Attawapiskat First Nations Chief Theresa Spence (right) meets with NDP M.P. Charlie Angus (left) and other members of Parliament in Ottawa, Sunday, December 30, 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Chartrand

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

As the old year passes, Stephen Harper faces a dilemma: If he can’t attend at Chief Theresa’s Spence’s teepee, how could he possibly attend her funeral?

And yet, if should she should starve herself to death because the PM refuses to meet with her, how could he stay away?

With each wasted day, it gets less and less likely the prime minister will blink. After all, what would be the explanation for attending on the 18th day of Chief Spence’s fast as opposed to, say, the 11th or 25th day? The photo opportunity — Christmas Eve or Christmas Day — has already come and gone.

And who would send Senator Patrick Brazeau as an emissary on any issue, even if you could get him to stop brushing his hair long enough to memorize his speaking notes?

This is the guy who effectively called a CP reporter a bitch, who dubbed the former native organization he headed up a “Mickey Mouse” operation, and who is now suing that same organization — which he says should cooperate with him as a Canadian senator. Brazeau claims that Theresa Spence isn’t a good role model for native kids. Maybe Justin Trudeau punched him a little harder than anyone knows.

While the PM continues to remind the middle-aged aboriginal woman out on Victoria Island who’s the boss, other politicians have made the trek to the teepee or written letters of support, including Justin Trudeau, Marc Garneau, Thomas Mulcair and Charlie Angus.

And then came Joe Clark. It is considered obligatory for a leadership candidate, especially of a third party, to display his human side at every opportunity. It is also good opposition politics to show compassion when the government gives the middle finger in any given situation.

But for a former prime minister, and a Conservative one at that, to pay his respects to Chief Spence presents a challenge to the sitting PM. After all, Harper has shown himself to be the Tin Man of Canadian politics, a calculator on two legs who lacks a heart. You get the feeling he would rather have a root canal than a discussion with someone who had a beef with him.

Those who think the PM is being generous by offering Chief Spence a meeting with Indian Affairs Minister John Duncan have short memories. She already had that meeting. At the height of the housing crisis at Attawapiskat in November 2011, the two got together and nothing happened. Unless you count another meeting where everyone drowned in declarations of goodwill and Perrier water, and nothing happened again.

Back to Joe Clark. Why did he lend his prestige as a former PM to a woman the Harper government is treating like someone who doesn’t yet realize her full insignificance?

My guess is that Clark is appalled by Harper’s continuing effort to divide Canadian society against itself as a means of governing. Clark has already expressed his disagreement with Harper’s divide-and-conquer politics in an earlier interview with McGill University, where he lamented the fact that the Harper government was turning Canadians against each other by vilifying select institutions like the CBC.

In Clark’s political universe, the prime minister should be a uniter, not a divider. As he put it after meeting the aboriginal leader, “Chief Spence expressed a humble and achievable vision — one which I believe all Canadians can embrace.”

Harper’s dilemma could deepen if another former prime minister, with an impeccable record on human rights, should emulate Joe Clark. Six weeks ago, Brian Mulroney told a standing-room only crowd at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish that the only thing voters have to know is inscribed on the Peace Tower: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

But even with the prospect of Oprah Winfrey showing up in Chief Spence’s teepee, the courtiers in the PMO must be taking heart from the forlorn media coverage her hunger strike has inspired. We enter the countdown to the New Year with the Ikea Monkey getting more coverage than Chief Theresa Spence. Has our security establishment been talking to the networks?

And it’s not just more coverage for the monkey, but “better press” in the argot of the public relations industry. The stories about little Darwin wandering around the Ikea parking lot in an oversized sheepskin coat had people swooning. His owner declared that he was a “little person”. The story went viral.

Would the tiny monkey man and his adoring owner be reunited for the holidays? Would the mean old judge shut Darwin up in a cage at the Story Book Farm Private Sanctuary, leaving him to celebrate New Years with a banana handed to him by strangers?

Would his moth… I mean his owner, Ms. Yasmin Nakhuda, ever recover from the ordeal?

While Darwin basked in the media spotlight, Chief Spence often found herself the object of ridicule.

People wondered if she was really on a hunger strike at all. “Drinking Boost doesn’t count as a hunger strike,” one commentator on a website bristled. That was the gist of a lot of the commentary.

How dare this woman demand a meeting with the prime minister? Why, it was almost an act of terrorism to try to blackmail the government into a meeting with the threat of taking one’s life.

It took a lot of nerve, the thinking went, to go on demanding meetings with the PM when all the chiefs soaked their own people by drawing down enormous salaries they kept secret.

And just how much native culture was there left to save anyway? Wasn’t the whole native thing sufficiently crushed that there was nothing worth getting your shirt in a knot trying to preserve?

(Well, there was one thing. The Atlanta Braves restored the “screaming savage” logo to their batting practice ball caps last week.)

These, of course, are simply the racist echoes that won’t go away when it comes to aboriginal peoples.

Canada, like the United States, mythologizes the “discovery” of North America when, in fact, it was a conquest. There were ten million people north of the Rio Grande, people who had discovered North America thousands of years before the dudes from Europe arrived.

A neat legalism was used to justify the largest land grab on the planet. Because, it was argued, the “Indians” were hunter/gatherers, they had no claim to the land in a European sense. Modern scholarship has shown that Columbus and others stumbled onto fairly well-defined sedentary societies. But the original inhabitants were destroyed, assimilated or marginalized on reserves. The convenient fiction of the Indian being his own worst enemy lives on.

And so Stephen Harper has placed his bet. It is clear from his strategy that he believes he will be going neither to a meeting nor a funeral and that sufficient pressure can be brought to bear on Chief Spence that she will voluntarily discontinue her hunger strike. That is why he has placed the prestige of Leona Aglukkaq and Patrick Brazeau squarely on the barrelhead by having both of them support the government’s position.

If Harper is right, his victory will be, at best, a partial and temporary one. Yes, there will be people who will praise his steadfastness on matters of protocol as a sign of leadership. But those will mostly be white people who are simply tired of wrestling with the profound issues raised by Chief Spence.

As for Canada’s aboriginal peoples, they will have been humiliated yet again. And this time, the humiliation will have been inflicted by a government which has imposed new rules for the environment and resource development without consulting Parliament, let alone the original stewards of this land. If all Harper’s government has to give to First Nations is ceremonial gesturing, trouble — big trouble — lies ahead.

But there is also the possibility that the PM’s calculation will prove to be the biggest mistake of his political life, and one of the national tragedies of Canadian public affairs. And all because Harper has turned what should have been an exercise in emotional intelligence into just another game of political hardball.

Note to the PM: One of the reasons that the story of the Ikea Monkey travelled the world was that one his owners told the press that he was not just an animal — his DNA was 93 per cent human.

Chief Theresa Spence can top that by seven per cent.

Readers can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

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