified that its use is subject to the Charter of Rights.
Finally, the Act goes out of existence automatically after 30 days if not renewed. Anything the government might want to extend would then have to be passed like any normal legislation through Parliament.
If these powers are excessive, there is ample opportunity to restrain their use, hardly justifying the charges of tyranny. The Emergencies Act is temporary, it’s working well, and it will be gone shortly, along with the emergency.
Gareth Morley | February 21
We had to declare a national emergency to
1. Procure tow trucks
2. Get police agencies to talk to one another
We should not care about the long-term consequences of lowering the bar for emergency. Canada will not make any diplomatic complaints about emergencies being declared in similar circumstances. We should also not care that this has unified the antiregime elements and divided those in support.
The October Crisis seems like a good benchmark because it was clearly more serious, an emergency declaration had more and broader support at the time, and it still seems to have been an overreaction in retrospect. Innocent people were caught up in it. But the Prime Minister got to look like a tough guy, so that’s what’s important.
Harvey Schachter | February 21
Gareth,
You keep coming back to this point about the Prime Minister looking like a tough guy.
He certainly came under attack initially for not doing anything – for leaving a leadership gap. (And for his rhetoric, perhaps intended to be tough-guy, perhaps just defensive or jabbing at the Conservatives).
But he insisted he would never call in the military, not exactly tough-guy. And he didn’t. Heck, calling in the military is standard tough-guy stuff and easy to do.
After what many people considered too long a time for inaction, he brought in the Emergencies Act, with some consideration to not being overly broad.
Hardly tough-guy. More like moving from supposed inattentive dupe to action-oriented leader.
I’m not saying that tough-guy thoughts never come up in the PMO. In fact, unfortunately, too many people consider tough-guy leadership as equivalent to leadership and so politicians respond. But it would have been easy to be tough guy a lot earlier rather than a wimp for nearly three weeks.
Arthur Milner | February 21
Also, Gareth, you write “Get police agencies to talk to one another,” using emphatically dismissive language.
From what I understand, it would have been possible to bring to Ottawa other police forces – the Sûreté du Québec, for sure – but it would have taken longer. How much longer, I don’t know. And I’m not sure about the RCMP, the Ontario Provincial Police or Ontario municipal police forces. Maybe someone could find out.
But it wasn’t about “talking to one another”; it was about bodies on the ground.
Gareth Morley | February 21
You don’t need to invoke the Emergencies Act to get police departments to shift bodies to one another. It happens all the time. Powers under the Criminal Code are given broadly to peace officers.
Ottawa has had issues about coordination around policing of protests at or near the parliamentary precinct. That is a longstanding issue. I am not at all dismissive of talking between the RCMP, OPP, Ottawa Police and the Sergeant-at-Arms ‘office. If I was dismissive, it was of this being a justification for invoking the Emergencies Act.
Putting armed forces on the streets would have been worse, no question. But lending tow trucks would not be a big deal either.
I apologize to those who think it is unacceptably cynical to see this as politically motivated. Declaring an emergency is an inherently political act. It seems to me to have been a counterproductive one from the point of view of getting together a broad front of a party of order, something that I think was happening and that this foreclosed.
Emergency powers are necessary but they need to be used carefully. I don’t see that here.
Reg Whitaker | February 21
With respect, Gareth, I have to say that you are trivializing this very serious matter, trivializing both the threat and challenge posed to order and the case for emergency powers.
There are reasons to see the threat of the “Freedom” convoys as at least as serious or arguably more serious than the FLQ threat in 1970. The latter certainly posed a threat to the safety and lives of individual diplomats and politicians, and to the legitimacy of a Quebec government wavering in the face of terrorist intimidation. The convoys have already caused somewhere in the vicinity of $1 billion in lost business over the border, the discovery of weapons and plans to kill RCMP officers, and an occupation of the nation’s capital by a self-described insurrectionary force that was not only undermining the legitimacy of the national government unable for three weeks to put this challenge to rest, but also making the lives of ordinary Ottawa citizens intolerable – with no guarantee that if firm action were not forthcoming, the threat would not gather force in various new locations.
The remarkable transformation of Ottawa policing from bumbling ineffective ineptitude (and/or perhaps barely concealed sympathy for the insurrectionists) pre-Emergency to the remarkably professional manner in which the mob and their trucks were cleared out on the weekend is itself the best testimony to the need for the emergency powers, which, yes, do include compelling tow truck operators with contractual obligations to the city to do their job which they had been refusing to do. In an occupation anchored in heavy trucks blocking off entire streets and areas, this is manifestly not a trivial matter.
