To head off Donald Trump’s threats to Canada’s economy and sovereignty this country’s prime minister, Mark Carney, is borrowing a leaf from the U.S. president’s playbook.
Trump has notoriously bypassed American democratic processes through his unprecedented use of presidential executive orders.
The American president has issued such orders scores of times since taking office, most notably to institute a virtual reign of terror on immigrant communities in the U.S.
When there were protests against the raids and arbitrary detention and deportations, Trump doubled down.
He defied precedent (and probably the law) to mobilize the National Guard and the U.S. marines in California, against the express wishes of the state’s governor, and without consulting the U.S.’s legislative branch, the Congress.
The kinder and gentler Canadian (Carney) version of this strategy does not entirely ignore our Parliament. But it comes perilously close.
Carney’s government has decided to fast-track Bill C-5, which includes measures to eliminate internal trade barriers combined with new rules that would allow the federal government to ignore its legal obligation to consult Indigenous groups and local communities, in order to quickly get “national interest” projects going.
Short-circuiting Parliament hobbles democracy
In the Canadian Parliament, the normal course of events would have a bill, any piece of legislation, go through a series of stages – all designed to allow adequate time for feedback from members of parliament, stakeholders, experts, and the public.
The rules of Parliament require legislation to be, first, debated in the House for several days, at what is called second reading.
The bill then goes to a House committee for detailed study, including testimony from witnesses called by both the governing and recognized opposition parties.
A bill then returns to the full House for a debate on third reading. After that, there are votes on any amendments to the bill and, finally, on the bill itself.
Once it passes the House, a bill goes to the Senate for a similar, though normally shorter, process.
Only after it passes both houses of Parliament, does a bill go to the Governor General for royal assent. The proposed legislation then becomes law.
For Bill C-5 Carney proposes to chuck this entire democratic process.
He and his cabinet intend to push C-5 through all stages at warp speed, in a bit more than a week.
Normally, the first part, the second reading debate could take a week or more.
Committee hearings then require several weeks, or even a month or more. To responsibly arrange for a list of witnesses who represent the gamut of interested parties and experts can take time.
The fact is that you can press the accelerator pedal on the parliamentary process only so hard. If you press too hard and go too fast you lose any semblance of democratic participation.
C-5 is a big bill, with consequential implications.
The first part, the internal trade part, has elicited almost no resistance or criticism. If lower trade barriers within Canada are indeed the pressing necessity the PM suggests they are, the Carney government could easily split the trade part from the rest of C-5 and pass it quickly.
The Bloc Québécois made exactly that suggestion, which Liberal House Leader Steven Mackinnon immediately shot down. He said the Liberals have the right to ride roughshod over Parliament because they won the last election.
The “building Canada” part of C-5 is what is truly contentious.
It includes radical changes to the way the federal government protects the environment and assures local communities and First Nations get consulted on major project.
It confers extraordinary powers on the prime minister to unilaterally determine which projects are in the national interest and allow them to proceed with minimal consultation or environmental oversight.
Pushing those changes through in a handful of days would be unseemly, to put it mildly.
If Conservative PM Stephen Harper had tried the same stunt when he was PM the Liberals would have howled bloody murder.
And what if Pierre Poilievre had got himself elected this past March and decided to almost completely bypass Parliament to, in extreme haste, push through legislation which threatened the environment and ignored Indigenous peoples’ interests?
How do you imagine the Liberals might characterize that act of arrogance? Can you hear them castigating the new Conservative PM as Trump North?
Another approach to getting Indigenous buy-in would be possible
Indigenous Canadians have every right to be particularly wary of this major Carney government initiative.
The subtext of C-5, and of the government rhetoric surrounding it, is that Canada’s Indigenous peoples are a net negative when it comes to launching major projects.
The government is effectively saying: We must show outward respect for Indigenous rights, of course, and promise at least a modicum of consultation. But, when push comes to shove, we do not see Indigenous communities and First Nations as full partners in the enterprise to build Canada.
Nobody blinks when Quebec’s premier Legault expresses general support for Carney’s nation-building approach, but adds that there is no way Quebec would accept any sort of new pipeline through its territory.
It is hard to believe any Indigenous group would merit that kind of acquiescence if it objected to – say – mines for critical minerals on what it considered to be its territory.
Former Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould has described this asymmetry as an outcome of the original sin of Canada – the wilful sidelining of Indigenous peoples, at the outset, as fully-fledged constituent entities of the federation
Mark Carney’s erstwhile banking industry colleague and current energy minister, Tim Hodgson, crystallized the government’s view when he said “Canadians’ livelihoods and the prosperity of the country are at risk” because of Trump’s trade war.
Plus, Hodgson added, there are Indigenous communities which favour the government’s approach. The minister pointed to the British-Columbia-based First Nations Major Projects Coalition (FNMPC).
That group, whose members are from many provinces (but not Quebec), includes businesses and non-governmental organizations, as well as some individual First Nations.
The FNMPC has seen its main job to be to provide economic counsel and capacity building for Indigenous groups and businesses that seek to get involved in big-project development.
There is no sense in which the FNMPC represents Indigenous people throughout Canada, and it does not pretend to.
Plus, to date, any support the FNMPC has offered to C-5 is highly qualified.
In a statement after the legislation was tabled, the FNMPC said:
“First Nations must play a central role in the decision-making process around national-interest projects … no national strategy to improve project delivery will succeed without embedding Indigenous partnership as a foundational element.”
So far, the government has not enunciated anything that resembles Indigenous partnerships as a “foundational element.”
Such an approach should include fully sharing the profits from resource exploitation projects with Indigenous Canada.
Revenue sharing of that sort is a mode of operating to which some provinces, such as Quebec and Manitoba, have been favourable.
The Quebec government, in fact, agreed to share revenue from its massive hydroelectric projects with the Cree and Innu people in the 2002 update to the 1975 James Bay Treaty known as “La Paix des Braves”.
Other provinces, including Alberta and Saskatchewan, have been, and continue to be, fiercely opposed to any sort of revenue sharing with Indigenous groups
The Quebec Paix des Braves agreement also incorporates respect for Indigenous practices in forestry and harvest of caribou, fish and other species, and an ongoing right for Indigenous peoples to participate meaningfully in decisions regarding natural resource development.
None of that sort of farsighted thinking seems to be on the federal government’s radar with respect to C-5.
More’s the pity.
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