FRIDAY,SEPTEMBER13,2019 | THEGLOBEANDMAIL O A
OPINION
NEWS |G
reen Party Leader Eliza-
beth May kicked off her
party’s election campaign
promising supporters she will
guide the ship of state toward a
safe harbour.
But given the past few days,
it’s fair to ask whether the
Greens will get stranded upon
some rocky shoal before their
leader has a chance to steer the
country toward the sanctuary
she envisions.
These are heady times for the
Greens. Their support in the
polls has never been higher –
ahead of the New Democrats in
certain surveys. The idea the par-
ty could emerge with 10 seats or
more after the Oct. 21 vote isn’t a
fantastical dream imagined by
some ecoactivist on Vancouver
Island.
At least it wasn’t until recent-
ly. But Ms. May and some of her
candidates are doing their best
to torpedo the party’s chances.
First Ms. May confounded and
angered many of her backers
when she refused to rule out
propping up the Conservatives
in a minority-government situa-
tion. How could the leader even
suggest such a scenario given the
Conservative Party’s refusal to
acknowledge climate change as
the crisis it is?
Then Ms. May had Green fol-
lowers further scratching their
heads when she said in a recent
interview with the CBC’s Vassy
Kapelos that she didn’t have the
power to silence a hypothetical
Green MP who wanted to reopen
the abortion debate. This, de-
spite her own belief that women
have the right to safe, legal abor-
tions.
Many wondered why Ms. May,
who said in the same interviewthat Jesus Christ was her hero
and then apologized for admit-
ting this, would not only say that
she wouldn’t silence an MP in
her party who held an opposing
view than hers on abortion, but
added that her approach was
healthy for democracy.
It didn’t take long for her
words to explode on social
media, and not much long after
that for the party to issue an ur-
gent clarification. There was “ze-
ro chance,” the Greens said, that
any MP representing the party
would reopen the abortion de-
bate. The party’s position was
that the abortion discussion was
closed and anyone who dis-
agreed would not be able to run
for the Greens.
But the damage was done.
The entire affair made one
wonder just how ready Ms. May
was to lead a potentially much
bigger Green contingent in Par-
liament.
If that wasn’t enough, the day
before the election was called,
one of the party’s prominent
Quebec candidates, Pierre Nan-
tel, said he would vote to sep-
arate if there was a sovereigntyreferendum. Actually worse than
that, he said in an interview
there should be Quebec inde-
pendence “as fast as possible.”
(He also supports Bill 21, Quebec
government legislation deemed
racist by many and that prohib-
its public sector workers from
wearing religious symbols, in-
cluding hijabs.)
Unbelievably, when asked to
respond to Mr. Nantel’s remarks
about Quebec independence, a
party spokesperson said any
Green MP from the province
would be allowed to espouse
separatist views because the uni-
ty of the country was “not one of
the party’s core values.”
The unity of Canada is not one
of the Green’s core values? Are
you kidding me? A party that ac-
tually imagines running the
country does not have, as part of
its central mandate, nurturing
the health of one Canada? That
is nuts.
I realize the Greens are mainly
a one-issue group, and that one
issue is the environment. But
they do have a broader platform
and they do want to be taken se-
riously, and they do want to pre-sent themselves as a modern al-
ternative to the NDP. And there
is no question that there are
some New Democrats, disgrun-
tled with the leadership of Jag-
meet Singh, who are giving the
Greens serious thought.
And there are likely people
who maybe voted Liberal the last
time around who are disillu-
sioned – folks who don’t believe
you can be serious about reduc-
ing greenhouse gases and buy
pipelines at the same time.
There are people who might
have been looking at the Greens
as a statement vote.
But I would not be surprised if
there are more than a few who
are now questioning what the
Greens stand for. After all, if they
can’t be counted on to fight for
the future of this country as we
know it, what good are they?
Sure, it’s a noble concept to
say the party doesn’t whip votes
or tell its MPs what to think. But
there are limits to that philoso-
phy. More likely, it’s a naive idea
that will increasingly sink Ms.
May and her party into the kind
of turmoil and controversy they
don’t need.TheGreensaretorpedoingtheirchances
Themainissuefor
ElizabethMay’spartyis
theenvironment,but
theyalsohaveabroader
platform,andthey
can’tignoreit
GARY
MASON
OPINIONL
et’s be real: None of the can-
didates vying to be prime
minister are hurting for
money. Each party leader earns a
salary of more than $200,000,
more than twice the 2015 Cana-
dian median household income
of $70,336. Yet, Andrew Scheer
keeps taking pains to show that
his financial past was “a different
experience from Justin Trudeau,”
which is how he put it to Ma-
clean’s in February.
