What to do about the police: How some socialists, decades ago, addressed these issues

The mass protests and public debate over what to do about the police sparked by the brutal police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis have brought to the fore popular demands to defund, disarm and disband the police. These issues and demands arise at frequent intervals under late capitalism, as deepening neoliberal austerity features increasingly violent attacks on working people and national and ethnic minorities, and their democratic rights, by the repressive forces of the state.

Canada, a colonial-settler state built on the expropriation and oppression of the Indigenous peoples and the marginalization of the Québécois, has been no stranger to such conflicts. In the 1970s, when the RCMP’s Security Service was exposed as engaging in a wave of illegal interventions against the Quebec nationalist movement and its leftist sympathizers, the federal government was led to establish a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the RCMP, better known as the McDonald Commission after its chair, Justice David McDonald.

Among those groups that took advantage of the Commission’s proceedings to expose political police activities was a group to which I belonged at the time, the Revolutionary Workers League/Ligue Ouvrière Révolutionnaire. The RWL/LOR had been formed in 1977 through a fusion of four groups in Quebec and Canada associated with the Trotskyist Fourth International.[[1]] Our brief to the McDonald Commission is published here, and an introductory essay describing the context is published here.

Many of the demands in relation to police powers now being raised by groups like Black Lives Matter parallel those that were raised in the Seventies by community, labour and left opponents of political policing. As the author of the RWL/LOR brief, I had occasion to address these and similar issues in a report I wrote within the League at the time. The text is published below, the only changes being that I have substituted my name for a pseudonym I used at the time, and added a few notes to explain some references for today’s readers. (R.F.)

Why we don’t agitate for abolition of the RCMP

by Richard Fidler

Appendix to Bureau Minutes No. 9, 02/18/78

We have recently received some correspondence from comrades asking why, in our brief to the McDonald Commission and in Socialist Voice, we do not call for abolition of the RCMP.

My position is that we should not advance this demand. Here is why:

1. A confusionist demand

As an agitational slogan the call for abolition of the RCMP does not focus on the particular police activities that are the subject of the current debate.

The RCMP is not just a political police force, although of course political policing is one of its major functions. In eight of the ten provinces, the RCMP is the provincial police force and in towns and villages it is the local police, too. It handles traffic duties and criminal investigations, and enforces a wide range of laws that have little or nothing to do with specifically political functions.

Of course, in the prosecution of these duties the RCMP’s racist, reactionary character is evident. For example, Native people, immigrants, and labor militants are especially victimized, as they are and would be by any capitalist police.

But the RCMP is the police force in many parts of the country, so the slogan for its abolition can be interpreted as a call for the dissolution of the police as such.

That is not the main point we want to make in connection with the current RCMP scandal.

As part of our program for a workers government, and for the transition to socialism, we pose the need to destroy the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state, and the need to replace it through the arming of the workers, the formation of workers’ militias. That’s all in our general propaganda. We also point out that in a workers’ state we won’t need to rely on a political police to deal with political dissent. As the first government that governs in the interests of the majority, our police will not need to repress dissent that does not challenge the constitution and laws of the workers’ state. It will not need to police dissent as such.

But in the current RCMP scandal, the main point we want to make is precisely that the capitalists do need to rely on such practices, repressing dissent in order to retain their rule.

We should focus our agitation on the need to end such practices: to open the files, stop political spying on dissenters, end the harassment and disruption of the left and the mass workers’ organizations by the capitalist state. We also emphasize that the workers’ movement must take the initiative in raising and pressing forward these questions.

On these points, I think our position, as expressed in our newspapers and the brief, has been very clear.

2. Structural reform — a false debate

The call for dissolution of the RCMP gives rise to another false debate, centered on structural reform of the police rather than the need for self-defense and political independence of the working class.

The demand to abolish the RCMP inevitably raises the question, what is it to be replaced with?

Now, most people are not revolutionary. They take for granted the framework of the capitalist state as something given, and they will judge all agitational slogans from that standpoint. They assume there must be some force; so what is to take the place of the RCMP?

The ruling class is now debating what to do about the RCMP. Some sectors are calling for increased parliamentary scrutiny of the force; some urge the formation of a “civilian” security agency; some want to confine the RCMP to federal policing and create more provincial police forces, and so on. Many of those who advance these proposals are seeking to obscure the thought-control role of the RCMP, and even to strengthen the political police function by giving it a veneer of “democratic” parliamentary sanction.

Unfortunately, the reformist leaders of the NDP and the labor movement have a similar position. They support “security” — political — operations by the police; they simply want such operations to be directed against their opponents in the labor movement, and not against them.[[2]]

Most proposals to reform the RCMP are based on the assumption that the RCMP is not adequately performing the role assigned to it by the ruling class, and that some other police force, or other structure, could carry out these functions more efficiently or more fairly. We reject those arguments. We say the RCMP is not “out of control” of the ruling class; that its political spying conforms to the role assigned to it. We do not want the RCMP to be more efficient. We don’t think it can be more fair.

We also say that the problem is not how citizens can gain some “control” over the RCMP, but rather to challenge and roll back the concept that political dissidence is illegal or illegitimate.

There is no way under capitalism that workers can exert any control over police forces.

So we want to cut across the “reform the RCMP” or “reform policing” argument. It a trap, a diversion.

Instead of trying to reform the police, the workers’ movement should be leading the fight to defend the victims of the political police, through exposing these practices and mobilizing opposition to them.

“Abolish the RCMP” may sound quite radical. But those who advance the demand don’t necessarily have a revolutionary alternative to propose. A bizarre example is the ex-Socialist League (the Dowsonites). They call for abolition of the RCMP. But in its place they propose the creation of provincial police forces. (They tack on the demand “under civilian control.” I’ll deal with that later.)[[3]]

In failing to focus on the central political question — what’s wrong with political spying on anyone — the ex-SL adapts to all sorts of reformist concepts.

For example, they fall into the trap of urging that a distinction be made between dissent and subversion. At the recent Ontario NDP Convention an ex-SL leader, Harry Kopyto, was instrumental in gaining referral of a motion denouncing Security Service harassment of the labor movement to include a proposal that explicitly accepted RCMP surveillance of “subversives.”

The ex-SL even supports some form of “security” police force — to defend “national security,” they say. Positions like these could cause considerable confusion if and when their lawsuit against the RCMP comes to trial.

This is not to say that the slogan “Abolish the RCMP” is reformist. But it does not combat reformist illusions. It is not our “full” position, as opposed to lesser demands that speak only to some RCMP activities.

Our general answer to police repression is not to issue calls for abolition or reform of the police but rather to point to the need to abolish the capitalist state that stands behind those police forces. That is, we stress the need for independent labor political action. We emphasize that workers can rely only on themselves to defend and extend democratic rights, as to defend and advance all their interests.

Of course, we can and do say we are opposed to the existence of capitalist police forces like the RCMP. But that’s hardly an agitational slogan.

3. Evolution of our position

In this connection, I’d like to explain briefly the evolution of the position of the Trotskyist movement in Canada on the question of the police.

Historically, the position of the LSA/LSO was not free of ambiguity.

With respect to the RCMP and its political role, the only occasion I recall when the LSA/ISO analyzed this question was at the time of publication of the report of the 1960s Royal Commission on Security. An article by John Riddell in the July 14, 1969 issue of Workers Vanguard concluded as follows:

“[NDP leader] T. C. Douglas supported the report’s one suggested reform — a call for a Security Review Board (with limited advisory powers to act as a court of appeal for citizens against arbitrary government actions).

“But it’s high time to challenge the whole concept of a secret-police security force. The main danger to the security of Canadians is not communist spies. It is the continuing subversion of our rights by the giant corporations and their government and police apparatus.... A first step to guarantee these rights should be the outlawing of government “anti-subversive” letter-opening, wiretapping, and electronic snooping, and the abolition of the RCMP’s Security and Intelligence division.”

