Separate Beds by Maureen K. Lux

Author:Maureen K. Lux
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4426-6312-1
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2016-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

One had only to look to the experience of the Hobbema Cree to see how integration as “equal citizens” played itself out.

Cast in the language of equality and freedom, and part of the new Liberal Party leader Pierre Trudeau’s broader liberal ideology that focused on political rights of the individual, the Health Plan would dispense with “special status” such as the treaty right to care.106 The Calgary Herald reported that Dr Rath had a “rough afternoon” explaining the policy to an angry crowd. “Even when their protests came in Cree,” the Herald reported, “the tones of bitterness and sense of betrayal needed no translation.”107 The chiefs wondered how this “middle-man” could simply announce their treaty rights no longer existed. Provincial governments were also alarmed. Alberta claimed that the plan to “slough off its responsibilities for the health care of Indians” made a mockery of the Constitution and the treaty agreements.108 By the fall and with the election over, the new health minister John Munro repeated his predecessor’s insincere claim that policies had not changed. Furthermore, he argued that IHS assistance for registered Indians who were living on reserves and were medically indigent was actually unfair: “While it appears to discriminate in their favour, it may not be to their ultimate advantage since it tends to differentiate Indians from other Canadians. Our hope is that Indians will become integrated in the main stream of Canadian life.”109 Nevertheless, bureaucrats continued to insist that limited medical assistance was provided because the people were poor, not because of any treaty right. Resistance to that claim emerged immediately.

Harold Cardinal, the youthful president of the Indian Association of Alberta, charged that the department’s Health Plan was a clear abrogation of treaty rights. He advised that to pay health care premiums would be to lose the treaty right to health care; that once their care passed to provincial jurisdiction they would lose any claims to federal responsibility; and that to lose one treaty right would jeopardize them all.110 In reply to Cardinal’s concerns over the treaty right to health care, minister of health Munro informed him that Indian Affairs, not Health and Welfare, dealt with treaty rights. Moreover, he claimed that the provision of health care in the past, as in the present, was based solely on need, and stated: “Our efforts have never been related in any way to Indian treaties.”111 The following month, the government outlined its intentions and the logical conclusion to its integration policy in the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy 1969, or the “White Paper”: to terminate completely the treaty relationship, dismantle the bureaucracy, repeal the Indian Act, and replace it with “Indian control” of reserve land that would eventually open them to provincial taxation. There can be little doubt that the Health Plan was developed to ease the process and prepare the ground for the White Paper. Aboriginal groups across the country responded with a clear rejection of the badly flawed policy that had been developed without

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