Both in 1970 and in 2022, there was a clear potential for a crumbling of authority and the decline of the rule of law in the face of an uprising ready to pounce on and exploit state weakness. In 1970 and today, that potential has been resolutely reduced by firm action. The difference is that in 1970 the War Measures Act was a blunt instrument bringing down maximum force without calibration, with no accountability and no framework of constitutional rights to protect the targets of state actions. The situation in 2022 is different, a calibrated time-limited legal instrument with accountability to Parliament and subject to the Charter of Rights.
I don’t see any long-term diplomatic consequences for Canada. The next time a foreign government declares an emergency that is manifestly a threat to public order, brings down a legal response that is time-limited, proportionate and accountable, and polices the crisis with the same kind of professional and measured methods deployed in Ottawa, then Canada will have nothing to criticize. If foreign emergencies don’t meet this standard, we will be just as free to criticize as we have ever been.
Joe Murray | February 21
Reg dismisses the argument that “the Act is overreach and unnecessary since normal police powers were already adequate for the task and had succeeded in clearing the Windsor and Coutts border blockades.” The argument is actually that existing laws are sufficiently powerful, not that their use was already successful. It’s necessary to prove they aren’t sufficient in order to declare an emergency under the Emergencies Act and still be acting within the rule of law. A government could introduce and pass a new law, but that’s not what Trudeau chose.
Reg also maintains that “the powers of the Act have proved effective and crucial to the resolution of the crisis” in a number of specific areas. The claim that the powers are crucial, meaning it couldn’t be done without them, is relevant.
The first area is “federal coordination of three levels of policing and a larger number of policing and security agencies.” It is not clear at all that this couldn’t happen without the declaration. Second, Reg cites “securing a perimeter around the central core and strictly controlling entry and exit from that perimeter.” This has been done legally numerous times without the Emergencies Act, including in Quebec City and Toronto. Finally, he mentions “use of the financial power to freeze bank accounts and seize assets of funding organizations, revoke truck licences and potentially seize the vehicles.” I believe, having scanned it today, that FINTRAC legislation could be used for a threat to national security, which can exist and be investigated without declaring an emergency under the Emergencies Act.
Reg Whitaker | February 21
Joe notes that police have secured perimeters “legally numerous times without the Emergencies Act, including in Quebec City and Toronto.” Quebec City and Toronto were one-off international conferences. Canada is obligated to guarantee the safety of Internationally Protected Persons, which describes foreign delegates to conferences hosted by Canada. The RCMP as the federal police force have particular responsibilities in this regard but responsibility extends as well to other forces, provincial and municipal, which have jurisdiction at the conference site. Exactly what authority this conveys is a matter of dispute. Suffice to say that for such conferences, a lot of leeway has been given policing to define security perimeters, but just for that conference. Charter challenges around unreasonable restriction of freedom of movement are possible.
The Emergencies Act is also subject to Charter review, but it clearly gives short-term power to establish enforceable perimeters, which was done in Ottawa which otherwise lacked the special authority of an international conference. Without that authority, protestors might well have had a valid claim for freedom of movement and the perimeter would have been rendered useless.
Joe also suggests that “FINTRAC legislation could be used for a threat to national security” to take coercive financial measures without invoking the Emergencies Act. Actually it has long been argued persuasively that FINTRAC lacks sufficient resources and sufficient powers to do an adequate job of tracking and stopping money laundering and tracking terrorist funding under normal conditions. Out here in B.C., a commission of inquiry and our provincial government have identified and strongly criticized the feds’ weakness on money laundering. FINTRAC’s powers are very likely to be augmented in the near future with amendments to the mandating legislation. For now, they were not up the job at hand – hence the need for emergency powers.
Obviously there are arguable and plausible points to be made against invoking the Act. Some of these were made in the debate in the House yesterday. I just think that the arguments for invoking time-limited accountable emergency powers are rather more plausible, and under the circumstances of an insurrection against democratic government and an intolerable burden upon peaceful law-abiding citizens of Ottawa: better safe than sorry.
Smoky orange sky over the Golden Gate Bridge as 2020 wildfires rage on in California.
If there was ever a time to reconsider the logic and purpose of the carbon tax, it is in the wake of the severe weather events that caused so much damage in British Columbia in 2021.
Proponents of the present “revenue neutral” carbon tax, where the revenues are dedicated to rebates or the reduction of income and other taxes, see the carbon tax solely as a means of providing incentives to reduce fossil fuel use and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A revenue neutral carbon tax addresses the criticism that a carbon tax is primarily a “tax grab”; however, it ignores the fact that the GHG emissions generating the carbon tax revenue in fact impose costs, which government directly or indirectly will have to pay.
