Quebec Government Announces "Grand Alliance" with Cree While Calling for Police Intervention to End BlockadesWith much fanfare, while at the same time calling for a Canada-wide police intervention to dismantle the various railway blockades set up in support of the Wet'suwet'en, the Quebec government has announced a "Grand Alliance" with Cree Grand Chief Abel Bosum. The tentative agreement includes extending the building 700 km of new railway from Matagami (located about 200 km south of James Bay) to Whapmagoostui on the eastern shore of Hudson's Bay, where a deep-water port is to be built; the electrification of industrial projects, training of local manpower and mining projects for strategic minerals such as lithium. Premier François Legault stated that the "win-win" partnership will allow both nations -- the Cree nation and the Quebec nation -- to grow and that he hoped that the Grand Alliance will serve as a "model" for other Indigenous communities. Ironically, this announcement comes when some members of the Cree community, such as Paul Dixon, from Waswanipi, North of Val-d'Or, and Director of the Cree Trappers Association, are speaking out about the disappearance of caribou and other animals. Dixon blames the clearcutting of black spruce and mining in that region and named one company in particular, Canadian Malartic. He stated that the James Bay hydroelectric project, the Phase I of which began in the 1970s, had a tremendous social and economic impact on the Cree Nation, and that generations of Cree trappers had never wanted their hunting to stop or to see their traps broken. He said that most of the families and members of the community are opposed to mining industries and that for him, the destruction of the natural environment of the Cree nation is a crime. As for James Bay, the political elite conveniently forget that work on the "project of the century" was announced and actually began without even a mention of the Cree or Inuit it would directly affect and on whose ancestral lands the project was being built. The First Peoples had to defend themselves through the courts to force the political and economic elites of the time to admit that they had not consulted the people living on those lands. As for Legault's calls to resolve the "railway crisis," he claims to be thinking of those who have lost or will lose their jobs and that, though it is important to listen to the Indigenous nations, "we must also listen to Quebeckers and Canadians who are suffering at this time." Truly shameless statements coming from a Premier whose callous indifference to the demands of the public sector workers and the open efforts by the Quebec government to further attack their already dire working conditions and the shameful situation in health and education in Quebec are clear indications that the suffering of the people is not their concern. If those political and economic elites truly want Prime Minister Trudeau to "solve the crisis," then they must insist that the RCMP and Coastal GasLink withdraw from Wet'suwet'en territories and that Wet'suwet'en rights, and national and international law be respected. These efforts to divide the people on the basis of sophistry must not succeed. The lines are clearly drawn. Either we open the path to progress or we defend the colonialist status quo. We must stand with the Wet'suwet'en!
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