56. Journalism as corporal punishment

Unpublished
31st July 1997

Re: The long slide into irrelevance of Ovide Mercredi (Opinion,July 30):
Before heaping more political blame on Assembly of First Nations leader, Ovide Mercredi, Jeffrey Simpson should have given his stale tea leaves an extra swirl. If, as Mr.Simpson claims, substantive elected bodies like the AFN, NAC and the CLC — formed in part to help shape public policy — are politically “ineffectual,” and if the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples only produced “pie-in-the-sky” recommendations, then whose pragmatic counsel on aboriginal, labour and women’s issues is now being heard and acted upon? Where in Mr. Simpson’s version of national affairs might we find the de facto civil rights leaders of the nineties: at the Business Council on National Issues, the Fraser Institute, or maybe the Bank of Montréal?
In November 1991 at the beginning of Mr.Mercredi’s first term, Mr. Simpson wrote that “ (public) support for aboriginal demands is a mile wide and an inch deep.” Mr. Simpson’s self-described “cheap seat proposals” for “handling native issues” in 1991 included accepting the nascent Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples recommendations on self-government arrangements. Then, just like Mr. Mercredi, Mr. Simpson wanted the “Royal Commission tied into the constitutional process.” Today, surrendering to post- Charlottetown opinion, Jeffrey Simpson abhors “constitutional theorizing and grandstanding.”
The AFN are hardly responsible for this about face and the larger orchestrated backlash against identity politics that helped erode public support for so-called collective minority rights in the post-Oka political landscape.
In today’s column (July 31st) on the AFN convention, Simpson admits in a bizarre use of language to having “paddled” Mr. Mercredi in his July 30th column. Mr. Simpson should also acknowledge that, post-Oka, historic federal promises on matters of social justice and aboriginal inherent rights were abandoned leaving the AFN leadership taunted by media attacks that are best locatable in earlier forms of settler bigotry.