Leaders versus all the rest

"Good morning," said a young man as I walked in Cochrane this morning.  "Is your baby cold?  We are", he said, laughing.  These two chaps -- most likely from the Tsuu Tina reserve -- were about as down-and-out as you could get, but they were polite, friendly and quite obviously harmless.  No begging for money for them, just pleasant banter.   

The baby I had strapped to my front was my six-month-old granddaughter.  Facing out, she has a habit of smiling and cooing to everyone she meets  We were walking through a side lane, heading to a grocery store, while her mother did a swim set at the local pool.

My point is that ordinary native communities are not the problem.  With few exceptions, it's their leaders all across the country who are causing the impasse.  Be it pipelines, roadways or mines, any attempt to get across their territory is, without fail, met with stringent opposition.  One local example is the years and years and years it took to negotiate with the Tsuu Tina just to get tiny part of a ring road through a small piece of their land in the bottom-right corner of the reserve.  And it wasn't as if that section were a pristine wilderness.  No, it was a dump, riddled with abandoned trailers and shacks.  How does this help their people?  How does denying prosperity generate reserve income for the benefit of all? 

It doesn't.  And it's not as if these reserves were well-springs of organized and prosperous industrial hunting and fishing which would be harmed by a pipe or rail line.  No, most of these remote reserves are poverty-ridden, with residents living in abject conditions thanks to the intransigence of their chiefs.  And speaking of chiefs, how do you negotiate with 600 of them?  They now want to deal "nation to nation", one on one, with the federal government, effectively castrating the now-meaningless National Assembly of Grand Chiefs.  So, we now have another impasse.  My cousin's late ex-husband was one such lawyer in Kenora who fought anything-and-everything on behalf of his mostly-native clientele and made a fortune doing it.  He wasn't part of the solution, he was part of the problem (G-d rest his soul).      

One could argue that all of Canada is native territory.  And that's about what they and their teams of lawyers and consultants now claim.  The price of oil is falling and our traditional US markets are drying up because the US has decided to become self-sufficient in oil, much to the serious detriment of not only Alberta, but of the entire Canadian economy.  Unfortunately, Canada remains a hewer-of-wood-and-drawer-of-water economy which has relied for too long on natural resources to fuel its economy.  The unions have done a masterful job of pricing manufacturing out of worldwide competition -- just ask Ontario.

It's all so sad.  I am no economist, but mark my words, unless we can cooperate and work together to get our vast resources to market, our children face a much bleaker future than we enjoyed.

My encounter with those two young men this morning made me sadder than ever.