A home in Attawapiskat. Someone’s exploiting the human tragedy of living conditions on many reserves to score cheap political points.

Michael Bryant is a Harvard-educated lawyer, a former Ontario cabinet minister and university lecturer. He served in the Ontario legislature for a decade, and six years in cabinet under Premier Dalton McGuinty. He was Ontario’s youngest-ever attorney general from 2003-2007, and served in the Aboriginal Affairs, Economic Development and Democratic Renewal portfolios, in addition to being government house leader. Bryant clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for the current chief justice, was a litigator at McCarthy Tetrault LLP, and a senior advisor at Norton Rose LLP. He lectured in law at King’s College London, was an adjunct professor at U of T and Osgoode Hall Law School, and is now a lecturer at the U of T in political science and a fellow at the Rotman School of Management. Bryant is a principal at Ishkonigan Consulting, led by former National Chief Phil Fontaine and recently authored a #1 Globe & Mail bestseller, 28 Seconds: A True Story of Addiction, Tragedy and Hope. He lives with his two young children in Toronto.

Next weekend, Ontario Liberals will elect many of the delegates who will be attending the leadership convention in just over two weeks. Until those numbers are in, we’re all just guessing at who’s winning and losing.

The best-organized campaign will fare well next weekend. Those campaigners are a phenomenon, truly; you have to witness their work firsthand to understand their enormous talent, energy and industry.

And that’s all very well for a leadership race — but too much parliamentary activity operates in perpetual election-mode. The people who help get a politician or party elected are excellent campaigners. They work well in chaos and they rarely pause for reflection — which is why even losing campaigns go hard to the bitter end. These campaigners often follow their elected members into office, become ‘staffers’ and play a major role in government and opposition activity.

There’s a problem with this: soldiers don’t always make great managers when the election is over. Indeed, for such political staffers the election never really ends. Every day, they feel, is a pitched political battle, with winners and losers. They tend to fight these battles without spending too much time thinking about the broader democratic mission at hand.

When you’re suffering from a bunker mentality, feeling under siege, you tend to lash out. Sometimes tactics or statements are driven by that imagined urgency. Sometimes the vulnerable pay a heavy price if they get caught in the bazooka scope of a premier’s office, an opposition leader’s staff, or their federal equivalents.

That’s what happened this week when someone in Ottawa blew the ‘dog-whistle’ during dramatic events involving aboriginal leadership.

I learned about dog whistles from Jim Bradley, Ontario’s environment minister. The dean of the Ontario legislature has served continuously for 36 years, and remains the only cabinet minister in Ontario today who also served in the Peterson government of the 1980s. Bradley is a survivor who also speaks his mind in and out of cabinet, while never drawing attention to himself.

Bradley draws attention to ideas and patterns — but mostly to evils. Bradley can see an emerging evil around every corner. It’s a skill that sometimes leads cabinet ministers to dismiss him as a mere pessimist. But there’s a good reason why Peterson and Dalton McGuinty kept Bradley in cabinet for so many years. He is a master at predicting unintended consequences — and in smelling out a rat.

One of the nefarious patterns Bradley brought to my attention is the dog whistle of bigotry. “There’s the dog whistle!” Bradley would yell out in the legislature, and whisper sotto voce in caucus or cabinet meetings, whenever he heard someone appealing to our worst instincts.

So I thought of Jim Bradley when I heard the latest dog whistle: the release of that audit on Attawapiskat First Nation finances. What were those peddling this audit trying to say about Chief Theresa Spence and her council, as public support builds for her heroic hunger strike? Could it be that those darn Indians mismanage tax dollars? That they should get their act together before coming to the feds for justice? The insinuations only get worse.

Bradley calls such events ‘dog whistles’ because they’re only heard by dogs. A critical audit, on its face, sounds benign. Just one accountant calling another on bookkeeping practices. But dog whistles send a very different message to those inclined to jump to the worst conclusions: in this case, that the real mess isn’t on the Hill but rather in Chief Spence’s own back yard.

This is an old, dirty trick. It’s wagging the dog (forgive the mixed metaphors) because, if nothing else, the release of this audit is intended to distract. I’ll bet that some whiz kids in the PMO demanded that Indian Affairs officials release the audit, having first leaked it to the media. People deserve to know the whole truth about that First Nation, I can hear them saying. As if the truth were something scandalous about the First Nation itself.

Sometimes these dog whistles are inadvertent. Because the political staffer works in that bunker, fighting through every day as if it were his or her last in politics, buttons get pushed in a panic. I’ll bet that’s what happened with the audit — those involved in the leak should have known better.

I am quite sure that Attawapiskat needs better bookkeepers, better accountants and better internal auditors. But better bookkeeping would not top anyone’s list of what is most needed in Attawapiskat. Better health care, better education, better housing — that would be a start.

But ultimately what Attawapiskat needs is what First Nations’ leaders have been calling for since time immemorial: true aboriginal self-government. With self-government will come a responsibility promised by the Crown at the time of Contact, and an accountability that will dismantle the revolving door of oppression.

Self-government requires not just new powers, but new revenue. That’s the trickiest part of self-government, of course. More on that in a future column. For now, just watch out for dog whistles, as this national debate on the future of aboriginal peoples in Canada continues.

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