This article is clear and correct in its two demands: 1) end “anti-subversive” police activity; 2) abolish the Security and Intelligence division (today the Security Service).

But in other respects the LSA/LSO position was not so clear, It tended to slip into “reform the police” demands. This was particularly true on the level of municipal politics, where it is most difficult to pose the question of state power, and where there are the greatest pressures to adapt to reformist positions, simply because of the obvious limitations of municipal government.

In the LSA/LSO’s municipal election campaign propaganda throughout the 1960s, for example, it advanced two incorrect demands: 1) for an elected police commission — a variation of the concept of community control of the cops; and 2) disarm the police.

The LSA/LSO dumped these demands in its 1974 civic election campaigns after a discussion in the leadership that clarified its thinking.

The LSA/LSO rejected “community control” of the cops and its variants like an elected police commission for the same reason that we reject “community control” in general in a class-divided society. It ignores class distinctions, and actual control of the “community” by the bourgeoisie.[[4]]

Likewise, the LSA/LSO rejected the “disarm the police” slogan because it contributes to the illusion that the bourgeoisie can be disarmed “piece by piece” without destroying their control of the state. The municipal cops may be disarmed, but behind them there is the rest of the repressive apparatus of the state with its army and other police forces. (In the 1969 Montréal police strike, for example, “order” was restored by sending in federal troops and the Quebec Sûreté.)

Instead of calling for disarming the police, we should emphasize the right of the victims of police repression to defend themselves by whatever means are necessary. For example, we oppose “gun-control” laws that would leave Blacks disarmed while white cops and racists assault members of the Black community.

4. Dissolution of the Security Service

Does this mean that we reject all demands for the abolition of particular repressive forces? In the LSA/LSO debate on the question of municipal police, we accepted that we could demand the dissolution of special repressive forces whose specific function is the repression of political dissent, or of activities directed against a particular oppressed section of the population. Examples of such forces are the special “tactical squads” that have been formed in the municipal police forces of many North American cities. Their role is to terrorize the Black, Chicano, and immigrant communities, as well as to suppress labor struggles.

We might also include the special “anti-terrorist” squads in Montréal or their equivalent in other cities; their function is to harass and disrupt groups like the LOR/RWL, which are not guilty of any violent or illegal activity. We can call for the dissolution of these specialized repressive agencies, at the same time linking the demand to the need for self-defense by the victims against attacks of these official and semi-official police.

By extension, it is correct to call for the abolition of the RCMP’s Security Service, which is the political policing arm of the RCMP. (Some international examples: the comrades’ call for dissolution of the National Republican Guard in Portugal, or of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité in France.)

In the case of these specialized repressive forces, there is a real potential for mass struggle around such demands, while there is not such potential for general demands directed against the capitalist police as such.

Such demands should always be firmly situated in the context of our central political thrust, which is to mobilize the victims of these repressive measures and agencies in struggles around our central political demands — for an end to the repression of political dissent.

The demand for dissolution of the SS can reflect and help concretize our major political demands: open the files, stop spying and harassment against opponents of the government.

In motivating this demand, we explain that the essential function of the SS is to curtail and suppress dissent, not to counter illegal activity as the bourgeoisie claims. (The ruling class tries to encourage the latter view through such means as its current campaign against Soviet “spies.”)

A caution is necessary, however. The demand for abolition of the SS should be used judiciously. It is clearly supplementary to our key political demands. We want to take the debate over the cops away from the structural questions and into the real political functions of security policing.

5. Slogans in Quebec

The Quebec comrades have raised the demand “RCMP out of Quebec.” That is consistent with our understanding that in relation to Quebec, an oppressed nation, the RCMP as the federal police force plays a special repressive role. In that sense it is correct to call for “abolishing” the RCMP in Quebec. (The LOR does not campaign for dissolution of the Sûreté — the “provincial” police — for the same reason that in English Canada we don’t raise the demand for dissolution of the RCMP.)

At the same time, the comrades of the LOR link the demand “RCMP out of Quebec” with other demands directed against any and all political policing, including by the Quebec government. They call for opposition to any political police or intelligence service, such as the Bourassa government’s “Centre d’Analyse et de Documentation” (CAD), or the Parti Québécois government’s plans to beef up its own security service. (See material below from the LOR internal bulletin and the exchange in the letters column of the February 1, 1978 issue of Lutte Ouvrière.)

Finally, a word on the small side-bar in the February 6 Socialist Voice entitled “SS stifles free speech.” Apparently, some comrades misunderstood its purpose. It was not intended as an explanation of our demand for the abolition of the Security Service, still less to explain why we don’t call for abolition of the RCMP.

The reason to abolish the SS is explained adequately, I think, in the brief to the McDonald Commission, including the excerpts published in that issue of Socialist Voice. The purpose of the side-bar was simply to give a flavor of the exchange between the RWL representatives and the members of the commission following presentation of our brief. Its function was more journalistic than didactic — although the two aspects should never he counterposed!

Attachment 1. Excerpt from the LOR Internal Bulletin, No. 5, January 1978: “Draft Resolution on Campaigns of the LOR”

Our slogans in this campaign [on the RCMP – Tr.] have already been largely developed in the report by Richard to the Political Committee and in the newspapers Socialist Voice and Lutte Ouvrière: Expose all police activities; Open the files of the RCMP, the immigration ministry, the army and any other repressive or information-gathering body; Down with police repression and all police activity directed against opponents of the status quo; Full compensation for all victims of police repression; Reveal the truth about the 1970 War Measures crisis; and Let the workers movement organize opposition to these police measures.

These slogans are valid for the entire Canadian state. In Quebec we add two specific slogans: No to any political police or intelligence service (like the CAD) of the Quebec government; and Army and RCMP out of Quebec! The first slogan is aimed at countering in advance any attempt by the PQ to extablish a “normal” bourgeois state apparatus for its sovereign Quebec. The second is intended to clarify the fact that the RCMP is not just any police force but an imperialist force and one of its most fundamental goals has always been to repress oppressed nationalities within the Canadian state, especially the Native peoples and the Québécois. This slogan concretizes the kind of independence we want.

Attachment 2. A letter to Lutte Ouvrière, and the editors’ reply (Lutte Ouvrière, February 1, 1978)

RCMP out of Quebec?

I have some comments with respect to the slogan “GRC hors du Québec” [RCMP out of Quebec] that appeared in the November 9 issue of Lutte Ouvrière (No. 4). Without denying the actual role that the RCMP plays in Quebec, that is, a police apparatus serving the Canadian confederation with the goal of preventing any form of autonomy or dissension in Quebec, I must say that the theme “GRC hors du Québec” displeases me somewhat.

A slogan should be clear and immediately comprehensible; but this one is too ambiguous. If we say there should be no RCMP in Quebec, does it mean that we want to export our problems to the English-Canadian workers? That we’re not disturbed at the prospect of what might happen in that event?

I think what Lutte Ouvrière is trying to do instead is to demonstrate that the primary purpose of the RCMP is related to the oppression of Quebec. The vast majority of misdeeds by this police force since its history began have taken place on Quebec territory. However, you can’t say “RCMP out of Quebec” as we said “U.S. troops out of Vietnam” or “French troops out of Algeria,” because of our geographical situation and the fact that we are not a colony but a nation.

I would add that it should be called “RCMP” (in French) as it has always been known, and not “GRC,” its Quebec “adaptation.”

