If you haven’t heard the name “Dominic Cardy” being brought up at your local daily gathering at the coffee shops in rural Saskatchewan, I’m not surprised; he’s a former Cabinet member of the New Brunswick Progressive Conservative government who now finds himself being the interim leader of the newest federal political creation, that being the Canadian Future Party.
The emergence of the CFP onto the federal scene is really just an equivalent manifestation of American “conservatives” who have coalesced their voting intention into groups such as “Republicans for Harris.” Originally known as “Centre Ice Conservatives,” the party’s evolution started when following the 2021 election, then Conservative leader Erin O’Toole failed to attract enough so-called “centrist” voters to enable him to form a majority government.
While O’Toole’s loss may have, if you recall, sent Premier Moe moments of irrepressible anger, I fail to understand why it is that our Conservative brethren can’t get the message that the average Canadian isn’t interested in being governed by a party whose policies represent the principles embedded in society during former PM Arthur Meighen’s brief reigns. Indeed, even now the Conservative Party’s membership is weighted down those whose anti-Canadian inferiority complexes have them still believing that they must continue to push their MAGA-like message of hate before we are ever cleansed of Justin Trudeau.
Entire tomes have been written as to the origin of this regular campaign of hate that Conservatives insist they must follow in order to win back government – the emergence of Stephen Harper as a minority leading Prime Minister starting in 2006, which in turn heralded the “coming out” party for Brad Wall in 2007, and his introducing this province to still another round of anti-labour sentiment and robber baron Big Oil worship that has perpetuated our $31 billion fall-out into debt, increased racial tensions and a government seeking only power for itself. To Cardy, then, the idea of Pierre Poilievre ever becoming prime minister is in and of itself “terrifying”.
Ever since the defeat of the Harper government, Conservatives have still seen it as their mission to have all its “future leaders” shamelessly walk the Harper pathway, and in so doing have contemptuously invited themselves to be described as nothing more than “Harper clones”. Even today, Conservatives still can’t understand that their toxic touchstone to the former PM’s whims and policy ideas is what finally triggered the Assembly of First Nations to temporarily, at least, abandon their claim to being nations within a nation and participate in an electoral process whose sole purpose was to finally convince our Canadian public to reject his rule.
In reality, Conservatives have given Indigenous communities precious few hints as to the possibility of their party’s policies bearing the most opportunity for economic emancipation, much less as equals in the sharing of opportunity and future riches. Cultural practice and belief acceptance contradictions between these parties contribute much to this divide; for instance, the obvious existence of climate change, scientifically accepted by a people whose avenues to learning have been boobytrapped by the denial of adequate funding for their educational system, is countered by a political body whose denial of that existence is to simply set aside the tax pennies one must shell out to create a resolution to the issue.
Simply put, Indigenous people do not share the small-c conservative principle that “ownership” of a portion of our Mother Earth entitles them to harvest such land’s resources for benefit only to themselves. In Saskatchewan in particular, that “belief” is best answered by a Saskatchewan Party government only to state the obvious without saying a word, namely that what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is also mine.
Having thus embraced such a confrontational position with such clarity, one could reasonably conclude that finding a position of compromise in the harvesting of earthly wealth would require decades to resolve. Poilievre, however, also knows that any form of mutually negotiated economic developmental platform involving resource harvesting with Indigenous leaders won’t sit well with the extremists who love the messages in his Campaign of Hate: “evangelicals” afraid of women having the right to make choices, Carbon Convoy thugs who still blame Trudeau for the mandate requiring truckers moving goods between the United States and Canada to be vaccinated against Covid, Canadian stricken with inferiority complexes who still can’t believe Trump lies, gun nuts who prefer their rabbit targets exploding instead of becoming stew, anti-vaxxers welcoming back polio, mumps and smallpox as threats to their children’s health, medical “experts” either miffed because their theories weren’t being utilized in the development of m-RNA vaccines or failing to relate the side effects of these same vaccines to other factors such as “forever chemicals” now polluting our drinking waters, and bigots of all varieties denying any form of welcome to our immigrants.
Even so, Poilievre wants to try and breach that gap…
On April 6, 2023, his video message to the annual Assembly of First Nations general meeting, he attacked the role of the federal bureaucracy, maintaining that by insisting that Ottawa be informed of proposed actions before they occur just stand in the way of Indigenous communities receiving the benefits of economic activities created on their lands, proposing instead that there should be a resource charge placed upon such harvesting, that more Indigenous members be allocated jobs to contribute to this economic activity, as well as utilizing this base activity as reason for creating job training programs for such youth to take advantage of future activities moving in the same direction. On July 11th, he went even further. This time addressing the Assembly in person, he prefaced his remarks by noting that there exists literally “trillions of dollars” of wealth potential lying beneath the lands over which Indigenous communities have authority to rule, and with the creation of such economic activities could eventually create membership rich beyond their highest expectations…
And therein creates the problem: Is this appeal intended to inflame a factor of greed within communities that excessively benefit from a surplus of resources, thus turning these communities into mini-Albertas, wherein IF they can’t keep the monies for themselves, other issues of a controversial nature will evolve from the eventual resolution – if possible – of that wealth now being extracted.
In short, Poilievre is missing the point; he’s merely planting suggestions in the minds of Indigenous leadership as to what his followers believe should be the pathway to economic Nirvana, thus ignoring the cultural values to which their people hold in reverence.
In short, Poilievre isn’t “listening” to what Indigenous communities want from this potential “blended” society wherein they are finally to be treated as “equals”; in its basest of colonial terms, he is still dictating what shall be done, and ignoring the “how”.