Encouraging households and business to reduce emissions is critically important. And imposing a carbon tax, as virtually all economists will tell you, is an economically efficient way to do that.¹ But the expenditures government must make to deal with the widespread damage caused by severe climate events, like the November flooding in British Columbia, are huge. And the investments that need to be made in public infrastructure and services to enhance the preparedness and resilience of utility, transportation, municipal and other government services to mitigate the damage of future events are even greater.
The obvious question is: Why shouldn’t the costs of mitigating and addressing climate-related damage be paid by the activity most directly responsible – use of fossil fuels that generate GHG emissions?
The present federal carbon tax is $30 per tonne of CO2 and generates nearly $3 billion annually. The federal tax is scheduled to rise to $50 per tonne in 2022 and reach $170 per tonne by 2030, in $15 per tonne annual increments. With a revenue neutral carbon tax, none of the current or increased revenues from higher tax levels will be available to finance the ever-growing costs governments face as a result of the climate change we are experiencing.
Pictured: The town of Lytton BC, before and after being destroyed by fire during the heatwave that set an all-time Canadian heat record of 49° Celsius. Before image from Province of British Columbia, via Flickr. After image from Anna Richards.
The November “atmospheric river” produced record rainfall in 48 hours over much of British Columbia. One consequence was massive flooding in the Fraser Valley. The mayor of Abbotsford has estimated repair of local dikes and compensation for destroyed infrastructure in and around his city will reach $1 billion. Probably, the cost of repairing and strengthening damaged rail and road infrastructure elsewhere in B.C. will amount to an additional $5 to $10 billion. As an initial estimate, the costs generated by record rainfall in B.C. are several times the current annual carbon tax revenue. That estimate ignores the climate-related costs of more severe forest fires, deaths due to heat waves and climate-related costs elsewhere in Canada.
Right now, financing remedial expenditures will come either at the expense of needed and almost universally underfunded health, education and other public services or through increased income, sales and other taxes. Ottawa has initiated a revenue neutral carbon tax schedule on the legitimate rationale that such a tax will reduce GHG emissions. But there is an equally legitimate rationale, based on the principle of “polluter pay,” to increase the carbon tax sufficiently to cover climate-related costs We shouldn’t be asking hospitals and schools to forgo needed funds, or workers and business to pay higher income taxes, to pay for these costs. We should be expecting those most directly responsible to pay.
We need a carbon tax per tonne of CO2 at least as high as required to cover the costs reasonably linked to GHG emissions. This in turn requires a more rapid increase in the carbon tax than the federal government is currently planning: annual increases of $30 instead of $15 per tonne over the 2023–2030 period. And it requires abandoning the revenue neutral policy in order to dedicate the carbon tax revenues to offsetting climate change–related costs.
With annual increases of $30 per tonne, the carbon tax would reach $290 per tonne by 2030. At that level, the tax would induce both significant substitution away from fossil fuels and significant revenues from remaining fossil fuel use.
You don’t need economic theory and price elasticity estimates to justify the tax. You just need the common-sense requirement that costs must be paid for, and those responsible should pay. You might find a lot more understanding and support for a rapidly rising carbon tax schedule if the revenue was targeted for climate-related costs.
Owen Lippert lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he has served as head of two US AID democracy projects. He was senior policy adviser to the minister responsible for the Canadian International Development Agency in 2007–08. John Richards is co-publisher of Inroads and works regularly in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is not as poor as many sub-Saharan African countries (although less prosperous than India and much less prosperous than most countries of southeast Asia), not recently subject to civil war (in contrast to Sri Lanka and Nepal), and not in possession of nuclear weapons (whereas Pakistan and India are). Despite being the world’s eighth most populous country, more populous than Russia, Japan or Mexico, it is a country that the world ignores – except when disaster strikes. Then, briefly, the international media note the large number of people killed in the cyclone or drowned in the capsized ferry. Late last year a garment factory fire that incinerated more than 100 workers made headlines; this spring, it was the collapse of the jerry-built eight-storey Rana Plaza, a human-made disaster that killed a minimum of 400, probably 800, garment workers.
For anyone who makes the effort to visit and learn about Bangladesh, there is heartache. Five per cent of the world’s poor are within one day’s drive from Dhaka. Dhaka itself is among the world’s ten most populous cities, and was recently ranked by The Economist as the world’s most “unlivable.” Notwithstanding its ranking, nearly 20 million choose to live in Dhaka rather than the villages from which they or their ancestors migrated, and Dhaka has become over the last half century the cultural centre (with Kolkata in the neighbouring Indian state of West Bengal) of a major world language and cultural tradition.
Bangladesh demonstrates the best and worst in postcolonial politics and development policy. The best is the role played by very large NGOs (notably BRAC and Grameen Bank) in delivery of health and education services and microfinance. Thanks largely to them, Bangladesh’s population health indicators are second only to Sri Lanka’s among South Asian countries. The worst is the routinely corrupt, ferociously partisan politics that in the minds of many have discredited the value of democracy and given rise, as in Pakistan, to support for the army on the one hand and fundamentalist Islamist organizations on the other.