André Fortier, Montréal, January 27

Our reader secs ambiguities in the slogan “GRC hors du Québec.” But he agrees that Quebec is an oppressed nation, even if it isn’t a colony, and that the RCMP is a “police apparatus serving the Canadian confederation.” That is why, in our view, defending the right of Quebec to self-determination means saying no to the interventions of the Canadian state apparatus. It meant saying no to the War Measures Act; it meant demanding the withdrawal of the Canadian army.

André Fortier also protests that this slogan suggests we want “to export our problems to the English-Canadian workers.” He has a point. The slogan should always be used in conjunction with others that oppose any political policing, whether in Quebec or in Canada, and whether it is federal or provincial.

In that sense, we were wrong to put “GRC hors du Québec” as the main front-page headline, isolated from other demands. – Ed.

---

[1] These were the League for Socialist Action/Ligue Socialiste Ouvrière (LSA/LSO), the Revolutionary Marxist Group and the Groupe Marxiste Révolutionnaire.

[2] During the Cold War, many labour and social-democratic leaders encouraged the state to curtail the rights of unions allegedly controlled by the Communist party.

[3] Ross Dowson sued RCMP officers in 1978 alleging that poison pen letters they confessed to circulating to members of the LSA/LSO had caused such disruption within the organization that he had been forced to quit his job as its executive secretary. Dowson’s attempts to sue the RCMP failed when the Attorney General intervened to stay proceedings. Dowson had left the League in 1974 and founded what became the Socialist League.

[4] However, some First Nations seeking alternative forms of justice have raised demands for control by their communities of policing, and preferably by Indigenous officers — demands that deserve our support, in my opinion.

Québec solidaire congress: a few skirmishes, but a shift to the right?

Congress focuses on completing fusion with Option nationale

By Richard Fidler

In the fusion agreement with Option nationale adopted at its previous congress, in December 2017, Québec solidaire committed to aligning its program with that of ON. This was the major objective of the unified party’s congress that met in the Montréal suburb of Longueuil on November 15-17. Also on the agenda, in addition to the usual internal elections and some organizational details, was adoption of the party program on “defense and national security,” left over from the QS congress in May 2017, and some “clarifications on ecotaxation” (écofiscalité) , the latter item being proposed by the QS national council meeting last March.

While the 600 delegates did adopt the key provisions of the ON program proposed for adoption, the congress was traversed by an undercurrent of dissent expressed in attempts by delegates to assert control over the party’s 10-member parliamentary caucus and its leadership bodies as well as to reorient the party’s direction on some important questions, in particular with regard to the climate emergency.

The congress also adopted an emergency resolution on the coup d’état in Bolivia, appended below.

Toward a ‘referendum election’?
Option nationale originated as a split from the Parti québécois in protest against the PQ’s reluctance to campaign for Quebec independence. In the belief that an independent Quebec should be “neither left nor right” and that no Quebec party “actively” promoted sovereignty, former PQ deputy Jean-Martin Aussant founded ON in September 2011.[1] Under the fusion agreement, Option nationale now functions as one of QS’s recognized “collectives,” albeit with unique privileges.

The “Transition to independence” resolution, as adopted with amendments by this QS congress, closely resembles the ON program’s commitment to begin implementing the program of an independent Quebec once elected to office, even before adoption of a new constitution drafted by the constituent assembly.[2]

The QS resolution provides that a Québec solidaire government, upon being elected, will draft and adopt a transitional framework law under which it may retain or amend any existing federal law to ensure it corresponds more closely to Quebec society, “reaffirming thereby the democratic legitimacy of our only national parliament.” (All quotations are my translation.)

The government will also ensure that all taxes and federal payments on Quebec territory will now be collected by the Quebec government before any distribution of funds to another jurisdiction in accordance with respective responsibilities recognized by the Quebec government. All international treaties involving Quebec will be signed by Quebec subject to the right to renegotiate or withdraw from them as needed.

Pending the results of the constituent assembly deliberations, Quebec will begin operating under a republican system of government; the position of lieutenant-governor and the oath of allegiance to the Queen will be abolished.

The framework law will provide for negotiations with the First Nations and Inuit people, guaranteeing “their right to self-determination during the process of accession to independence.” Pending the results of these negotiations, Quebec will claim the continuity of its existing territory. It will integrate Québécois now employed in the federal public service into the Quebec public service if they so wish. Any permanent resident or temporary immigrant residing in Quebec upon its accession to independence will retain his or her status, and processing of their applications for citizenship will be speeded up.

The congress adopted as well an amendment to the draft resolution providing that a QS government must work to create a strong relationship with the popular movements and to rally the continental left to strengthen the constituent process.

Many questions remain
In a statement issued following the congress, QS spokesman Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois said “Once we are in power, we will carry out acts of rupture with the federal regime.” As an example, he said a QS government will refuse to allow new oil or gas pipelines to traverse Quebec.

“The adoption of these transitional measures,” writes Bernard Rioux in Presse-toi à gauche, demonstrates the determination of a QS government to embark on the road to independence beginning with its initial mandate…. It is an election that will have given it the mandate to launch the process.”
“[T]he transition might be defined as a situation in which Quebec is no long under total domination of the federal state and not yet really independent.”

However, Rioux warns,

“As history shows, the Canadian state is not going to accept independence through a ‘cold’ process. The members of the Canadian ruling class are not going to behave as great democrats respectful of the expression of the political will of the Quebec people, and they will do everything to attempt to undermine Quebec’s right of self-determination, a right they have never recognized.
“The only response, in this situation, is the strength of the mobilization and determination of the majority of the Quebec population, which alone will make it possible to accede to independence. The forms of actions and organization that will make this possible beyond a simple vote are essential questions that we cannot evade.”

Among the questions that Québec solidaire must address, he says, are:

• The role of Canadian and U.S. imperialism and the need to avoid any illusion as to their readiness to accept Quebec independence. This raises the issue of the alliances we need to forge with the oppressed nations and working and popular classes in both countries to help overcome our isolation.
• In this context, it is illusory to rely on a Quebec army (an indirect reference to the Option nationale collective’s proposal in the pre-congress debate calling for formation of a Quebec army to defend a sovereign Quebec against U.S. intervention).
• How can we confront the probable blackmail of the Bank of Canada during the transitional period? Rioux cites the way in which the European Union used the common currency, the Euro, to strangle the program of Greece’s Syriza government. And what about the pressure that will be exerted by the banks, big business, and “the technocratic summits in the state apparatus” to frustrate the transition?
• How can we challenge the legitimacy of the federalist elites who still traverse Quebec society?

These are among the many essential debates that remain before us, says Rioux.

It is worth noting that these are among the topics scheduled to be addressed in the debates at the conference on “The Great Transition” to be held next May 21-24 in Montréal.

A Québec army?
The previous programmatic congress of QS in 2017 had left for further debate and decision the issue of whether a proposed national civil defense force should include a military component. To prepare the debate at this year’s congress, the QS policy commission prepared a draft resolution that included many provisions already in some form in the QS program[3] but put two different options concerning the defense of an independent Quebec: a “strictly non-violent defense” (Option A) and a “hybrid defense including a military component.”[4]

“Both options,” said the commission, “are compatible with what was previously adopted. Neither advances a defense model that would be a simple extension of the one currently applied in Canada, with its massive spending on military equipment, a numerous professional army and a close alliance with the United States.

“Option B evokes situations like those of Switzerland, Ireland or Iceland, which have an army that is not part of NATO and never leaves their territory (except in UN operations).
“Option A rejects the idea of an armed force, and relies on a strategy of conflict prevention, reduction of vulnerabilities and non-violent mobilization of the population. This orientation draws on the experience of the mass resistance movements against dictatorships, segregation systems or foreign occupations.”