The question was whether the
Conservative Party of Canada
Leader regularly mentions that
he grew up taking the bus and
didn’t get parental help with tui-
tion, to convey some sort of hard-
knock childhood. No, he told Ma-
clean’s, he had a “good life” with
“nice things.” He just needs us all
to know that he had a more mod-
est youth than the Liberal Leader,
a genuine elite and official mil-
lionaire.
Mr. Scheer reminded us again
in an op-ed last week in which he
described himself as “a kid who
grew up in a townhouse, in a fam-
ily that didn’t own a car, whose
mother lived with her eight sib-
lings in a two-bedroom house on
a dirt road ...” That last bit seems
excessive and invokes a family
history of poverty, not living
“middle class,” as Mr. Scheer ar-
gued when the online public ob-
jected to his self-depiction as de-
prived, now or ever.
The Maclean’s story, for exam-
ple, pegs his parents’ combined
salary at about $120,000 and
notes that he’s earned six figures
since becoming an MP at the age
of 25, tidbits shared this week
with the mocking hashtag
#ScheerWasSoPoor. That’s a
tacky framing, one that also sub-
stitutes lightweight sniping about
which leader is least rich for a real
conversation about class – and
money – in Canadian politics.
“Only a politician would ...
think they have some kind of
bragging rights about having to
always take the bus when theywere growing up, like that’s a
hardship,” said Kathy Dobson,
whose terrific memoirPunching
and Kickingdetails growing up
poor in 1970s Montreal. The long-
time journalist is now teaching at
Carleton University and working
on a PhD about how rarely truly
low-income people get to tell
their own stories.
In an e-mail, Ms. Dobson said
that political boasting about di-
verse caucuses never mentionspeople raised on welfare, such as
herself, or former employees of
Tim Hortons or Walmart. “I want
to be able to vote for a prime min-
ister who knows what it means to
have no choice but to send your
child to school without boots in
the winter,” she wrote.
One reason she’s never had
that chance is that running for of-
fice is expensive. Federal Conser-
vative candidates spent, on aver-
age, $90,665 in 2015, while Liber-als came in at $71,660 and New
Democrats at $54,404. While can-
didates can only personally con-
tribute $5,000, some people are
more likely to know potential big
donors than others.
Campaigning is an unpaid,
overtime job. It requires savings
to live on, and, for parents, relia-
ble, affordable childcare. Perhaps
if more former shift-work nurses
sat in the House of Commons,
we’d finally have universal day-
care. Instead, it’s supposedly ex-
citing that 88 women were elect-
ed in 2015, compared with 250
men.
In the United States, discus-
sions about wealth taxes and oth-
er serious solutions to addressing
financial inequality are hot topics
among the Democrats vying for
the 2020 presidential nomina-
tion. Those ideas are gaining trac-
tion in large part because of the
2018 midterm elections, when
many voters did have a chance to
choose representatives with dif-
ferent class backgrounds than the
usual suspects.
The best known is likely Alex-
andria Ocasio-Cortez, who beat a
10-term incumbent to become
the youngest-ever Congresswo-
man. In the Netflix documentary
Knock Down the House, it’s both
thrilling and exhausting to watch
her go from long days campaign-
ing to late nights lifting heavy
buckets of ice at her paying job, as
a bartender.
AOC, as she’s known, is a force- but if it takes superhuman
stamina for an atypical candidate
to succeed, then no wonder so
few of them do. When wealthy
politicians compete to seem real
this election campaign, let’s ask
how they’ll get more real people
into politics.
Trudeauisrich,Scheerisn’tpoor,andthetrulybrokedon’thaveasay
DENISE
BALKISSOON
OPINIONNooneamongthefederalpartyleaders–JustinTrudeau,AndrewScheerandJagmeetSingh,seenabove
fromleft–canbedefinedas‘poor’underanycircumstance,exceptsatire.FROM LEFT: AL DROGO/REUTERS;
CHRIS WATTIE/REUTERS; CHRIS YOUNG/THE CANADIAN PRESSL
ast week, the Canadian Hu-
man Rights Tribunal or-
dered the federalgovern-
ment to pay maximum compen-
sation of up to $40,000 to First
Nations children on reserves and
in Yukon who were unnecessari-
ly taken into care since Jan. 1,
- The tribunal concluded
that Canada willfully and reck-
lessly discriminated against tens
of thousands of First Nations
children contributing to their
unnecessary removal from their
families and, in some tragic
cases, their deaths.
