Charlie Angus's Ring of Fire Youtube ad -- cause you may be sick of Ontario's one.
Okay, Donald Trump hates the Reagan ad. The widely circulating Ontario ad that makes me mad is the one endlessly proclaiming that the Ring of Fire is going to save us all: Give us $22 billion, give us 77,000 jobs. Rebuild the Canadian economy by digging up more minerals for the USA.
The Reagan ad was legal, honest, and fair. The Ring of Fire ad is fake news all the way.
Happily, the antidote is found in Riley Yesno's article in the Toronto Star this weekend "The Truth about Ontario's Ring of Fire ads." Here's the essential takedown of this miracle project in two sentences:
"So why hasn’t this project started already?
"The biggest problem: The province doesn’t have the right to the land."
That's the truth we need to start with. Treaty 9, which covers the so-called Ring of Fire (a marketing slogan, recently coined; Yesno prefers "Mammamattawa") and most of northern Ontario, was an agreement to share the land. The chiefs consistently refused to make treaty until they were told "the land will always be yours," "you may hunt and fish forever," "reserves are only places no white man can disturb up" over and over again.
It is true Ottawa's official text of Treaty 9 uses words like "cede, yield, release, and surrender" and "the Crown may "take up" Treaty 9 where and when it choses to. But the treaty text was written and printed up in Ottawa before the treaty commissioners ever set out for the Severn River. No commissioner dared to say these words aloud or allow them to be translated for the chief. The real Treaty 9, the one actually negotiated on the land by the authorized parties on both side, was absolutely an agreement to share the land.
This reality behind Treaty 9 is unusually well documented, perhaps because it was one of the last made (in 1905). But the basis on which all the Canadian treaties were made and ratified is the same: an agreement to share the land. There really is no legal basis for Ontario to develop extractive projects in Mammamattawa unless and until the two sides negotiate agreements as to how the wealth will be shared. Ontario really has not even started bargaining.
Harold Johnson, the Cree lawyer and writer, used to say the settlers of Canada have an absolute right to be here. That absolute right comes with the treaties they made with First Nations.
And to validate that right, he would then say, all the settlers have to do is to live up to the commitments made in the treaties.
Maybe there has to be one BIG court case. The Supreme Court has been begging Canada and the provinces to negotiate treaty rights and land claims , and not to force all the decisions into the courts. But there is a lot of jurisprudence to suggest which way the courts will find if pushed to it.
Why do so many people find it hard to articulate these realities. As they say, it's hard to see the truth if your livelihood depends on not seeing it.
Vital Reading: John Long: Treaty 9: The Agreement to Share the Land in Far Northern Ontario (McGill-Queen's UP).
Cheater version: "George McMartin's Big Canoe Trip" from CBC Radio Ideas .Online