Option A linked the question of national security and defense to “the nature of the state that the Constituent Assembly will want to establish…. “From the outset, the constitution of an independent Quebec involves a rupture with the Canadian confederation as an imperialist state, a junior one as it may be. With a centralized professional army, Canada is integrated with the hegemonic domination of the United States.”

The party’s policy must address the concrete threats and the multiple forms they present today. In the interests of immediate mobilization, and to lead successfully the transition to a new state, we will have to count on a massive citizens’ mobilization. “Non-violent civil resistance thus constitutes, beginning now and throughout this transition, a major strategic advantage in the defence of the process we will be implementing….

“Among the many forms of aggression and destabilization are food, economic, financial, energy, social and/or ecological aggression. Non-violent civil defense aims to counter any threat in a prepared and organized way through peaceful collective actions of non-cooperation and non-confrontation with the adversary. The goal is to place that adversary in a situation in which it is unable to achieve its objectives and to make our society politically uncontrollable, ideologically unsubdued, economically unworkable. The goal is to dissuade by making the cost of aggression greater than the hoped-for gain….
“With the climate threat, decentralization of state power to the benefit of citizen bodies is essential. So also with security and defense policy.”

Option B proposed the creation of a force that would be both military and civilian. The military component would be armed and would intervene in the event of foreign invasion. It was needed for protection of the immense territory of Quebec, its resources and its strategic infrastructures. It would serve outside Quebec territory only in exceptional circumstances, democratically decided. The civilian component would be specialized in non-violent resistance techniques, and could as well be “deployed abroad in international solidarity missions.”

The military component, according to Option B, is a prerequisite to an anti-imperialist policy. “Some countries that have no military forces, like Costa Rica and Iceland, subcontract their defense to the United States and participate thereby in NATO, an aggressive military alliance.”

We need to bear in mind that Canada is “a colonial state that has no interest in Quebec becoming independent and has not hesitated to intervene in it on several occasions. Nor should be forget that the society we want proposes a rupture with the present neoliberal and petro-state…. [A] QS government must be able to achieve that society despite possible imperialist military threats.”

It seems there was little internal debate on these options prior to the congress, perhaps because the membership thought they had been defined and explained adequately by the policy commission. The synthesis resolution debated at congress incorporated a few proposed amendments to both options. A third option, C, proposed by the policy commission itself, called for “gradual implementation of a defense without an army” pending “full recognition of Quebec independence by the international community.” It was rejected, and in the end Option B was adopted overwhelmingly with no major amendments.

Climate change
The third and last major programmatic item on the agenda, “ecotaxation,” resulted in overturn of the Québec solidaire program’s opposition to market approaches based on carbon taxes and Quebec’s existing cap-and-trade program. The retreat had begun during the 2018 election, when — in the middle of the campaign — the QS leadership presented a climate-change platform that promised a QS government would retain cap-and-trade during its first mandate and establish a carbon-tax that would be set at $110 a ton by 2030 — far below any amount that could help to limit greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 48% of 1990 levels by 2030, as promised by QS. That platform, Now or Never, was never debated in the membership.[5]

A proposal that (inter alia) would end subsidies to fossil energy industries and impose much greater taxes on banks, big business and large private fortunes, the resulting revenues to be applied exclusively to fighting climate change, as well as to “replace the carbon market by regulatory limits on GHG emissions of polluting industries and provide for mandatory and rapid declines on those levels” was defeated by delegates.

In its place the adopted resolution, in addition to eliminating the QS program’s rejection of market-based mechanisms, paralleled the federal government’s existing carbon-tax program with rebate of the tax payments to lower-income citizens. However, it would apply the tax to all GHG emissions, whatever the source. The gradual implementation of this system would depend on “the availability of alternative options generating fewer GHGs.”

Carbon taxes are designed to alter consumer behaviour by increasing public awareness of the dangers in existing and rising GHG emissions. However, since capitalist politicians fear the adverse political effects of such taxes they are usually kept to ridiculously low amounts and are usually accompanied by provisions to rebate the proceeds, in whole or in part, to lower-income taxpayers. In the case of the federal Trudeau government’s tax, the amount rebated actually exceeds the amount collected from this sector of the population — thus defeating the promised effect on consumer behaviour!

Despite the QS ecofiscal commission’s argumentation, there is virtually no evidence that carbon market mechanisms result in any qualitative reduction in carbon emissions. Capitalist economists cling to this approach, however, because they are unwilling to contemplate the necessary radical elimination of fossil fuel production with its probable negative impact on profits and “competitiveness.” Yet Québec solidaire fails to name the system that is responsible for the climate catastrophe. Instead, its 2018 election platform blames it on “human activity,” not capitalism.

Again, these are issues that must be debated in QS. Its present program fails lamentably in this regard.

Begging Legault to tackle climate change…
There are related problems, too. The QS parliamentary caucus’s major campaign this past year has been Ultimatum 2020. It demands that the right-wing CAQ government of François Legault “adopt a credible economic transition plan by October 1, 2020,” the half-way point in its current mandate. “That,” says QS, “is the year of the last chance to avoid climate crisis.” Specifically, it calls on the Coalition Avenir Québec government to

1. Prohibit any proposed oil and gas exploitation or exploration on Quebec territory
2. Propose a plan to enable Quebec to attain the GHG reduction targets of the international panel of experts on climate change (IPCC)
3. Have this plan approved by an expert who is independent of the government.

If the government fails to do this, “Manon Massé and the QS caucus will cease to collaborate and will implement a parliamentary blockade (barrage parlementaire) to force the Legault government to act…. Perhaps he will finally understand.”

QS co-spokesman Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois has even published a book entitled “Letter of a deputy who is concerned to a premier who should be.”[6]

The breathtaking naiveté of this campaign simply boggles the mind. But the QS leadership has focused its primary appeal to the party’s members and supporters to mobilize “to force Legault to get his head out of the sand and assume his responsibilities.” (All quotations are translated from the QS pamphlet introducing the campaign.)

Supporters are urged to form or join teams that are to pursue “concrete” tasks assigned by the party. These tasks, issued every two weeks (there are nine so far) include such things as collecting signatures, organizing public meetings, lobbying CAQ deputies, etc.

And how successful has the campaign been? So far it has collected only 25,000 signatures — about the same number as the QS membership! Within QS, many members are upset.

Although there was no debate on the campaign scheduled at the QS congress, an emergency resolution proposed by six QS associations was adopted almost unanimously calling for the campaign to be “reoriented, in accordance with the requirements of the new situation [a reference to, inter alia, the climate protest demonstration of half a million in Montréal in late September] to put the emphasis on the major priorities of the Québec solidaire transition plan as well as to support, extend and deepen the present mobilization.” An accompanying proposal calling for a debate on the campaign at the congress had been ruled “unreceivable” by the resolutions committee.

Internal democracy
Another expression at the congress of membership unease with the party leadership’s conduct was the recent attempt by co-spokeswoman Manon Massé and two other QS deputies (Catherine Dorion and Sol Zanetti, both representing Quebec City ridings) to parachute their chosen candidate into the by-election in the area riding of Jean-Talon, now scheduled for December 2. The candidate, Frédéric Poitras, until then not a QS member, has worked the last five years as a political advisor to Quebec City mayor Régis Labeaume. The mayor is a strong supporter of the CAQ government’s plan to build a new highway crossing between the north and south shores of the St. Lawrence River, a project opposed by many citizens’ groups with which QS members are actively working. Three other candidates had already announced they would seek the QS nomination in Jean-Talon.

The deputies’ intervention provoked a revolt among the riding’s membership. In the end, party activist Olivier Bolduc was elected the candidate at the nomination meeting, far ahead of Poitras.
A leaflet distributed at the congress by the members of the “expanded coordinating committee” of QS Jean-Talon protested:

“This is not the first time the national leadership has acted this way. It is time to put an end to a practice that demobilizes the associations and violates our political values…. That is why the principle that candidates are chosen by the local associations is embedded in our statutes…. The support of members of our parliamentary wing to the candidacy of someone outside our party has profoundly shocked us.”