Politically, things do not change, a commedia dell’arte of similar political troubles played out again and again – rearranged, perhaps, but constant. The Awami League, the party currently in office, is led by Sheikh Hasina, daughter of the country’s first prime minister, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. While corrupt and administratively incompetent, Sheikh Mujib deserves credit for having led the country to independence in the 1971 “war of liberation,” allowing Bangladeshi to escape the equally corrupt but even more violent politics of Pakistan. He was assassinated in 1975. The Bangladesh National Party (BNP), the other large party, is headed by Khaleda Zia, the widow of another hero of the war of liberation. Her husband, who ran the country after the death of Hasina’s father, was assassinated in 1981. Since 1990 Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia have each given two terms of questionable government to the long-suffering people of Bangladesh. It is not a coincidence that Sohel Rana was able to build the Rana Plaza where and how he did, nor that two engineers of Savar municipality ignored the building’s cracks and declared it safe the day before it collapsed. Rana is a prominent local leader of the youth wing of the governing Awami League.
Talleyrand is reported to have said of the restored Bourbon royal family in the 1820s that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. He would have said the same of the political dynasties that have dominated Bangladeshi politics since 1971. They conduct politics as if in a zero-sum prisoner’s dilemma game. Each consistently attempts to inflict maximum pain on its opponent in the hope of winning it all. When the ensuing social chaos escalates to intolerable levels, either the army steps in or people console themselves that perhaps the parties, by repeating the same mistakes over and over, will finally learn to practise politics differently.
The last time the army intervened was in 2007. It cleaned up a rigged voters’ list and in late 2008 organized a reasonably fair election. Sheikh Hasina won. Now, five years later, the two major parties are again in campaign mode prior to the next election, scheduled for January 2014.
Sheikh Hasina has accused Khaleda Zia of disloyalty to Bangladesh, and invited her to emigrate to Pakistan. In turn, Khaleda Zia accuses Hasina of being an Indian lackey. Speculation has predictably started that the army will have to step in as in 2007. Were the campaign limited to verbal abuse, that would be politics as usual. However, Hasina’s electoral tactics include an unanticipated novelty: an international war crimes tribunal.
In 2009 she created this tribunal to prosecute selected “razakar.” The razakar are Bangladeshi who allied themselves with Pakistan in the 1971 civil war. Some of them participated in the brutal Pakistani army slaughter of Bangladeshi and, for understandable reasons, are despised. The tribunal may be labelled “international,” but it is a creation of domestic law and the choice of suspects to prosecute has been made by government-appointed judges. Conveniently, those chosen for prosecution are virtually all associated with Jamaat, the leading Islamist party, which is in an electoral alliance with the BNP. Jamaat can count on only 5 to 10 per cent of the vote, but that will likely be the vote margin between the BNP or Awami League in 2014.
We will never know exactly why Hasina established the tribunal. Her father feared that prosecution of razakar risked a dangerous polarization of the new country. Four decades later, maybe she thought that justice should be rendered even if long delayed. Maybe, even in 2009, she saw the tactical benefit of posing as the champion of a secular Bangladesh and embarrassing the BNP and Jamaat for harbouring old men who, in their youth, committed wartime atrocities.
The tactic has not worked as intended. Instead of rallying the majority behind the Awami League, the tribunal has aggravated the deep division in many Muslim countries between those (largely urban, more prosperous and more literate) who favour secular modern institutions and view political corruption as an unavoidable cost of progress and those (largely rural, poorer and less literate) who believe that the only solution to the rampant corruption and random brutality of the Bangladeshi state is creation of a moral Islamic order.
In February 2013, the tribunal found Abdul Kadr Mullah, a Jamaat leader, guilty as a young student leader of complicity in serious crimes and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Unexpectedly, the sentence catalyzed a “Bengal spring” – an equivalent of Tahrir Square in Cairo two years earlier. The media described it as a revival of the “Spirit of 1971.” Rather than accept Kadr’s sentence as justice too long delayed, tens of thousands, primarily young people mobilized by social media, gathered in Shahbag Square in central Dhaka and insisted that life imprisonment was not enough. “Hang the razakar” echoed throughout Dhaka from Shahbag Square and rallies held elsewhere in the city.
The Shahbag protesters maintained a nightly vigil and after several days Hasina decided to oblige – only to discover that, given the terms of the legislation establishing the tribunal, she could not. The law allowed appeal of a verdict but not a sentence. The law was quickly amended and applied retroactively. For good measure, the amended law enables a ban on organizations that support the razakar, a provision targeting Jamaat.
