and his intellectual advisors in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) held Chrétien in contempt as someone who spoke French with a working class accent and whose manners were unpolished, but they appreciated his toughness and ability to get things done. While at Indian Affairs, Chrétien introduced the 1969 White Paper, a proposal to abolish treaties between Canada and First Nations and related legislation including the Indian Act. Critics charged that the goal was to assimilate First Nations people into the general Canadian population. The paper was widely opposed by First Nations groups, and later abandoned. It was the 1969 White Paper that first brought Chrétien to widespread public attention in English Canada. At a press conference announcing the White Paper, Chrétien openly clashed with Indian activists with one First Nations woman asking Chrétien, "When did we lose our identity?", to which he replied: "When you signed the treaties", which prompted boos and jeers. Another woman from the Iroquois reserve at Brantford asked Chrétien, "How can you come here and ask us to become citizens, when we were here long before you?", noting the Crown had granted the Grand River valley to Joseph Brant in 1784, to which Chrétien had no reply. Cree activist Harold Cardinal attacked Chrétien and Trudeau for the White Paper in his bestselling 1969 book The Unjust Society, accusing them of "cultural genocide" against the First Nations. To counteract such criticism, Chrétien adopted an Inuit boy from a local orphanage during a 1970 visit to the Northwest Territories. As Indian Affairs minister, Chrétien fell in love with the far north of Canada, whose beauty moved him, and he vacationed in the north every summer during his time while holding the Indian Affairs portfolio. During the October Crisis of 1970, Chrétien told Trudeau to "act now, explain later", when Trudeau was hesitant to invoke the War Measures Act. Eighty-five percent of Canadians agreed with the move. In the 1972 election, Chrétien, who was frightened by a near-defeat in 1968, had a friend Antonio Genest win the Progressive Conservative (PC) nomination, and then run a deliberately inept campaign in order to ensure his re-election. Robert Bourassa, the Liberal premier of Quebec, was a nationalist who frequently pressed for more devolution of federal powers to his province, making him Trudeau's bête noire, with the two men openly feuding. In 1971, when the Bourassa government began the James Bay Project to