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Affirm Indigenous
Sovereignty and Rights! Standing With the Wet'suwet'en Land Defenders!
Federal and BC Provincial leaders keep repeating that Canada is a country of the rule of law, as if such a declaration does anything to address the growing opposition to the refusal of both levels of government to meet with the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs or justifies the deployment of heavily militarized RCMP to remove Wet'suwet'en people from their own territory. Actions of solidarity and civil disobedience, including road, port, ferry and rail blockades, and the temporary occupation of offices of Members of Parliament (as well as of Members of the Legislative Assembly in BC), have taken place right across the country. On February 11, the day of the Throne Speech, hundreds of people, including a large number of youth, occupied the entrances of the BC legislature, demanding that the government of British Columbia end the RCMP assault and occupation and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflict with the Wet'suwet'en hereditary leaders. At a press conference the day after the mass demonstration, BC Premier John Horgan insulted Indigenous people defending their hereditary rights, and all Canadians, saying "I am going to continue to work with those people who want to make progress, and they are legion and far outnumber those who are preferring instead to focus on grievances." Like the old colonial rulers, he gives himself the right to define progress, in this case pipelines and LNG, then dismiss and criminalize anyone who disagrees. The message is clear -- if the government's actions to serve foreign investors, who want the resources and the land and the labour of British Columbians at any cost, cause you harm or violate your rights, too bad, "my government" is concerned with "progress," not your "grievances." Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's role thus far has been to claim that this is a provincial matter and he has "full confidence in the NDP government in British Columbia to move forward in the correct way." Ronald Wright, author of Stolen Continents: Conquest and Resistance in the Americas, in a letter to the Globe and Mail published on February 13, cogently explains the essence of the matter in the increasingly heated confrontation between Indigenous demonstrators and their allies, and those who want to get on with pipeline construction and what is called economic development. Wright makes the important point that the Wet'suwet'en territory the Canadian court has given developers permission to build across was never ceded to the Crown, so the court lacked authority to grant its permission. Furthermore, the elected band councils supporting the pipeline only have authority over the small reserves created by the Indian Act.[1] Wright points out:
"Similar to the Mohawks, the Wet'suwet'en have never surrendered their ancient sovereignty as an independent people. Sovereignty can only be lost by conquest or treaty; unceded land has never lawfully become a part of Canada. Like the Mohawks, the Wet'suwet'en have a system of government that predates European occupation and is still alive. (Band councils merely run the small reserves set up under the Indian Act; any "permissions" they may give are worthless beyond those boundaries.) "In landmark decisions of 1997 and 2014, the Supreme Court upheld Indigenous rights in British Columbia and said that unceded Wet'suwet'en territory may cover 22,000 square kilometres. That being so, no outside government or corporation should have the right to impose its will there. It seems that BC and the RCMP are the ones breaking the rule of law." It is high time hereditary chiefs and Indigenous spokespeople stop being pushed aside whenever the Crown finds some economic use for their traditional territory, whether it be for mining, forestry, hydro dams, or pipelines. At this time, the RCMP occupation is firmly in place and, on February 13, Coastal GasLink announced that work had recommenced on the pipeline. This is called upholding "the rule of law," even though it pours oil on the fire of opposition to the racist and colonial "might makes right" stand of the Trudeau and Horgan governments. The RCMP has established an exclusion zone on Wet'suwet'en territory, all the way to the Unist'ot'en Camp at the 66 km point on the Morice River Forest Service Road and arrested 28 people. This is the road which is being used by Coastal GasLink to access the unceded Wet'suwet'en territory, where it is building a natural gas pipeline to bring fracked gas to the LNG Canada plant that is being built in Kitimat. Meanwhile, Indigenous nations and other supporters of the Wet'suwet'en land defenders at Kahnawake in Quebec, Tyendinaga in Ontario, and in Manitoba have blocked rail lines, demanding that the RCMP be removed and that nation-to-nation negotiations take place. By the end of the day on February 13, national rail service had virtually been shut down and rail service to the Port of Prince Rupert in Northern BC and the West Coast Express commuter rail service from downtown Vancouver to the Fraser Valley disrupted. Quebec Premier François Legault stated recently that the train blockades in support of the Wet'suwet'en must stop, with his old refrain about possible "propane shortages." This is precisely the modus operandi of the Canadian and Quebec institutions -- the latter being an integral part of the Anglo-Canadian colonial state -- that on issues of the fundamental rights of the Canadian, Quebec and Indigenous peoples, the answer of those who usurp political power is to criminalize those who defend their rights, to make their struggles a question of law and order.