Indigenous Services Minister
Seamus O’Regan released a state-
ment on Friday saying the child-
welfare system is broken and
needs to be fixed. He completely
missed the ruling’s keynote find-
ing – it is the Department of In-
digenous Services that is broken
and needs to be fixed.
The federalgovernment’s fail-
ure to reform itself is a key rea-
son why unnecessary removals
and deaths of children have per-
sisted, from residential schools
to the Sixties Scoop to the pre-
sent day. Courageous survivors
speak up, suethe government,
win and then Canada pays a set-
tlement and apologizes but con-
tinues its egregious behaviour.
I have been thinking about
lawyer Samuel Hume Blake’s re-
sponse to 1907 revelations by Dr.
Peter Henderson Bryce that the
federalgovernment’s inequitable
provision of health care to “Indi-
ans” was linked to Indigenous
children dying unnecessarily in
residential schools at a rate of 25
per cent a year. Dr. Bryce called
on the federalgovernment to
equalize the funding and Mr.
Blake noted “in that Canada ob-
viates the preventable causes of
death, it brings itself into un-
pleasant nearness with man-
slaughter.” That was 112 years
ago, and yet, when talking about
current issues for First Nations
children, too many federal public
statements use phrases like “first
steps,” “making progress” and
“committed to change.” These
are little kids and they deserve to
be treated fairly now – not 100years from now.
Canada’s inertia in addressing
the public-service inequalities
depends on the rest of the Cana-
dian population being unaware
of the federalgovernment’s ineq-
uitable provision of public ser-
vices or not appreciating the
gravity of the harms these in-
equalities cause children.I filed and received an access-
to-information request recently
where federalgovernment docu-
ments show how Department of
Indigenous Services officials ac-
knowledged the validity of a so-
cial-media critique of depart-
mental actions and were won-
dering how to respond.
After significant back-and-
forth, the question was settled
with this statement: “[I]f the al-legations are valid from the ex-
ternal point of view, we should
stay silent.”
Silence is apparently the strat-
egy the Prime Minister and Lead-
er of the Opposition chose to
adopt in response to the tribu-
nal’s findings. There were no
posts on social media, not even a
tweet.
Politicians and government
departments remain silent be-
cause they want the Canadian
public to look away. They don’t
want us to see the government’s
discrimination, and for the most
part, their strategy has worked.
When the deaths of children or
the overrepresentation of First
Nations children became too ob-
vious to ignore,the government
points the finger at the “broken
system.”
In 1911, Dr. Bryce wrote a letter
to the Minister of Indian Affairs
regarding the refusal of Duncan
Campbell Scott, the top public
official on the residential school
file, to take action to save the
children’s lives: “In this particu-
lar matter, he [Scott] is counting
upon the ignorance and indiffer-
ence of the public to the fate of
the Indians; but with the awak-
ening of the health conscience of
the people, we are now seeing onevery hand, I feel certain that se-
rious trouble will come out of
departmental inertia and I am
not personally disposed to have
any blame fall upon me.” That
was 108 years ago, and while
some such as Dr. Bryce and Mr.
Blake spoke up for the children,
most of us didn’t.
Greater numbers of Canadians
are beginning to see the over-
whelming evidence of federal
government discrimination
against First Nations children
and are demanding action. A key
solution is the Spirit Bear Plan.
This twofold plan includes an in-
dependent 360-degree evalua-
tion of the Department of Indig-
enous Services to find why it
does not do better when it
knows better and asks the Parlia-
mentary Budget Officer to cost
out all the inequalities in public
services to First Nations children,
so a comprehensive plan can be
implemented to end them all.
The Spirit Bear plan was ap-
proved by First Nations leaders
in 2017 but Canada has refused
to adopt it.
Enough is enough. After 112
years, Canada’s piecemeal ap-
proach to equity is a proven fail-
ure. Now is the time for a com-
prehensive plan.OttawawillfullydiscriminatedagainstFirstNationschildren.Silenceisnotanoption
CINDYBLACKSTOCK
OPINIONExecutive director of the First
Nations Child and Family Caring
Society of Canada. She is also a
professor at the school of social
work at McGill University.
The federal
government’s failure to
reform itself is a key
reason why unnecessary
removals and deaths of
children have persisted,
from residential schools
to the Sixties Scoop to
the present day.