Did you know "idle no more" means you're actually gonna do something?

Another piece of Idle No More nonsense showed up on my Facebook feed. Or is it? This seems entirely backwards from the stated goals of Idle No More.

The offending propaganda was a photo with the caption "Since 1978, over 14 billion dollars have been taken out of our traditional territory. Yet my family still goes without running water." (A quote from Melina Laboucan Massimo, Lubicon Lake Cree.)

So... isn't it about time you got a job, or something?

Just for kicks, your correspondent googled Lubicon Lake. One of the humorous tidbits I found is that the Lubicon Cree claim they never signed a treaty and therefore... what, exactly? But never mind that for now. More to the point, if you never signed a treaty, why are you protesting for the implementation of the treaties? And if you're displeased with your living conditions, why on earth would you want a more literal application of the treaties? Oh wait, they want to return to "the spirit" of the treaties. Of course the purpose of the treaties was to facilitate integration of the indigenous populations and become gradually obsolete by the attrition of those meeting the requirements of the treaties. So now they're freaking out because "the white man is trying to assimilate them" while at the same time freaking out that they're "second-class citizens" and don't have the wealth and opportunities of said white man. (It should be noted also that the Chinese, who were subjected to significantly nastier terms than the indigenous people AND were consistently paid less, are thriving, and you don't hear them bitching.)

This brings us back to defining what exactly the Aboriginals want, which is difficult since they have no clue themselves. They want the spirit of the treaties but not any of the results intended by the treaties; they want more money while preventing any kind of development near them; they want to be more equal without letting go of the privileges they enjoy over everyone else; they mostly have no clue what is in their own treaty, let alone everyone else's; and most of all they don't want to have to do anything about it. Except shout and create badly-spelled Facebook pages.

So back to the Lubicon Cree. Lubicon Lake is about 110 km east of Peace River by road. It's also 278 km west of Fort McMurray as the crow flies, but there is no through road, so driving to Fort McMurray for a job takes 731 km (most people will drive three times as much to get to Fort Mac, mind you), around a giant irregular U of roads running through High Level, Peace River, Slave Lake, and Fort McMurray itself. All along and around that U, resource industries are thriving, and so are the people who work in the resource industries. Inside the U, on the map, are shaded areas marked as various indigenous preserves, and nothing else. Inside the U is exactly what the Aboriginals are demanding: plenty of undeveloped land to enjoy their "traditional lifestyle." Except of course, they want nothing to do with their traditional lifestyle. They want to live in houses, buy clothes and food from the store, watch TV, access healthcare, and bungle education. Of course all this costs money. Currency. Specie. Something you can only obtain by producing an economic surplus and trading it to the outside world. That is not part of the Aboriginal plan, Idle No More or not. Instead they're funded almost entirely by the Government of Canada, plus resource royalties. Received wisdom tells us that Aboriginals are poor because evil white people parked them on worthless land. This is patently false, but since they neither use the land nor let others use it, it hardly matters that the land in question is extremely rich. (And before I forget, I should also mention that claims by the Lubicon that Fort Mac messes up their water is passing odd considering that Fort Mac is hundreds of kilometers downstream on the Peace / Wabasca drainage system. But that's all right: cause-and-effect thinking is another White Man evil.) We also know that they're poor and miserable because the Government of Canada is shafting them. Notwithstanding the fact that they receive vastly more benefits from said government than the rest of us, including prescription drugs, dental, vision, free post-secondary tuition, housing, all their local infrastructure, and pretty much all the jobs in their communities. Even contractors are generally contracted to the government, or more rarely to resource industries.

Now you may wonder exactly why the Government of Canada has to pay for all the infrastructure for them, when it doesn't for the rest of us. Because you see, Aboriginal communities generally do not levy property taxes. It would be pointless anyway since in theory no one may own land in said communities, and in practice all the money in the community is funnelled through the local government anyway, so the amount of money on hand would not increase by levying property taxes. So with no property taxes, infrastructure spending is impossible, except as provided by donations from the Government of Canada. Humorously, the Aboriginals generally demand "self-government". This is prima facie absurd since they have no revenue-raising ability whatsoever and therefore can never be a government. It's also absurd in that the services whose failure has been most public in recent years were those administered by the local governments under the myth of "self-government", for example, water systems, which are often locally administered since it's not too difficult, and are very inadequate in many communities. And, for added surrealism, when the effects of their bad administration of these "self-government" systems become costly, they blame... the Government of Canada. So "self-government" essentially means that the Government of Canada is responsible for the costs and consequences, but the crooked local administration makes the decisions. Badly.

Ultimately, what has always been missing from Aboriginal reasoning is the understanding that wealth does not come from government as a hand-out (by any other name): rather it is the synergy between producers that creates wealth AND government. Though I suppose that when you have neither producers nor synergies, government hand-outs look like manna from the heavens.

Your correspondent suddenly forgot what else I was going to say, but it doesn't matter anyway. The problem remains and will remain the same: the Aboriginals want to live like middle class Canadians, call it their "traditional lifestyle", get more money from the Government of Canada, do whatever they want with it, call themselves "a sovereign nation", and have no economic development anywhere near them. The fact that this is blatantly impossible is obvious when you actually state it in plain language, but dressed up in propaganda and shouted melodramatically to people who have none of the socio-economic data, it does make a good tear-jerker.