Prime Minister Trudeau echoed BC Premier Horgan in a statement issued following their call on February 13. Neither is interested in addressing the legitimate stand of the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs that it is they who have to give consent for industrial development on their territory, and that neither BC nor Canada is upholding the rule of law -- provincial, national or international. The statement from the office of the Prime Minister states: "The Prime Minister and Premier discussed how freedom of expression is an important democratic right, but activity must respect the courts and act within the law. The Prime Minister and Premier also discussed how progress on both climate change and reconciliation must continue to be at the forefront of all government actions. Prime Minister Trudeau expressed the desire to work together closely toward a resolution as soon as possible. Both governments shared a commitment to meeting with Gitxsan Simgyget, Wet'suwet'en Dini Ze' and Ts'ake ze to engage in an ongoing dialogue."
The BC Civil Liberties Association and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, supported by West Coast Environmental Law and Pivot Legal Society, have twice (January 29 and February 9) written to the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP asking for an investigation on the grounds that the implementation and enforcement of the RCMP exclusion zone in Wet'suwet'en territory is unlawful, spelling out what makes the RCMP actions unlawful. The Prime Minister and Premier would be well advised not to speak in such a self-righteous way of the rule of law or freedom of expression while they are overseeing the violent occupation of Wet'suwet'en territory, the arrest of youth occupying a Cabinet Minister's office in an effort to get him to talk to them, and the criminalization of those who are exercising their right to express themselves. The bold actions by the Wet'suwet'en to defend their rights and the actions being taken across the country to support them, by Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike, show the modern democratic personality that is struggling to free itself from the confines of the anachronistic liberal democratic institutions imposed on them by the powers that be. The aspiration for just nation-to-nation relations between Canada and the Indigenous peoples is blocked by what Trudeau, Horgan, Canada's Minister of Transportation Marc Garneau and others are calling the "rule of law." This "rule of law" is the colonial rule enforced at the point of a gun. Canada's colonial relations with the Indigenous peoples, have no place. The people demand institutions which provide redress for the crimes committed against the first peoples. Governments that render service to private interests, necessarily negate the peoples' right to have a say in the decisions which affect their lives. To reduce this to an abstract rendering of rule of law is being debunked by life itself. All Out to Stand with the
Wet'suwet'en Land Defenders! Note1.‘The Wet'suwet'en have never surrendered their ancient sovereignty,' Globe and Mail, Feb. 13, 2020. (Photos: TML, R. Gillezeau, C. Smith, C. Hunt, B. Patterson)
This article was published in Article Link:   Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca |
"John Horgan should know better than to invoke
'the rule of
law' in driving a pipeline through unceded Wet'suwet'en
territory. Those same words were used by the Mulroney government
during the 1990 Oka crisis. The question is: Whose law?
Under extreme
pressure from all quarters, including trade
unions, scholars, lawyers organizations, churches, the National
Farmers Union, journalists and civil liberties organizations, the
Trudeau government has pledged that Crown-Indigenous Relations
Minister Carolyn Bennett will meet with BC Indigenous Relations
and Reconciliation Minister Scott Fraser and Gitxsan and
Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs. The Gitxsan, whose territory is
adjacent to that of the Wet'suwet'en, have been blocking rail
traffic in and out of the Port of Prince Rupert. As well, federal
Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller contacted the Mohawks of
Tyendinaga, who are blocking rail lines near Belleville, Ontario,
and arranged to meet with them.
The LNG Canada
project is the darling of Prime Minister
Trudeau and BC Premier Horgan who together boasted that it is the
largest foreign investment -- $40 billion -- ever undertaken in
Canada. So eager was the BC government to secure the investment
that in March 2019, the BC legislature created an 'incentive
package,' including tax exemptions and cheap electricity
totalling an estimated $5.35 billion, for a consortium of several
of the world's largest multinationals, among them Shell,
Petronas, PetroChina, Mitsubishi and Korean Gas. The NDP
government, which opposed the development of LNG in BC while in
opposition, has become the champion of the dangerous fracking
operations in northern BC, the construction of the pipeline
through unceded Indigenous territory without consent, the
building of the Kitimat liquefaction plant, and the --
increasingly unlikely -- prospect of a market in Asia for the
liquefied gas. Anyone who raises concerns about the damage to
Mother Earth, including the destruction of the land and water on
which the Wet'suwet'en depend, or how LNG for export contributes
to climate change, is dismissed as an enemy of progress.