A young girl holds a sign during a First Nations Idle No More protest at the Douglas-Peace Arch crossing on the Canada-U.S. border near Surrey, B.C., on Saturday, January 5, 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail, and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton, where he is an associate professor. His new book Power Trap, on the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties, was published in September.

Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike and the emergence of the Idle No More movement show how utterly alienated aboriginal Canadians are from the mainstream political channels of elections, MPs and Parliament.

And yet the protests were triggered by a specific act of Parliament — Bill C-45.

Our first peoples, including Inuit and Metis, make up about 4 per cent of the population and are thinly spread across the land. As a result there are very few constituencies in which they predominate or where their votes are even decisive. Not surprisingly, given that they are generally younger, poorer and less educated — all low turnout demographics — they vote in smaller numbers than does the population at large.

The Conservatives deserve some credit for recruiting candidates of aboriginal background and the 2011 election saw the largest contingent ever elected. Five of the seven were Conservatives, and the health minister, Leona Aglukkaq, is the first Inuk ever to sit in cabinet.

It could hardly be said, however, that any of these MPs have a mandate to speak for first peoples, nor in general do they claim to do so. All of them operate under the whip of party discipline.

Organizations such as the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and their Metis and Inuit counterparts have sometimes spoken as if they had a mandate to act as legislative or even constitutional proxies — but they don’t, not in a legal sense, and the chiefs that make up the AFN are chosen primarily in relation to local concerns. Most Canadians would not be content to be represented in federal politics by, say, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, but that in effect is where many aboriginal people stand.

I wonder whether it isn’t time to consider a different approach to drawing the descendants of the original Canadians into the political process and allowing their voices to be heard: giving them their owns seats in Parliament.

Perhaps this sounds crazy, but this is exactly what happens in New Zealand, where seven MPs (out of a usual total of 120) are elected from constituencies of Maori, the indigenous Polynesian people who inhabited the islands before the arrival of “Pakeha”, the Maori term now used by most New Zealanders for those of European descent.

The Maori MPs are by no means monolithic in their political orientation. Currently, three of the seats are held by the self-styled Maori party; they are a key part of the centre-right coalition government led by the National party. Three more of the Maori seats are held by centre-left Labour, which is the official opposition. One is held by a Maori activist splinter party called Mana.

In practical terms this means that the concerns of Maori on policy and legislation are directly represented, usually in cabinet, and always in Parliament: not just on treaty and land-rights issues, but on areas of general concern that are particularly important to Maori, such as health and housing.

There is no double-representation because voters of Maori descent must choose between voting either in the Maori or the general constituencies. And while one might worry about political ghettoization, this hasn’t been the experience in New Zealand. The mainstream parties nominate and elect many candidates of Maori descent in the general electorate. The co-leader of the Green party, the country’s third-largest, is of Maori descent, as is the leader of the fourth party, the populist New Zealand First. Both politicians came up through the mainstream political system.

In Canada, with its larger Parliament and proportionately smaller aboriginal population, we could begin with ten seats and then calibrate the number over time, depending on how many people chose to register to vote through this channel. Given Canada’s huge landmass compared with New Zealand, it might be best not to have geographical constituencies, but a single pool of MPs elected nationally through a system of proportional representation.

It would be easy to dismiss this idea as race-based or even racist, but it’s worth remembering that aboriginal peoples already are accorded a particular status in the Constitution. Indeed, until 1960 so-called “status Indians” were so special under Canadian law they were not even allowed to vote.

Moreover, there is a long history in Canada of over-representing rural and remote communities. Prince Edward Islanders, for example, currently enjoy almost four times the representation in Parliament than their population would justify.

This proposal would not give first peoples the over-representation that Prince Edward Islanders get. It would do no more than give them their actual population weight in Parliament — arguably somewhat less, because some of those eligible would choose to vote in the general electorate. However, it would be more effective representation.

Having their own MPs would give Canada’s first peoples an opportunity to vote for representatives who hold their concerns as a priority and who could speak for them with a degree of independence and authority that no one now has. None of us thinks it is remarkable that Albertans or Québécois have their voices directly heard in Parliament: we have even had parties such as Reform and the Bloc which ran for election as voices for regional concerns. Is there something fundamentally wrong with aboriginal Canadians having a similar voice?

Aboriginal seats would hardly be a panacea. They would not displace protest or moral suasion. They would not end the need for negotiations over land and they would not remove the need for organizations such as the AFN.

But they would ensure that aboriginal concerns were raised in the process of legislation, and not just in anguished howls afterward.

There has to be a better way than what we’re doing now.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter: @padams29

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