POLITICS-CANADA: Indigenous Vote Instrumental in Liberal Party Election Win

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Dec 1 2000 (IPS) - Canada’s indigenous minority may have played an important part in helping the ruling Liberal party return to power in Ottawa with an increased majority of seats in the House of Commons in the Nov. 27 national election.

Nationally, a mere 63 percent of Canadians bothered to vote. But in some of the small aboriginal communities like the Carry the Kettle reserve near Regina in western Canada, virtually all of the 300 eligible voters showed up at the polls.

Don Ross, a Liberal party organiser, says that an upsurge in native support made a difference in his party’s favour in various federal constituencies across western and northern Canada, including the seat for Ann McLellan, the federal Liberal justice minister, who narrowly won her seat in Edmonton.

It was a matter of telling people that their vote matters, Ross says. “The more people vote, the more the parties are going to have to start develop policies that will attract that vote.”

About 43 federal constituencies out of a 301-seat total in the House of Commons were identified by the Assembly of First Nations, the country’s leading aboriginal organisation, as containing electoral contests where native voters could influence the outcome. Furthermore, about 18 candidates of aboriginal origin ran for office, of which three got elected.

Following the Canadian election, the head of the Assembly of First Nations Matthew Coon Come urged the seven year old Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien to go beyond its promises of alleviating poverty and improving health care and start using the massive budget surplus to tackle the legacy of racism and dispossession facing native peoples.

“To get beyond a short-term surface solution to our problems, we need to engage in a deeper discussion of history and our political relationship; and we need to begin a serious negotiation to redistribute resources and power.”

About 1.2-million out of a population of 30 million in Canada can claim some form of Aboriginal ancestry, including more than 883,000 First Nations people living on reserves or in the cities, 220,000 Metis (mixed native-mainly French heritage) and 50,000 Inuit, a separate distinct group in the Arctic region.

Fear of serious political inroads being made by the main opposition party, the right-wing Canadian Alliance party, caused many aboriginals to take a more active part in the national electoral process, reports Dan David, director of news for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. “There was increased activity, increased interest and a lot more organising.”

Many people in the aboriginal communities across Canada saw through the “equality for all Canadians” and an end to “race-based” agreements rhetoric of the Canadian Alliance, says Dan David. He states it represented “a return to an earlier assimilationist policy” in Ottawa. “They read past the jargon and saw red flags.”

The Alliance platform’s call for the taxing of First Nations land and the ushering in of property rights on reserves would undermine traditional treaty rights, originally negotiated with the British Crown in colonial times and of legal force today, say aboriginal leaders. Their concern is that the largely impoverished population of aboriginals on their reserves would end up losing their lands to private land developers and resource companies.

“Their [the Alliance] policies and attitudes are just too destructive and it would be too hurtful for our people and our rights and our interest in this country,” stated Gerald Morin, president of the Metis national council.

Meanwhile, controversial statements by candidates running for the Canadian Alliance also played into the hands of the Liberals. One Alliance candidate in the constituency of Prince Albert in Saskatchewan joked about “getting scalped” by local native protestors, carrying signs comparing his party to the US anti-black group the Ku Klux Klan.

Various First Nations chiefs across the country purchased advertisements in national newspapers urging natives to vote against the Alliance. Despite criticism by these same leaders that the Chretien Liberal government had relegated their concerns regarding treaty rights to a low priority, the Liberals still garnered a lot of native support because the Canadian election was primarily a two-way competition between it and the Canadian Alliance.

In one northwest Ontario constituency where they constituted about a quarter of the voters, natives “held their nose” and helped elect again to the House of Commons the mainly “invisible” Liberal Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Robert Nault, says David.

One result of the Canadian election is the polarisation between western Canada where the Alliance won a majority of seats and the Liberal dominated eastern portion of the country, including the Atlantic Provinces, Ontario and Quebec, where the majority of the population resides.

Similarly, in some rural western constituencies where local whites went Alliance and natives voted Liberal, the conflict that already exists over the sharing of resources between the two groups will only be exacerbated, says Adrienne Fox-Keesic, the editor of a native newspaper in northwest Ontario, the Wawatay News. “I’m afraid it will get worse,” she says.