The battle has been joined.
The “Shahbag bloggers” have issued thousands of emails damning Jamaat for its pro-Pakistan sympathies and the links of its aging leaders with war crimes in 1971. Jamaat has damned Hasina for suppressing the free expression of Islam in politics and the Shahbag bloggers for blaspheming Muhammad and the Qur’an. Since the announcement of the verdict in Kadr’s trial, Jamaat has called repeated “hartals” – strikes intended to stop all commercial activity in the cities. Enforcement of Jamaat-called hartals falls to Chhatra Shibir, the well funded Jamaat youth wing. During hartals buses and other vehicles have been burned, violent demonstrations organized, highways blocked. The police have reacted aggressively. Jamaat has accused Hasina of using the police to enforce a secular one-party state. The death toll has mounted on all sides.
The Islamist movement in Bangladesh has money (some of it from wealthy donors in the Gulf states buying piety in poor countries), strong organizations and little restraint when it comes to using brute force and targeted killings. The Hindu, Buddhist and Christian minorities have suffered a series of house burnings, personal attacks, destruction of temples and the inevitable land-grabbing.
At time of writing (in April), the most recent major event has been the “long march” organized by an Islamic organization linked to Jamaat. Hundreds of thousands of the faithful marched on Dhaka from all corners of the country. Their demand is new legislation to prosecute those who blaspheme. The chant of the faithful was “God is great – hang the atheist bloggers.” Hasina has now dampened her rhetoric on behalf of a secular Bangladesh and arrested four bloggers on suspicion of blasphemy, but has refused to alter the existing law’s penalties. Other bloggers have shut down their sites. Does a bigger rally for hanging bloggers than one for hanging Jamaat leaders mean an Islamic revolution is imminent? Probably not.
Though Bangladeshi political culture places great faith in the 20th-century tradition of mass protests including hartals, the tactic that Gandhi invented in battling the British, the meaning of such events has passed into ritual. For four decades, all parties in Bangladesh have relied on violent street demonstrations and hartals. The parliament plays a marginal role. On the one hand, the youthful composition of the crowds in Shahbag and their determination not to be suborned by any political party symbolize a refreshing rejection of politics as usual. On the other hand, their demand, death for those who fought with the Pakistani army, merely repeats the politics of violent confrontation.
Human rights organizations, one might expect, would object to retroactive changes in the law to please the street as a poor way to create a secular society respectful of the rule of law. There admittedly do exist careful bloggers questioning both the Awami League and Jamaat. But it requires personal courage that borders on the suicidal for those inside the country to take on Hasina and the Islamists simultaneously.1
What of the international media? With the honourable exception of The Economist, no major international newspaper or magazine has undertaken serious reporting and analysis of the tribunal and its unintended consequences.
What of the tribunal judges themselves? They clearly have limited independence. This appears to be a tribunal that can issue only one verdict, guilty, and one sentence, death.
Sheikh Hasina and her followers cling to past fears and live in apprehension of the military (the Raj as reflected in Pakistan’s army), while Khaleda Zia and her followers cling to past prejudices and live in suspicion of India (the Hindu face of the British Raj). Neither seems to have accepted that times have changed and new approaches are necessary. In fighting the vaporous ghosts of colonizers past, neither is free. Both are vulnerable: one to disaffected urban youth who may no longer be willing to rehash old battles, and the other to increasingly aggressive “Islamist” youth who are spoiling for a fight.
Four decades after the war of liberation, Bangladeshi political elites have yet to come to grips with the meaning of political independence, the obligation to assume responsibility for their country’s social and political developments. When in opposition, political leaders treat those in power as agents of outside colonizers to be resisted with absolute ferocity. The government of the day is always portrayed as some combination of British imperial authoritarianism and, depending on who is in power, the malign self-interest of either Pakistan or India. Violent protest is justified as continuation of the struggle against concealed colonialism.
This was a view popularized by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who thought individual examples of moral courage had no effect on the outcome. In our own era, however, Nelson Mandela has taught the lesson that freedom starts from within. The physical follows the spiritual and an individual’s moral courage does make a difference, indeed the critical one. Once you are free in your head, you are free.
Meanwhile, until Bangladesh’s leaders understand that responsibility is the price of independence, their country will not see peace.
Photo: Albert Hirschman (left), German Jew, economist, and lifelong anti-fascist, pictured at the 1945 war-crime trial of German general Anton Dostler. Image via Wikimedia. Edited by Inroads Journal.
A basic income recognizes unpaid work – and it’s cheaper than poverty.
