Crossroads Canada 2025
2025 will be a test year for Canada as to where our emphases lie. It came to pass during Advent 2024 our federal parliament lost patience, reached an impasse and then, coincident with Epiphany, the Governor General acceded to request Parliament be prorogued. Now there seems haste toward the 2025 national election, likely moving to earlier than October. Once related campaigning ends, the public will give formal expression to what’s most on citizens’ hearts and minds, a moment-in-time tabulated indication of national political will. In all this we might well wonder how on the mark we are in Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations.
Once the House of Commons reconvenes in March, the legislative agenda resets and some key pieces of legislation may literally fall off. They may die on the order paper unless opposition parties support a motion to resume related debates. It must not be hidden, go unnoticed that these include the First Nations Clean Water Act. As proposed, it’s intended to ensure First Nations communities receive at least the same funding as other jurisdictions for water treatment, and recognize they have a right to clean drinking water and the ability to protect source water.
Also announced, a bill seeking to create a modern treaty commissioner to ensure governments abide by the terms in modern treaties with First Nations. Communities with modern treaties have long called for creation of such commissioner, experiencing they had little recourse when governments failed to uphold obligations.
There’s no guaranteed passage for these bills. Canada’s opposition parties --except the Greens who called for collaboration on the vital legislation—have indicated they seek to defeat the government entirely, which would bring the 44th Parliament to an end. But the standstill is deeper than stalled parliamentary procedure. Successive governments have been challenged re their degree of progress in reconciliation and in decolonization, and the Canadian electorate, again, has opportunities this year to indicate its priorities in advancing and honouring such change.
One common current view of reconciliation is of advancing social equity through education, bridgebuilding and friendship. To which we might add reparation. Some say a sense of “economic” reconciliation, albeit that expression is often reductionist. Many of these postures tend to view the wrongs as being very much something of the past. A more challenging view of reconciliation recognizes and exposes, opposes the racism, racist structures and colonization still continuing systemically.
The current government still talks about what it will do for the middle class. Center and right of center parties tend not to talk about class, preferring to talk about Canadians, perhaps hard working Canadians, small business and working people. These parties don’t readily speak about poverty; we hear minimally about poor people from them, and it seems the existence of an underclass of any kind is unmentionable for these folks. Nor structured, systemic existence of such. For most political parties, the notion that the status of Indigenous people in this country stems from a continuing Canadian form of caste system is skirted, basically untouched.
Jody Wilson-Raybould, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, has often pointed out that long-term boil water advisories stem from the injustice of the Indian Act. She notes “No government has done the transformative work of recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights and enabling Indigenous Peoples to exercise their inherent rights.” This will require a federal legislative and fiscal framework of transition, mechanisms so Indigenous people are allowed to effectively govern their own communities, each with operative capacity.
As those committed to the path of healing and justice, ponder this country’s wealth, we might ask how and why basic access to clean water for Indigenous communities remains a work unfinished.