FUREY: A vocal minority who hardly speak for First Nations are grinding our country to a halt

First Nations members of the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory block train tracks servicing Via Rail, as part of a protest against British Columbia's Coastal GasLink pipeline, in Belleville, Ont., on Feb. 8, 2020.Alex Filipe / Reuters

What a message that’s been sent this past week from the police and from the politicians. The message is simple: If you masquerade as the voice of Canada’s First Nations, you can break the law with impunity.

Canadians have been frustrated to see rail travel slowly grind to a halt as we get well into the second week of lawless protest. They were also shocked to see B.C. cabinet ministers denied entry to their place of work by protesters and to watch Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland get blocked from accessing a Halifax government building. Just who is in charge of this country?

On Thursday, CN Rail announced it was slowly shutting down its entire eastern network while Via Rail cancelled all of its service on CN tracks across the country.

The longest blockade to date has been in the Belleville, Ont., region by Mohawk protesters who say they are acting in solidarity with those few Wet’suwet’en protesters who oppose the Coastal GasLink project in British Columbia. (Most Wet’suwet’en support it. More on that later.)

The Ontario courts have to date issued multiple court injunctions requesting that the law be enforced. But the Ontario Provincial Police have opted to ignore these injunctions.

Once the first injunction isn’t enforced, that becomes the green light for activists to go ahead and cause whatever havoc they want, knowing they are now untouchable.

As I wrote in a recent column, back in 2013 Ontario Superior Court Justice David Brown issued a word of warning after similar injunctions weren’t enforced: “Such an approach by the OPP was most disappointing because it undercut the practical effect of the injunction order. That kind of passivity by the police leads me to doubt that a future exists in this province for the use of court injunctions in cases of public demonstrations.”

This is becoming a national crisis and it cries out for leadership. Yet leadership is nowhere to be found.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been out of the country for most of this mess. He didn’t seem to grasp the severity of the problem while opining on it from Germany.

“You need to know we have failed our Indigenous people over generations, over centuries. And there is no quick fix to it,” he said. “We also are, obviously, a country of laws. And making sure that those laws are enforced, even as there is, of course, freedom to demonstrate and to protest …. Getting that balance right and wrapping it up in the path forward … is really important.”

What on earth does this mix of words mean? It is certainly not obvious right now that we are a country of laws. And while the PM is right that there is no quick fix to the broader questions around future First Nations prosperity, there is a quick fix to this current impasse: It’s to enforce the laws.

While Trudeau shied away from calling for action, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer urged Trudeau to order Public Safety Minister Bill Blair to use provisions in the RCMP Act to end the protests.

The blame game accomplishes little though. The truth is that both the RCMP and provincial police have the legal right – and, following the injunctions, the duty –to enforce these laws. After this is all over, there will need to be an inquiry into how this lawlessness unfolded and who in the chain of command was complicit.

Before that happens though, this needs to stop. Will it? And when will it? And how will it?

There was thinking in some corners that OPP would dismantle things in Belleville during the early hours of Friday morning, which was when temperatures plummeted and no media would be on site to record it. That didn’t happen.

What makes all of this worse is that these protesters do not represent the majority of First Nations voices. In fact, many of them clearly are not First Nations themselves. They are simply using the idea of Indigenous rights as a prop for their anti-development ideology. Meanwhile, a growing chorus of pro-development First Nations groups are standing in support of these development projects. They’re rightly upset that their voices aren’t being amplified to the same degree of protesters.

“A message to reporters and news media from [the National Coalition of Chiefs]: If 80% of Wet’suwet’en people support the Coastal GasLink pipeline, shouldn’t 80% of your interviews by with pipeline supporters?” The Coalition is a group of chiefs who represents pro-development communities. And the quote is a social media post from the First Nations LNG Alliance, a similar pro-growth organization.

A good memo for reporters and media. It also needs to be sent to our politicians and politically-cowed law enforcement.

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