No doubt with this scandal in mind, the QS executive decided, shortly before the congress met, to open an internal consultation on the party’s democratic functioning and statutes, and “to draw up an inventory of possible solutions to these problems.” A table was set up in a separate room at the congress to hear some initial submissions by members. A preliminary report will be debated at the QS national committee meeting next May.

The “consultation” committee may also be called on to address the “updating of the modalities of recognition and continuity” of the party’s collectives, as proposed by the national coordinating committee last April. At present the party has nine collectives. With the exception of Option nationale, which has special rights under the 2017 fusion accord, most have a low profile and simply group QS members with a particular interest (e.g. animal justice). However, there is a pending request from some members to remove recognition from the collectif Laïcité (secularism) because it has publicly criticized the QS opposition to the government’s Bill 21 denying the right of public employees to wear symbols of their religious belief.

Another exception is the International Marxist Tendency collective. In past congresses, TMI members have been content to maintain a book stall and to lurk in the corridors selling their journal La Riposte (Fightback). In this congress, however, TMI members intervened vocally in several debates, their delegates ostentatiously flashing copies of their journal while they spoke. In the ecotaxation debate, they sought unsuccessfully to have the congress overrule the policy commission’s exclusion from consideration of proposals from two QS associations expressing the TMI hope (as they put it in an accompanying leaflet) that Québec solidaire would agree that “nationalization of the major sectors of the economy is the only real immediate solution to the climate crisis.” (The policy commission had ruled this went beyond the agenda of the congress.)

Personally, I have little sympathy for the ultimatist tone and content of the TMI message, which displays little awareness of the transitional program advanced by other international tendencies of similar (Trotskyist) antecedents. And I disagree with the views of the Laïcité collective, which seems to misunderstand the distinction between individual belief and state neutrality in religious matters. However, I believe that the quality of debate within Québec solidaire might benefit if the party’s collectives, and the membership generally, were given an expanded role in contributing to internal debate and decision-making.

This congress illustrated once again, as have so many other QS congresses in the past, an underlying problem in the way programmatic debates are organized in the party. I think Pierre Mouterde puts it well in a post-congress article.[7] The practice, he writes,

“organized essentially — as tradition has it in the unions, which has served as the model — around a string of amendments and sub-amendments proposed by the different associations… ends up making the debates extremely onerous, complex and frustrating for all the delegates (and I was one). To the point that many no longer really grasp the meaning of what they must ultimately vote on, and above all are no longer able to debate the essential (the major orientations at stake) and subsequently decide. Which tends to make this exercise … particularly sterile, since it does not help us get to the bottom, to deepen our own political vision, to politicize ourselves collectively and to reinforce this common left culture that ought to be ours.”

A QS predecessor, the Union des forces progressistes (UFP), maintained a moderated on-line forum that allowed members to discuss political ideas and events, and to link to articles of possible interest to other members. This might help the cause of internal democracy within Québec solidaire.

Finally, it is worth noting an important decision taken on the last day of the congress following some intense lobbying by, among others, the QS antiracist decolonial collective. The delegates voted unanimously to establish a National Indigenous Commission (CAN in its French acronym) to give voice to the party’s First Nations and Inuit members. It will be composed only of Indigenous members, and will be mandated initially to define its structures, and to declare its views on the existing party program and any issue “within an inter-sectional perspective” at all levels of the party. It is intended to develop “nation-to-nation relations between QS and the Indigenous peoples’ communities; to support the involvement of Indigenous women; and to convoke if it wishes a national conference of Indigenous peoples to address any issue that it considers relevant.” A member chosen by the committee will sit on the QS national coordinating committee on an interim basis until the party’s 2021 congress.

Appendix:

Emergency Resolution on Bolivia

Adopted unanimously by delegates at the congress of Québec solidaire, November 16, 2019

QS Introduction
From a news release issued by the party on November 17
It must be said: What happened last week in Bolivia is a coup d’état. It recalls to us the darkest hours in the history of Latin America.

The great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote in the early 1970s:

“[O]ur region still works as a menial. It continues to exist at the service of others’ needs, as a source and reserve of oil and iron, of copper and meat, of fruit and coffee, the raw materials and foods destined for rich countries which profit more from consuming them than Latin America does from producing them.[…] [I]n close proximity [are] the caravelled conquistadors and the jet-propelled technocrats: Hernan Cortes and the Marines; the agents of the Spanish Crown and the International Monetary Fund missions; the dividends from the slave trade and the profits of General Motors.”[8]

Sadly, in 2019, this assessment still rings true. The coup in Bolivia was orchestrated by the Bolivian economic elite with the complicity of the Organization of American States (OAS). The OAS is based in Washington and is financed 44% by the United States. It is nothing but the diplomatic arm of U.S. imperialism.

By challenging the electoral results that made outgoing president Evo Morales the victor, the OAS paved the way for the seizure of power by an illegitimate and profoundly regressive government. After the forced resignation of Evo Morales, the whipala, the seven-colour flag of the Indigenous peoples and the second official flag of Bolivia, was removed from the presidential palace and burned. It was an openly racist act.

To denounce this tragic coup against democracy and human rights, the deputy of Laurier-Dorion Andrés Fontecilla, and the delegate of the Verdun QS association Zachary Williams, presented yesterday the following emergency motion to the congress of Québec solidaire:

Whereas:

• The Bolivian president Evo Morales received the majority of the votes in the Bolivian presidential election;[9]
• President Morales agreed to a second round of election although, under the country’s election law, the majority support he received did not necessitate a second round;
• The coup placed in power an illegitimate government in Bolivia, which has promoted violence against the progressive activities of Bolivians and the indigenous peoples

It is proposed:

• That Québec solidaire formally denounce the coup in Bolivia and the foreign interference through the Organization of American states (OAS);
• That Québec solidaire denounce the far-right violence toward Evo Morales, the progressive and popular movements and the indigenous communities of Bolivia.

A comment (RF) - Unfortunately, the resolution does not mention Canada’s role in this sordid affair, which closely resembles the Trudeau government’s continued support of Venezuela’s would-be coup leader Juan Guaidó. See “Canada backs coup against Bolivia’s president.”

See also: Statement on Human Rights Violations in Bolivia — An open letter signed by over 850 public figures, http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article51279.

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[1] He has since rejoined the PQ and was an unsuccessful candidate in the 2018 election.
[2] See the 2017 program on the ON collective’s website, https://opnat.quebec/le-collectif/archives/programme/, especially Part I, “Accession to Quebec independence.”
[3] See in particular pp. 73-74.
[4] The commission’s draft and its presentation are linked in the Option nationale collective’s text, cited earlier.
[5] See my summary and critique of the platform.
[6] Lettre d’un député inquiet à un premier ministre qui devrait l’être, Lux 2019, 104 pages. For a critique see “Lettre de Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois à François Legault: comme tenter de faire pousser une fleur dans le ciment.”
[7] Pierre Mouterde, “14ième congrès de QS: ne pas lâcher la proie pour l’ombre?,” Presse-toi à gauche, Nov. 19.
[8] Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (Monthly Review Press), translated by Cedric Belfrage, foreword by Isabel Allende. – RF
[9] Morales received a plurality of the popular vote: 47.08%, just over 10% more than his nearest rival Carlos Mesa, and thus was elected on the first round in accordance with Bolivia’s Constitution of the Plurinational State. – RF

Catalan independence leaders sentenced to heavy jail terms

The savage sentences handed down by Spain’s Supreme Court against nine Catalan independence leaders have been denounced by political leaders in Quebec, including Premier François Legault. In the forefront are the deputies of Québec solidaire, who will present a motion this week in the National Assembly condemning the repression and reaffirming the right of self-determination of peoples.

