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Chris Selley: First Nations chiefs make a much-needed case for Canada

The meeting at Buckingham Palace was a reminder this country wasn’t just born yesterday

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A fascinating scene played out Wednesday at Buckingham Palace, where the King met a delegation of chiefs from the Treaty 6 First Nations, from what today we call Alberta and Saskatchewan. Charles had been invited to the Fort Carlton Provincial Historic Park, near Duck Lake, Sask., for the 150th anniversary celebrations of the original Treaty 6 signing this summer; Charles responded with his own invitation to the chiefs.

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The chiefs were there representing their own people’s interests, of course; headlines from the meeting focused mostly on the prospect of a sovereignty referendum in Alberta, which Indigenous groups argue would be unconstitutional, not just ill-advised.

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“We made (Charles) aware of the separatism issue in Alberta and the threat to treaty it represents,” Grand Chief Joey Pete said of the meeting. “He expressed his concern and committed to learning more.”

Notably, First Nations point out, Treaty 6, signed in 1876, predates the existence of Alberta. So a hypothetically independent Alberta couldn’t just search-and-replace “the Crown” with “the Republic” in the treaty and be done with it.

Canada’s history with First Nations is one of co-operation just as much as it is of conflict. But it was still striking to see the chiefs doing a better, more principled job standing up for Canada than many “settlers” can manage nowadays.

It’s bad enough when someone wants to break the country apart, justifiably or otherwise. Canada is many things, but irredeemable isn’t one of them. Most countries would kill to have what we have: a generally tolerant and reasonable population, natural resources bursting out of the ground, the world’s largest consumer market directly to our south and access to every other consumer market via two oceans. Were Alberta or Quebec to vote to leave Canada, it would be a truly absurd snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory.

It’s therefore doubly annoying, in a way, that while there’s no realistic prospect of that happening, we have to keep talking about it. The latest Leger poll of Albertans puts support for sovereignty at a paltry 17 per cent; its latest poll of Quebecers suggests 26 per cent support leaving Canada. People will tell you the 1995 Quebec referendum and Brexit looked like failing until the last minute, before wafer-thin defeat and victory, respectively, but neither movement overcame deficits anywhere as large as Leger reports. Not to dismiss all the grievances underlying the sovereignty movements, but 17 per cent and a loonie won’t even buy you a cup of coffee in this economy.

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First Nations opposition is a given in sovereignty discussions in Alberta and Quebec alike. Days before the 1995 referendum, under Grand Chief Matthew Coon Come, the Cree in Northern Quebec held their own vote on sovereignty. The result was 96 per cent against.

Alberta-separatist spokesman Jeffrey Rath has been trying to butter up First Nations. “We’ll triple the amount of money spent on the Indigenous people of Alberta, through a constitutionalized revenue-sharing program,” Rath promised at a recent event. “We’ll lift them out of the abject poverty that Ottawa has left them in, in an embarrassing fashion, for 100 and some odd years.”

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That sort of language is probably terribly unwise when dealing with First Nations, who would understandably bristle not just at paternalism (“we’ll lift them out of poverty”) but at grand promises from governments in general. Rath, a lawyer who represented Alberta First Nations in disputes with the federal government before the relationship soured, ought to know this. But then, Rath isn’t a very good spokesman. The collective response from Treaty 6 chiefs and other Indigenous leaders to the Alberta separatism movement amounts to an amused snort. As it should.

Canadian politics is often maddeningly juvenile and flighty, its separatist politics all the more so — and its anti-monarchist politics, as well. (There are roughly 50 op-eds out there suggesting we “abandon the monarchy” for every one that suggests which alternative system we should choose.) But the meeting at Buckingham Palace was something serious, a reminder that this country wasn’t just born yesterday and can’t be dissolved tomorrow, no matter what anyone says in a referendum.

The federation isn’t just some bush party that coalesced on a Saturday night, where everyone’s free to go home with whomever they please once the keg runs dry. There are signatures, treaties, royal seals, intricately negotiated constitutional workings. And it’s not a matter of 10 provinces and three territories managing their own relations with Ottawa; it’s a partnership between them all, and indeed with First Nations.

It’s appropriate, I suppose, that people whose history in North America goes back many thousands of years, rather than hundreds, should remind us of this — and entirely appropriate they should do it in London, in the presence of our head of state.

National Post cselley@postmedia.com

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