Dismantling Canada by Brooke Jeffrey

Author:Brooke Jeffrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A year later, Harper’s own special envoy on aboriginal and energy issues tabled his final report and delivered a speech in which he stated Ottawa “must shoulder most of the blame” for the substantial and growing opposition to the Northern Gateway project. Rather than negotiate in good faith, Doug Eyford said, “I’ve been surprised at the extent to which the federal government has been content to allow project proponents like Enbridge to engage aboriginal authorities with little or no Crown oversight, direction, or assistance.”50

The need for the government to negotiate was brought home forcefully yet again by an unfavourable Supreme Court decision a few weeks later. In a unanimous decision written by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, the court confirmed the existence of aboriginal title – that is, it found that native Canadians still own their ancestral lands, unless they signed away their ownership through treaties with government. This historic ruling was particularly important for the Harper government, since treaties were never signed in most of British Columbia, through which the Gateway pipeline must pass. As a result, the court ruled that governments and companies must obtain consent from aboriginal title-holders, and from aboriginal communities who have asserted ownership of land which has not yet been established (the case for most of the land claims in BC), before proceeding with resource-development projects or other economic development.

But negotiation has not been part of the Harper government’s strategy, and the pipeline is likely to remain a major problem as the Conservatives near the end of their mandate. Moreover, Harper’s most recent attempt at pragmatism – in which his government used the May 2014 National Energy Board recommendation to approve the project, and then once again abandoned responsibility by telling the private sector to work out the details in negotiations with stakeholders – is even less likely to succeed, nor is it likely to distance his government from the inevitable fallout.

Still, as we will see, this is hardly the only unexpected development the Conservatives faced in implementing their agenda. Other key elements of their domestic agenda have also been overturned by the courts. Nevertheless, it may be in the area of economic policy that the Harper Conservatives have the most significant long-term impact. Regardless of whether their pipeline project is ultimately successful, their changes to the tax system and cuts to government programs have created a substantial economic imbalance among regions and individuals in Canada, closely mirroring the consequences of the Reagan and Thatcher economic agendas in their respective countries. An O E C D study released in April 2014, for example, showed that the gap between rich and poor, while widening in many industrialized countries, had increased more in Canada than any of the thirty-eight other members states, except the United States. In fact, it found the top percentile of income earners in Canada accounted for 37 per cent of pre-tax growth, compared with only 23 per cent in Britain and Autralia, and 47 per cent in the US. Worse still, the higher the income, the faster the gains.

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