Albert Hirschman lived a fascinating life. A German Jew, he fought in the Spanish Civil War and later helped the Emergency Rescue Committee in its efforts to help people like himself – Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst – escape Nazi-occupied Europe. He too became an émigré, making it to the United States. The political economist and moral philosopher found himself at Berkeley before joining the U.S. Army and the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. Hirschman ultimately ended up at Harvard and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.1
In The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), Hirschman argued that supporters of any big new social policy idea can count on being assailed for three reasons. As his title implied, he was principally analyzing attacks from the right – scarcely surprising in light of his early life and general political leaning. Yet when it comes to mounting interest in a Basic Livable Income (hereafter BI), the assault is just as likely to come from the left.
Hirschman described reactionary arguments as based on jeopardy, futility and perversity: jeopardy in that the proposal would imperil other goals, futility in the sense that it wouldn’t work, and perversity because it is undesirable and generates unintended consequences.2
All three of these categories come into play in arguments against BI. With respect to jeopardy, hand-wringing by mild social democrats and many liberals reflects a defensive attitude – stoked by four decades of attacks by market fundamentalists – toward what remains of the paternalistic welfare state. This is backed by a canard: the old debating tactic of setting up a straw person, in this case the claim that BI boosters believe that a cash payment will solve all our woes. No thoughtful BI advocate ever uses this “silver bullet” argument.
Futility arguments describe BI as simply unaffordable. End of story. This even though there are myriad proposals for funding BI, the devil being in the details – a crucial one being reversing neoliberal attacks on progressive taxation via thoroughgoing tax reform.
Perversity arguments suggest that BI would give indolent slackers something for nothing. More on this below, but think for a moment of those of us who stand to get something for nothing when an inheritance comes our way. Canada is among a small number of rich countries with no inheritance tax. The deficit is inching toward $400 billion. The iconoclastic former bank economist Jeff Rubin figures that taxes will be going up: “The question is, who is going to pay them?”3
Here we address two of the principal objections to basic income: that it’s just too costly and that it will make people lazy.
We can’t afford it
This argument usually comes from the right. From this perspective, any (apparently) new government spending that does not support their own objectives is, ipso facto, bad. This critique fails to consider a brutal fact: we already pay mightily for poverty.
In 2019, Feed Ontario (formerly known as the Ontario Association of Food Banks) conservatively estimated that the annual financial cost of poverty in Ontario is somewhere between $27.1 billion and $33 billion. Its estimate of the total bill included health care costs, justice system expenses and the opportunity cost of forgone tax revenue. These costs are compounded many times over when children grow up poor. Others have estimated that the cost of reducing poverty is less than half of the estimated cost of doing nothing.4 Of course, none of these estimates considers the incalculable cost of the human suffering associated with poverty.
Perhaps it goes without saying that the way governments spend is always a matter of political priorities and tradeoffs. (Apparently, we can afford to buy pipelines to transport oil and subsidize the oil and gas industry, although the future of the planet depends on a rapid move away from a carbon-based economy.)
However, different kinds of BI have different costs. Just as the pandemic hit, the Basic Income Canada Network used the Statistics Canada SPSD model to estimate the costs of three basic income proposals. It found that with even mildly progressive tax reform, the current level of taxation is sufficient to provide all those who need it with an income floor of $22,000 for a single person aged 18–64. Beyond that, costs would increase dramatically to either include seniors or provide a basic income to all Canadians.
In the “negative income tax” model covering those ages 18–64, those in the top half of the income distribution would pay more, while all those in the bottom half would benefit from redistribution. Reallocation of funds from social and disability assistance and several refundable and nonrefundable tax credits means that the proposals would be almost self-financing.5 This model of basic income is different from a “universal” model – that is, a payment all citizens receive and then pay back if they don’t need it. Instead, the negative income tax would be universally and unconditionally available to all who need it – meaning anyone below an income cutoff – just as Medicare is available to all who need it. We support this BI model. Given the costs of poverty and the savings we could reap by eliminating it, we argue that this approach not only is affordable but would save us money in the longer term. As if we need an economic argument to resolve a moral and ethical issue.
It will make people lazy
Interestingly, this argument against BI seems to come from the right and the left. And while it rarely comes from those who have experienced poverty themselves, it is sometimes used by people living in poverty or close to it in an effort to show their own worth and avoid a stigmatized category, the undeserving poor. This can create moral distance from “those” people who would surely take advantage of a BI by loafing. The working poor are sometimes vociferous in expressing such beliefs: “I may be poor, but I have a job.”
Right-wing politicians have used this trope consistently in an era of growing job insecurity. In 1995 Mike Harris’s market fundamentalist Common Sense Revolution campaign in Ontario leaned heavily – and successfully – on a simple work-for-welfare message.
