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It does not bode well that the backgrounder to Monday’s statement says the first thing the minister of C-IRANA will do is “to lead a consultation process to determine how best to replace INAC (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada) with the two new departments.” If there’s one thing Ottawa is good for, it’s consultation processes (which used to be called just “consultations”). The commission into missing and murdered native women has been consulting endlessly. Monday’s announcement implements recommendations emerging from consultations 20 years ago by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.

The desire to consult is understandable

Not that the desire to consult isn’t understandable. With at least 600 native constituencies to please, anyone who raises his head above the parapet with an actual proposal gets shot down faster than a World War I soldier stealing a peek at no man’s land. The first and clearest example was the 1969 white paper itself, which, when you read it, says lots of right things, even by today’s hyper-politically-correct standards: that First Nations (OK, it does call them “Indian people”) have long been subject to discrimination; this helps explain their relative poverty; separate has not been equal; their culture and contribution to Canada have been slighted; they haven’t received the government services they should; their ownership of their land needs to be recognized with legal title; and so on.

It even uses the c-word, “colonial,” as in: federal services have been provided through “Indian agencies reflecting the authoritarian tradition of a colonial administration,” which must have been radical language in 1969. True, in 7,000-plus words it used “colonial” only once. Compare that to Monday’s backgrounder, which uses it four times in just 1,100 words: “We recognize that relationships built on colonial structures have contributed to the unacceptable socio-economic gap…existing colonial structures have not helped us work coherently… the Indian Act(is) a colonial, paternalistic law… (T)he ambition of this government cannot be achieved through existing colonial structures.”