Article content continued

During Trudeau’s first term as prime minister, his ministers floated discussion policy papers (called “white papers,” for their white covers) aimed at sparking public debate on how to achieve the “just society” that Trudeau envisioned for Canada.

The “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian policy (The White Paper, 1969)” argued that a just society for indigenous people could be achieved through desegregation: the scrapping of Ottawa’s department of Indian Affairs; the scrubbing of all references to “Indians” in Canadian laws; and the rescinding of any “special status” for indigenous peoples.

At the time, Trudeau said: “We can go on adding bricks of discrimination around the ghetto in which they live and at the same time perhaps helping them preserve certain cultural traits and certain ancestral rights. Or we can say you’re at a crossroad—the time is now to decide whether the Indians will be a race apart in Canada or whether it will be Canadians of full status.”

The white paper, it could be said, sought to acknowledge the failure of segregated aboriginal rights, by explicitly eliminating them, through desegregation. For Trudeau, it turned out to be a Trojan Horse of his own making.

Although the minister responsible, Jean Chrétien, was told that this was the change aboriginal leaders were seeking, aboriginal leaders and then the provinces went berserk after the 1969 white paper’s release. Assimilation was not how to achieve equality, they argued. In fact, special status was exactly what indigenous leaders sought.