Zygmunt Bauman, like Hirschman an émigré intellectual, distinguished between producer societies, in which people’s identities were bound up with their role as workers, and the consumer societies that have developed since the 1970s. In a producer society, he noted, the poor could redeem themselves through displays of frenetic activity such as keeping a spotless home, thereby separating themselves from the “undeserving” poor who, apparently, were poor because they were lazy. In a consumer society, those living in poverty generally have no way to redeem themselves, because social status depends on consumption, which requires money.6
Living in poverty is hard and stressful work in and of itself. Juggling bills. Struggling to figure out how to put food on the table. Walking to and from medical appointments, the food bank and the grocery store. Moving house without a vehicle. Filing endless paperwork. When asked if BI would make him lazy, one participant in a Queen’s University research project, who was homeless, replied,
I don’t even have a chance to be lazy, right? I gotta carry around a big huge bag. I’m kind of sleepwalking from place to place. People that think it’ll make us lazy, I would say, try to come down here… it’s pretty rough. Even coming down for, you know, a couple hours a day, for a week, would be probably too much… I don’t think it would make us lazy. I think it would make us grateful.7
Yet the old moral objection of “laziness” lingers on. Never mind that an estimated 70 per cent of those living in poverty and 65 per cent of those who are food-insecure have paid employment – it is just inadequate to keep them above the poverty line and out of food insecurity. With the rise of the gig economy and precarious employment, many of the working poor have two or three jobs and still can’t make ends meet.8
In the aftermath of the 2008 global meltdown, McMaster University researchers, in collaboration with Toronto’s United Way, published a series of groundbreaking studies under the rubric of Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario (PEPSO). Their investigation of growing inequality focused on the new labour landscape, which has been marked by a catastrophic decline in working-class power and the rise of humiliatingly precarious labour.
The data were conclusive. Based on more than ten thousand surveys and a hundred interviews over the course of seven years, the studies highlighted the alarming emergence of polarized income during a period of sustained economic growth. A split-level labour market had fractured Canada’s industrial heartland. The social scientists abandoned their usually cautious tone, describing how the “shocking portrait” and “stark picture” of the regional labour market had become clear. Only half of working adults reported being in classic “full employment” – the secure, full-time jobs with benefits that so many White working-class men had been able to secure in the postwar era that was now clearly over.
The data showed young people struggling with the brave new world of work as well as longstanding discrimination against women – particularly racialized women. PEPSO found that, among those who managed to get 30 to 40 hours of weekly work, women were paid 88 per cent of men’s annual wages. Racialized women earned 67 per cent of men’s wages. This was especially important in the Toronto-Hamilton area, where half the residents had been born outside Canada and 43 per cent were racialized.9
When Doug Ford’s new government cancelled the Ontario Basic Income Pilot (OBIP) a few weeks after coming to power in 2018, it destroyed the opportunity to systematically understand labour force attachment while on BI. During the election campaign, Ford had promised to see the OBIP through,10 while saying, “I believe in letting the market dictate.”
When researchers from McMaster University surveyed a convenience sample of about 21 per cent of the southern Ontario participants in the OBIP, they found that 80 per cent reported improvements in overall health, with 86 per cent reporting less stress or anxiety at home, 83 per cent reporting less depression, and 86 per cent feeling more positive about life in general.11 Given the high rates of mental illness associated with poverty and food insecurity,12 mental illness could easily be confused with “lazy.” The McMaster researchers quoted a 37-year-old woman who compared her mental health before and during the Pilot. Before the Pilot, she said,
(My mental illness) would really cause me to stay in bed or drain me of any will to do anything. When I got basic income, the stress was gone, and it was just easier … Knowing I had a purpose, and being able to make a plan, because the extra financial resources allowed me to do that, does something profound to your mental health.
The researchers also found that those who were employed before joining the OBIP continued to work while receiving basic income. For some, the security of basic income allowed them to take a chance to move to higher-paying, more secure jobs with better working conditions. They concluded, “For a significant number of participants, basic income purportedly proved to be transformational, fundamentally reshaping their living standards as well as their sense of self-worth and hope for a better future.” Hardly a recipe for laziness.
The results from the McMaster study fit with the results of every other BI pilot or cash transfer program. When people in poverty receive unconditional cash, they know how to spend it to best meet their needs and improve their situation. In the 1970s Mincome experiment in Manitoba, only two groups decreased their attachment to the workforce: new mothers stayed home with their infants and young men completed high school rather than dropping out to take a job to help support their families. Other research has shown that low-income Canadian families that receive cash transfers in the form of the Canada Child Benefit increase their purchases of childcare, food, rent and transportation, and decrease their purchases for self-medication – tobacco and alcohol.13
Conventionally, academic models of public policy change assert a rational process by which policy is made, and changed, on the basis of sound, objective scientific evidence. Increasingly it is clear that such models are naive; policy is more often made to fit existing ideological frameworks. Elected officials who believe that government and taxation are inherently “bad” and that the private market will fix everything will not be inclined toward measures that support public goods. Scientific “evidence” rarely serves to counteract ideologically driven beliefs; in fact, some research even shows, counterintuitively, that evidence that doesn’t fit with our existing ideological framework strengthens our existing beliefs, rather than changing our minds.