“Jailing elected members because they exercised their democratic duty does not make good sense,” said QS deputy co-leader Manon Massé. She was responding to a letter sent to QS by the president of the Catalan parliament asking them to find a way to help in resolving the political conflict in Spain. Massé, who had visited Catalonia in 2017 at the time of the independence vote, testified by videoconference in April during the trial of Jordi Cuixart, leader of one of the social movements supporting independence.

Campaigning in Canada’s federal election, Bloc Québécois leader Yves François Blanchet called on the leaders of the other parties, starting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to denounce the heavy sentences imposed on the Catalan leaders. Trudeau refused, arguing that it involved an internal Spanish affair. He invoked the same neutrality in 2017 when Spanish police beat Catalan voters who sought to exercise their right to vote. At the time Jagmeet Singh, newly elected leader of the New Democratic Party, denounced Trudeau, saying the right to self-determination was one of the most important rights.

In the article below, Dick Nichols reports on the massive protests that have erupted in Catalonia in response to the court sentences. Nichols is the Barcelona-based European correspondent of Green Left Weekly, from which the article is reproduced, with thanks.

Nichols’ article is followed by extensive excerpts from an article by Viento Sur editor Jaime Pastor critically dissecting the meaning of the Spanish court’s judgment, and in particular the parts in which the court attempts to distinguish the Catalan case from those of other national minority peoples in states of the geographical North, starting with Quebec. My translation from the Spanish.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Vindictive sentence in Catalan leaders’ trial unleashes tsunami of protest

By Dick Nichols, Barcelona, October 18, 2019

The gap between the 75%–80% of Catalans who uphold their country’s right to self-determination, and the Spanish elites and parts of Spanish society that do not want to know anything about it, was already very wide before October 14.

But on that day, when the Spanish Supreme Court condemned nine Catalan political and social movement leaders to a total of 99.5 years jail, it most likely became unbridgeable.

Following the sentence of the leaders for their role in the October 1, 2017 independence referendum, popular outrage in Catalonia immediately exploded in mass protests involving tens of thousands of people.

They occupied Barcelona airport, imposed road blocks on major highways, demonstrated in huge numbers outside Spanish government offices and began “Marches for Freedom” on Barcelona from five provincial cities.

Every imaginable Catalan social and sporting organisation, from Barcelona Football Club to chess associations, has issued statements condemning the sentences.

On the nights of October 15–16, police and small groups engaged in running battles in central Barcelona, as smoke rose from burning rubbish bins.

On October 16, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) acting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez appeared on television to warn that security forces would act “firmly, serenely and proportionately” in the face of violence.

To his right, People’s Party (PP) leader Pablo Casado demanded the declaration of a state of emergency in Catalonia, while Citizens’ leader Albert Rivera called for an end to Catalan self-rule under article 155 of the Spanish constitution.

One of the main instruments coordinating these responses is the Democratic Tsunami platform, anonymously run by activists from the October 1 referendum, and coordinated via a Telegram channel that, at the time of writing, had attracted 300,000 subscribers.

Punishment without crime

The unanimous verdict of the seven Supreme Court judges that set off this still expanding wave of protest was that nine Catalan leaders — seven former ministers and social movement leaders Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart — were guilty of “sedition” in preparing the October 1 referendum.

For this 18th century crime, long deleted from the penal codes of many other European states, they were sentenced to jail terms ranging from 9 to 13 years.

The harshest sentence was handed out to former Catalan vice-president Oriol Junqueras as “leader of the sedition”. Former ministers Raül Romeva (foreign affairs), Dolors Bassa (social welfare) and Jordi Turull (minister of state) came next with 12 years: along with Junqueras they were also found guilty of “embezzlement”.

Former Catalan parliament speaker Carme Forcadell incurred 11.5 years jail for allowing the chamber to vote on the referendum’s enabling law, after being instructed by the Spanish Constitutional Court not to do so.

The “sedition” of former Catalan interior minister Joaquim Forn (11.5 years) consisted in undermining the ability of the Catalan police to deliver and enforce Spanish state court orders.

Former territory minister Josep Rull was found guilty of denying a Spanish Civil Guard ship mooring facilities and of making public buildings available as voting centres.

As for Òmnium Cultural president Cuixart and former Catalan National Assembly president Sànchez, their “sedition” was proven by the fact that they had called demonstrations against Civil Guard searches and urged people to defend voting centres against police and Civil Guard attempts to impound ballot boxes.

Along with these nine, who have already been held in preventive detention for up to two years, the court found former ministers Carles Mundó (attorney-general), Santi Vila (business) and Meritxell Borras (education) guilty of “disobedience”, fining each €60,000 and banning them from standing for public office for 18 months.

The nine jailed leaders have been banned from standing for public office for the term of their sentences.

Why this verdict?

The verdict is the predictable result of the pressures operating on the Supreme Court and its chief judge Manuel Marchena.

The chief pressure was for the trial to produce an exemplary punishment of the Catalan leaders. They had humiliated the Spanish state by successfully organising a unilateral independence referendum after 18 failed attempts to negotiate a Scottish-style referendum with successive Spanish governments.

A measure of the viciousness of the sentences is to compare them to those arising from the failed 1981 coup attempt. The average punishment for the military and Civil Guards who tried to reimpose the Francisco Franco dictatorship then was six years jail: the sentences of the Catalan leaders average 8.3 years.

The Supreme Court judges were doing the work set out for them by the previous PP government of Mariano Rajoy.

According to a leaked WhatsApp message by PP Senate spokesperson Ignacio Cosidó, its Second Chamber, which heard the case, was controlled “via the back door”.

There was no way its judges, even their “progressive” minority, were going to find the Catalan leaders innocent, or guilty only of disobedience (which carries no jail sentence).

There was no ‘rebellion’

However, the heavy sentences the court was always going to impose have to be defensible in law, not only within Spain but especially before a European Court of Human Rights — which in 2018 upheld nine out of ten appeals against Spanish court decisions.

This pressure to find a plausible legal foundation for their decision meant the judges had to discard the “rebellion” charge against the Catalan leaders.

This indictment was originally brought by the investigating magistrate Pablo Llarena and was backed by the Spanish prosecutor-general’s office and the “popular prosecution”, the ultra-right party Vox.

(The “popular prosecution” is a Spanish institution originally designed to allow the representation of community or public interest.)

Dropping the charge of “rebellion”, which a majority of Spanish jurists had already declared inapplicable, was also probably the price of a unanimous verdict between judges of different political temperaments.

It was also a political imperative. It will help Pedro Sánchez maintain the myth that Spain is a “law-governed state” with an independent judiciary and it will also help the European Union and its member states, fearful of any Catalan threat to the EU status quo, sustain the same fiction.

In the days after the verdict, spokespeople for the European Commission and the British government robotically repeated the line from Madrid.

Caught in contradiction

The dropping of “rebellion” comes at a price, however, because the whole Spanish-patriotic view of the October 1 referendum, from King Philip down, is that it was a deliberate, rebellious assault on the Constitution.

Sensitive to the angst their appeal-proofed verdict would cause, the judges devoted about 200 pages of the 493-page judgement to arguments against the “rebellion”.

Yet, in adopting the “sedition theory”, the judges fall into a painful contradiction.

Their decision says, for example, that October 1 did not involve “preconceived, deliberate and functional” violence aimed at achieving Catalonia’s separation from the Spanish state, but was rather an attempt to pressure it into negotiations.

“The over-excited citizens who believed that the positive result of the so-called referendum would lead to the hoped-for horizon of a sovereign republic were unaware that the right to decide had changed into an atypical right to bring pressure.”