"Idle no more" but still just as ignorant

"Smart goals" are supposed to be Specific, Measurable, Realistic, and tied to a Timeline. Native protests are generally none of the above, so your correspondent normally pays no attention to them. However, thanks to years of aggressive Oliver Twist-esque branding and the advent of Facebook, Natives can now rally literally dozens of slacktivists to their cause. One of my now-former Facebook friends (an educated blonde of Dutch descent with not a drop of Native blood, mind you) has been enthusing over this "Idle No More" affair for some time, and last week, being on vacation in Ottawa, offered to "take our messages to Stephen Harper" as she would be joining the Idle No More dog-and-pony show on Parliament Hill.

At first I thought it was merely grandiose on her part. Protesters on Parliament Hill rarely get to speak with Stephen Harper, and incoherently obstreperous crowds are hardly the medium for rational political messages. If I had something to say to Stephen Harper, I'd email him, and his aides would filter me out. Or more to the point, I'd get in touch with some of my New Democrat brethren in the Shadow Cabinet, and that would be much more likely to get things done. But I digress. At first, as I said, I thought it rather arrogant of her to think of herself as a special conduit to the Prime Minister's ear. Later I realised something much more humorous and so very apt in this context: Parliament is in recess since 14 December and won't be back until 28 January. A protest at Parliament Hill on 21 December will reach no one but the janitor. (And your correspondent can't help wondering how many of the protesters left their vehicles idling so they would be warm and comfy after the protest.)

After I purged the uncritical blonde, another Facebook friend of your correspondent's, who had participated in a similar protest in Edmonton, objected to my Facebook status mentioning the purge. "Why don't you refute something instead of pouting," quoth he. Reflexive deprecation of the outgroup: always a useful fall-back position when out of arguments. Yet the reader may ask, indeed, why I don't refute something.

The answer is simple: I can't refute an argument where none has been given. So, I tried to find something in the Idle No More drivel that might be argumentitious enough to be argued against. Their website contains nothing but lamentably unoriginal purple prose, some of it misleadingly presented under the tempting heading of "action plan". I recalled from somewhere, however, that someone had made a reference to "protesting against Bill C-34." A lead! Quick, to the Batcave!

The Batcave as it were, or the Order Paper, reveals that there is no such thing as Bill C-34. It received royal assent on 23 March and is now an Act, and not a very interesting one at that. It was merely a budgetary appropriation. Protesting a bill nine months after royal assent seems woefully apt for this crowd, but even so a doubt came upon me, and it occurred to me to check Bills C-34 from previous sessions. And lo, the Tsawwassen First Nations Final Agreement Act started life as Bill C-34, back in 2008. The Tsawwassen Act replaced the Tsawwassens' treaty with a new form of intergovernmental cooperation which, whatever it is, is NOT a treaty. This seemed like an excellent idea, particularly in view of the memorable quote in Canadian Geographic from one of the beneficiaries, lamenting that "this removes the Federal Government's responsibility for us. Who's going to be responsible for us now?" Hmmmmm... May I suggest... yourself? Try that on for a change.

Unlike the budget appropriation, this seemed somewhat related to some of the purple prose, about consultations and treaties and whatnot. Of course the Tsawwassen Act was negotiated with and agreed to by the Tsawwassen, and is possibly the smartest thing ever accomplished in First Nations negotiations, so this would be the last Act that one ought to protest under the heading "lack of consultation" (four years too late, at that), but if the Natives can produce one thing in abundance, it's revised history. The vibe, sadly, was hopelessly right. Though one can't entirely rule out the possibility that they're complaining about the Protecting Victims from Sex Offenders Act or the Act to amend the Museums Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts or even, who knows, the 2012 budget appropriation. Possibly even all of the above, jointly, severally, morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably, and reliably.

In all likelihood, we'll never know. The whole thing will blow over like a puff, puff, pass of smoke. And it's good exercise for them to do some walking and stair-climbing. What's sad, though, is that next time they get together in this fashion, it will be the same thing again: no goals, whether specific, measurable, realistic or otherwise. And more generally, the eternal failure to engage in the first three steps of problem-solving: identify the problem, identify the cause of the problem, propose solutions. They may be all revved up, for now, but they're still nowhere near getting in gear.

Told you so!

"News" in the weekly paper: the new Town Council is starting to come to the realisation that they have to either raise taxes or cut services. Just like I said before the election. Keeping election promises even when not elected: I'm that good. In fact, I can even tell you what the Council is most certainly not gonna admit: we don't just need to raise taxes, we need to more than double them to keep on top of the infrastructure reserve, PLUS we need a one-time take to fund the current replacement needs. All the 100% increase would do is fund the things that are recent and won't need replacing for some time.

It's funny. I mean, it would be funny on its face, but what's really funny is that I'm moving to Winnipeg in two months, while everyone else can stay here with their crumbling infrastructure, no jobs, no economy, and the Council they elected themselves, of eight people who don't know the first thing about economics and social policy and are committed to keeping on exactly the way things have always been done. I mean, when the two most successful talking points in the campaign are "I've lived here all my life" and "I agree with the others", you're pretty much thoroughly fucked, as a group.

Thanks for voting me off your sordid little fantasy island of denial and ignorantism, Hay River. You're such a low level, it's not even bragging to say I'm much better than this.