The idea that giving people money will make them lazy is a predictable outcome of the logic of the ideology of the rational, competitive economic man. This doctrine has it that “if people got what they needed without being forced to compete for it, then there wouldn’t be a reason for them to be disciplined. Therefore, it is immoral to give people things according to their need rather than pushing them to work for it. It is an incentive for people to be less than what they can be, and that does them a disservice. We are all rational, and if we build a system where it is rational to be lazy – then that’s the society we’ll get.”14 According to this logic, paid work means dignity.
Never mind that dignity is inherent in human nature. Or in unpaid labour, for that matter. Or that economics – particularly the neoliberal model, hegemonic for some four decades – has been built on highly questionable assumptions. For the most part, human actions are not the result of rational decisions based strictly on individual self-interest. That’s why we’re prey to a massive advertising industry designed to entice us to buy stuff we don’t need.
Recognizing unpaid work
Feminist economists have for decades pointed out that “the economy,” as measured in the GDP, ignores a whole other economy – invisible, taken-for-granted and usually uncounted. Canada is an exception. In the late 20th century, Statscan conducted national time use surveys, attempting to account for households’ unpaid labour. In 1998, Canadians spent more than 30 billion hours on unpaid labour, equivalent to an average of 24 hours per week for everyone over the age of 14 and accounting for the equivalent of 33 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product. This includes almost two billion hours of unpaid volunteer and community work. Almost two thirds of this unpaid labour was carried out by women.15
In a witty excoriation of conventional economic logic, feminist writer Katrine Marçal asks, “Who cooked Adam Smith’s dinner?” She points out that Smith failed to recognize that his mother cooked his dinner every night out of love, not self-interest. Her unrecognized labour allowed him to write the treatises that became the basis of the field of economics, including his famous notion that the butchers, brewers and bakers provided dinner not from benevolence but from self-interest. (Smith was also a moral philosopher whose Theory of Moral Sentiments emphasized empathy – rarely a factor in the equations of today’s econometric models.)
In the early 1970s, when the idea of a guaranteed annual income was popular, some feminists argued for “wages for housework” to recognize women’s unpaid household “labours of love.” White liberal feminists rejected the idea, being more concerned with access to the labour force, equal pay and abortion rights. Steeped in the doctrines of “economic man,” they actively sought to distance themselves from unpaid care work in the home.16
Yet although it is commonplace to explain that the word economics is derived from the Greek oikos, meaning home, mainstream economics has generally been uninterested in what happens at home. This despite gradual and encouraging recognition of household economics. The dominant approach tends to erase universal realities. Our welfare depends on bodies – human bodies that get hungry, sick or injured. Bodies that bleed, reproduce and age. Bodies that need sleep, cleaning and care. And let’s not leave out soul, that indispensable emotional and spiritual care – “Body and Soul” being more than a jazz standard immortalized by Coleman Hawkins.
Feminists have argued that the model of rational, self-interested economic man is an escape from these messy realities – an escape from dependency, insecurity, need, weakness, vulnerability, emotion. If you account for all the jobs a stay-at-home mother does, her median salary would have been about $235,000 CAD in 2019.17 A basic income would of course never adequately compensate for the unpaid labour of Canadians, but it would be another step in recognizing its invaluable contributions to families, neighbourhoods and communities, as well as “the economy.”
A century or so ago, Bertrand Russell – himself a proponent of a basic income – and John Maynard Keynes imagined that the day would come when we were wealthy enough that we would no longer need to work. We could focus instead on living a “good life.” Keynes calculated that by 2030, we would only need to work 15 hours per week, devoting the rest of our time to enjoying life, creating art, engaging in philosophy and admiring the lilies of the field (Lord Keynes was also likely counting on someone else doing the housework and cooking). In his famous essay “In Praise of Idleness,” Russell argued that “a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and … the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”18
Real change has often centred on ideas whose time has come, ideas commonplace today that were once scorned as utopian. An end to slavery. Votes for men without property. Votes for women. Votes for Indigenous people. Universal health care. In his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde wrote that “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at … Progress is the realization of Utopias.”19
Elaine Power is a professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Her research focuses on poverty, food insecurity and health. Jamie Swift is a writer based in Kingston and the author of a dozen books, including The Vimy Trap (2017) with Ian McKay. Together they have written The Case for Basic Income: Freedom, Security, Justice, published in May by Between the Lines.
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