But if that argument is valid against “rebellion”, how is it not also valid against “sedition”? The only difference in Spanish law is that “rebellion” is a crime against the constitution and “sedition” a crime against public order.

The judges’ answer was to smother the contradiction in lurid fictional accounts of the events of 2017. These are based on the well-rehearsed evidence of Spanish National Police and Civil Guard officers, whom Marchena “spared” from defence cross-examination, backed by visual evidence, during the trial.

In their decision, it is the huge peaceful demonstrations and non-violent protests of 2017 that become “sedition”. This ruling opens the door to any protest activity, like trade union pickets or organised attempts to stop evictions, being regarded as “seditious”.

In an October 16 interview in the Catalan daily Ara, Jordi Sànchez said: “The sentence unequivocally lies. It doesn’t specify any detail of the supposed strategy of sedition. Not one confirmed meeting, not one email, only declarations in public ANC [Catalan National Assembly] events and the calling of demonstrations.

“The Supreme Court judges’ hostility towards us has betrayed them. Their animosity towards us has leaked out in the sentence in the form of false statements to justify the prison terms.”

Offensives launched

The verdict has also been the signal for new offensives from both sides of the Catalan-Spanish State struggle.

The Spanish judiciary immediately banned convicted Catalan leaders from standing in the November 10 Spanish general election and judge Llarena reissued a European arrest warrant for the extradition of former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont from Belgium.

The PSOE government went on an offensive to persuade other countries of the immaculate character of the Spanish legal system. Cabinet members with foreign languages made themselves available for interviews on whatever international channels would have them.

On the Catalan side, the enormous, growing tsunami of mass protest started to roll.

All this is taking place three weeks out from the Spanish general election, in which Catalonia will dominate as never before. In Jordi Sànchez’s words: “They believe that they will terminate people’s sentiments by beheading those they think are leaders of the process.

“They are having the opposite effect.”

A ruling against the right to decide

by Jaime Pastor (extracts)

A reading of the 23 pages of the judgment devoted to rejecting the claim to the right to decide (199-222) reveals clearly the pirouettes resorted to by the Supreme Court (SC) in order to disqualify it. Notwithstanding its statement that “it is not our job to offer — or pursue or insinuate — political solutions to a problem with deep historical roots” (referring obviously to Catalonia’s relation to Spain), it immediately goes on to reject the defence’s allegations, since accepting them “would be used to affirm, in opposition to a monistic vision of sovereignty that is typical of historical constitutionalism, a constitutional pluralism, a diffuse and shared sovereignty including a co-sovereignty transcending rancid concepts affected by the passage of time.”

Well yes, ladies and gentlemen, if we analyze the present and global political reality, it does not support a monistic or unilateral vision of sovereignty, since what we are witnessing is a now irreversible crisis of the sovereign national-state paradigm. In the framework of neoliberal globalization what has occurred is an intertwining of sovereignties and jurisdictions within an hierarchical inter-state system that in turn is increasingly fusing with the major economic powers around a lex mercatoria común under which most states are reluctant to recognize internal national and cultural diversity, and above all are draining it of democracy and popular sovereignty. Is not the reality of the European Union a confirmation of that “diffuse and shared” sovereignty, which has led even the states of the Eurozone to renounce one of their most symbolic powers, that is monetary sovereignty? […]

It is in this reality of an institutional architecture that a multilevel governance is developing and expanding on a global scale, especially around the hard core of politics — economics and finance, civil and military security, etc. — shared by the IMF, the World Bank, the central banks, NATO, the G8 and the United States. So it is truly sarcastic to speak of the exclusive sovereignty of states and, in our case, of the preservation of the sovereignty of the Spanish people when the latter have been excluded, for example, from deciding on constitutional reforms of such huge scope as the reform of the much-criticized article 135 of the Constitution — which annulled the social character of the “social and democratic rule of law” established by that same fundamental law. In reality, unfortunately, there is one area in which that exclusive state sovereignty is exercised, and in an increasingly more repressive form, as we see in the Mediterranean: the border controls imposed on the free movement of persons even while barriers to the entry and flight of capital continue to be eliminated.

In this regard, and to be brief, I take the liberty of quoting what I wrote recently in Le Monde Diplomatique:[1]

“In today's world, moreover, although the sovereign state paradigm continues to exist, we know that we are actually in an increasingly interdependent world on all levels, as well as a hierarchical system of states, in turn merged with major economic powers that seek to impose their interests and decisions over and above the peoples and even their representative institutions. We should not be surprised, therefore, at the rise of popular-based sovereignty movements in very different places on the planet and with quite distinct ideological orientations.

“In what concerns us here, it should be recalled that we have arrived at this point after a long process in which most states, especially since the end of the 18th century, have tended to develop a model of nationalization of their respective populations based on the promotion of a single national identity, a single language and a single culture. This paradigm, according to which access to citizenship rights is linked to belonging — voluntarily or by force — to the official national identity, has generated many relationships of inequality and injustice, due to the lack of recognition of the different ethnic and national identities within the same State.”

That is the crux of the matter and that is why the claim to the right of self-determination within demo-liberal states of the North has resurfaced. The old salt-water theory, which was intended to limit that right to colonies and occupied countries, has long since lost its applicability. That is why the internal and external dimensions of the right to self-determination are seen in cases such as that of Canada and Quebec, challenging the taboo of the “territorial integrity of states.”

Yet notwithstanding this persistent and ever-increasing reality in different places, the Supreme Court clings to the thesis of “the safeguarding of the territorial integrity of the already constituted states as the natural limit to what has been called the external dimension of the right to self-determination.” Aware, however, that this “territorial integrity” has been questioned in the aforementioned cases, it excuses itself by saying that “we cannot go beyond our functional space” only to do so later by rejecting any similarity between the case of Quebec and that of Canada, since “no similarity can be proclaimed between the historical origin of Quebec’s claim and the unilateral act of secession attributed to the defendants.”

Why not? Hasn’t there been a problem of accommodation, both in Quebec and in Catalonia, of their national realities within the respective states? Yes, there is a difference, of course, but it is that while in Canada that conflict was addressed after two referendums, and a political and democratic solution has been sought despite the fact that its Constitution does not recognize the right of secession, in the Spanish state there has been no willingness to find that democratic solution. On the contrary, from the first moment a fundamentalist reading of the 1978 Constitution has been imposed making it a true straitjacket — which is what the Canadian Supreme Court judgment [on Quebec secession] rejected.

Then the SC makes a quick and superficial tour of other cases: Montenegro (“a previously constitutionalized process”), Scotland (“result of a negotiation process” and with the particular feature that the UK constitution is unwritten), or Kosovo (for the unique nature of the conflict and the EU tutelage). Interestingly, with respect to the latter, the Court passes very quickly over the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), forgetting that while it recognizes the specificity of the case, that does not stop it from extracting some general conclusions, among them that while international law does not recognize the right to secession within existing states, it does not prohibit it either. In order to recognize it, the ICJ limits itself to demanding some procedural requirements of the collective subject that is prepared to exercise it: the non-use of force, proof that the process seeking a negotiated settlement must be exhausted, and, finally, that a clear majority of the population concerned has declared itself in favour of secession by peaceful means.[2]

Starting, therefore, from the conclusions of the ICJ, the debate should revolve around the question of whether the negotiated settlement process has been exhausted within the framework of the Spanish State. It seems clear that since the de facto annulment of the substance of the Nou Estatut de Autonomía by the Constitutional Court,[3] there has been a widespread feeling in a large sector of Catalan society (of which about 48% vote for independentist parties, but whose real percentage could only be verified in a referendum that turns on this issue), of non-recognition as a people by the Spanish state. That 2010 ruling was understood as a breach of the territorial constitutional agreement of 1978. It is this that helps to explain the rapid rise of independentism over the almost 10 years since then, which is not to deny that other factors of a secondary order may have been an influence. All the more so when there has not been a single alternative proposal since then for a new type of consensual relationship among the parties of the regime other than the application of article 155[4] and/or the National Security Law.

