As the city of Montreal prepared to discharge 8-billion litres of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River November 11 as part of long overdue infrastructure upgrades, Kahnawake Mohawk Chief Clinton Phillips received a phone call from the person who ultimately approved the massive dump – newly-minted Liberal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, who was about to board a plane for the Paris climate conference pre-talk sessions. She spent 30 minutes discussing a scientific report that recommended a controlled sewage release as the least damaging of numerous bad options.
“She has invited me to participate in what is dubbed a post-mortem committee — their language, not mine – to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” says Phillips, who appreciates that McKenna’s decision was the predetermined product of years of municipal, provincial, and federal failure to fix what was identified two decades ago as a serious infrastructure challenge.
Nonetheless, Phillips was surprised to hear from the minister. He says, “Even the former Minister of Indian Affairs never called.”
Although not widely-publicized, McKenna’s call may be viewed as a small but hopeful first step in the right direction in consultations with indigenous communities. But will a government that is friendly to the resource extraction and oil industries fully respect a consultative process that mandates “free, prior and informed consent” of First Nations?
That challenge – the duty to meaningfully consult with Indigenous peoples – was outlined in the ministerial mandate letter received by Toronto MP Carolyn Bennett, the new Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs, from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“No relationship is more important to me and to Canada than the one with Indigenous peoples,” wrote Trudeau. “It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship… based on recognition of rights, respect, co-operation and partnership.”
If Bennett requires a template of how not to begin such a relationship, she need look no further than the mishandling of the St. Lawrence sewage crisis.
The Mohawk community of Kahnawake lies just across the river from Montreal, a mere seven minutes by car. Yet civic officials did not think to involve Phillips’ community in any discussions about the impending flush of sewage into a waterway that “is like blood that flows through our veins.”
The province of Quebec is fully aware that there is a duty to consult First Nations. To learn about the planned dump at the 11th-hour – Kahnawake leaders were finally able to attend two Montreal meetings held mere days before the release – was an insult.
“As a First Nations leader, it’s unacceptable that the government is saying a couple of two-hour meetings constitutes meaningful consultation,” says Phillips. Temporary measures were put in place in 1997 to deal with the sewage, but options other than a massive discharge were not discussed over the following 18 years, he says. Members of the community protested, from launching a flotilla to blocking the Mercier Bridge, but to no avail. “Meantime, I was being inundated with calls and emails from citizens of Montreal pleading, ‘Don’t let this happen, block a bridge, do this, do that,'” says Phillips. “But I’m thinking, ‘It’s your government, why don’t you do something?’”
For members of the Kahnawake community, the dump, which lasted three days, “hurts like you wouldn’t believe,” says Phillips. “Kahnawake means by the rapids, and we’re not by the rapids anymore because there’s a sewer system that goes right through the heart of our reserve called the St. Lawrence Seaway.”
In addition, the community is facing pipeline projects proposed by both Enbridge and TransCanada to carry tar sands crude to refineries in Montreal and the East Coast. In that regard, Mohawks are not unlike many indigenous communities across the country dealing with threats to their lands and water that may be exacerbated by ongoing tarsands development – not to mention the recent signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.
It is here that Bennett will face her biggest challenge, for while her mandate includes ensuring enhanced “consultation, engagement and participatory capacity of Indigenous groups in reviewing and monitoring major resource development projects,” how much power will that leave First Nations, Inuit and Metis communities whose livelihood and beliefs may prove incompatible with the bottom lines of multinational corporations?
Notably, Bennett’s mandate carefully avoids one of the most critical phrases in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the “free, prior and informed consent” that the Harper government refused to support fearing it could be used to justify the veto of major energy projects.
While Trudeau is seeking to respect the declaration, “First Nations across this country and the US have been promised every single thing under the sun, and unfortunately, it has never happened,” Phillips sighs. “At the end of the day it’s still the Government of Canada and they still follow the Indian Act. For us, it’s the same monster, just different people, and based on history, all I can do is pray that things change for our people.”
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