In these circumstances, and returning to the case of Kosovo, the conclusions of the ICJ should be taken into consideration and the possibility of recognizing the right to secession be accepted […] that is, to recognize that in the last resort, the negotiation routes have been exhausted and to avoid a stagnation of the conflict, it would be legitimate to respect the right to secession of the population of the affected territorial area (in this case an Autonomous Community) provided that it complies with the democratic procedural requirements. It is precisely around this hypothesis that there is a total absence of references in the Supreme Court ruling.

The final answer of the SC is, therefore, that “there is no such right” and, what is worse, that “there is no democracy outside the rule of law,” thus opposing one principle to another and refusing to recognize, as did the Constitutional Court itself, that there is at least a “political aspiration” to which a political solution should be sought. The logical thing, then, would be to adopt an evolutionary interpretation of rights, as was done, by the way, with the recognition of gay marriage, and to consider, as the ICJ did, that there are extreme situations in which the legitimate exercise of the right to decide prevails over the “safeguarding of the territorial integrity of the already constituted states” and, in our case, of the sacred unity of Spain. […]

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[1] Jaime Pastor, “La cuestión catalana y la disputa por la soberanía,” Le Monde Dipomatique (Spanish edition), No. 271, p. 3. Available in Viento Sur: https://vientosur.info/spip.php?article13844.

[2] Iñigo Urrutia, “Territorial Integrity and Self-Determination: The Approach of the International Court of Justice in the Advisory Opinion on Kosovo,” REAF-Revista d’Estudis Autonòmics i Federals Vol. 16 (2012). Available at https://works.bepress.com/inigo_urrutia/5/.

[3] The 2006 Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia was a law passed by the Catalan legislature, then approved by Spain’s parliament and later ratified in a referendum by Catalan voters. Almost immediately, the opposition center-right Popular Party challenged the statute before the Constitutional Court. The court deliberated for the next four years until June 28, 2010 when it struck down 14 of the statute’s 223 articles and curtailed another 27. Among other things, the ruling struck down attempts to place the distinctive Catalan language above Spanish in the region; ruled as unconstitutional regional powers over courts and judges; and said: “The interpretation of the references to ‘Catalonia as a nation’ and to ‘the national reality of Catalonia’ in the preamble of the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia have no legal effect.” (“The Spanish Court Decision That Sparked the Modern Catalan Independence Movement,” https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/catalonia-referendum/541611/.) – Tr.

[4] Article 155 is only two short paragraphs of the 1978 Constitution of Spain. It says that if a regional government “does not comply with the obligations of the Constitution or other laws it imposes, or acts in a way that seriously undermines the interests of Spain,” the national government can ask the Senate to vote on the use of the measure. (“What is Article 155 of the 1978 Spanish Constitution?,” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/10/article-155-spanish-constitution-171019100117592.html.) – Tr.

Indigenous sovereignty and socialism in Canada: a Marxist perspective

New book explores the mass Indigenous movement that is in the vanguard of the fight for climate justice in Canada

Valerie Lannon and Jesse McLaren, Indigenous Sovereignty & Socialism. Toronto: International Socialists [2018].

____________________

Ian Angus, editor of the excellent web site Climate & Capitalism, invited me to review this book. Here is my review, published January 30 on his site. —Richard Fidler

This small book (123 pages) is an ambitious effort, with three objectives: “to outline the history of European colonization and the Canadian state… to outline the long and ongoing history of Indigenous resistance to colonialism… [and] to explore the dialogue between Indigenous sovereignty and socialism over the past 150 years.”

Describing themselves as “settlers and socialists involved in the climate justice movement,” the authors say they want to “contribute to this ongoing conversation — learning from Indigenous resistance and contributing to settler solidarity.”

On the whole, they do this well. The result is a valuable contribution, one of the few written from a Marxist perspective, to the growing literature on the mass Indigenous movement that is now in the vanguard of the fight in Canada against climate catastrophe.

The book addresses, in chronological sequence, seven aspects of Canada’s Indigenous history. This review will highlight some salient features. The full text incorporates a wealth of documentation, much of it based on Indigenous peoples’ narratives and research.

I. First Peoples. This chapter describes the communal societies of the Indigenous peoples encountered by the first European settlers, drawing on studies by Marx, Engels and North American Marxist and Indigenous scholars. “European socialists saw the democracy and equality of Turtle Island [North America] as something to be celebrated and spread, but European rulers saw it as a barrier to capital accumulation that had to be crushed.”

II. Capitalism and Colonialism. Europeans saw the land as theirs for the taking, invoking a “doctrine of discovery” that treated it as terra nullius, a land without people. Where necessary, they cajoled the Indigenous into signing unequal treaties, interpreting them as a surrender of Native sovereignty, while their own undertakings were subsequently ignored. Colonialism, with or without treaties, entailed the dispossession of the Indigenous populations, and in some cases their proletarianization. The authors quote Howard Adams, a Saskatchewan Métis who pioneered in the Marxist analysis of Canada’s oppression of the Indigenous peoples:

“The structure of racism and the form of racial violence in Canada was dictated by two facts: the conquest of Indian territory and the exploitation of Aboriginal labour in the pursuit of wealth from fur pelts…. Indian communal society was transformed into an economic class of labourers by European fur trading companies, particularly the Hudson’s Bay Company.”

They add:

“The competition for market dominance — between competing companies like the HBC and the Northwest Company, and competing colonial states like England and France — transformed hunting, trapping and fishing from activities that maintained societies in equilibrium with nature to unsustainable profit-driven markets. Indigenous societies had maintained their metabolism with nature for thousands of years, but the introduction of the capitalist market led to a metabolic rift: over-hunting of beaver in the forests, fish in the streams, buffalo on the plains and whales in the Arctic. This undermined food security, furthering colonial control.”

III. Canada: A Prison-House of Nations. The British Act creating the Dominion of Canada bolstered colonial domination over Indigenous peoples and the national oppression of Québécois and Acadians. The subsequent consolidation and expansion westward of the new Canadian state entailed the violent suppression of Indigenous and Métis resistance and the theft of their lands, whether by treaty or not (as in British Columbia).

The Indian Act replaced traditional tribal governance with band councils dominated by a federal government bureaucracy. The subdivision of Indigenous lands into reserves was designed, as an Indian Affairs commissioner wrote, to destroy “the tribal or communist system.” Indigenous culture was targeted through residential schools, forcibly removing within a century 150,000 children from their communities, traditions and teachings in order to “kill the Indian in the child.”

Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, the authors note, led the genocidal project of building a colonial and capitalist state by trying to destroy Indigenous nations. He is hailed in Canadian mythology as a “nation builder,” but “the Canadian state he helped build was a prison-house of nations; it was built on colonizing First Nations and Inuit people, deporting Acadians, conquering Quebec, oppressing the Métis, and exploiting Indigenous and immigrant workers.”

While Indigenous labour was employed extensively in Canada’s resource-based economy in the early 20^th century, Indigenous workers were considered unreliable assets by employers because of their surviving links with their lands, communities, and customs, which served to offset the super-exploitation of their labour. “Canadian capitalism used racism to justify colonizing Indigenous territory, to extract more surplus value from Indigenous workers, and also to weaken solidarity.” However, the authors cite numerous examples of Indigenous resistance to these attacks.

IV. White Paper, Red Power. The biggest attack on Indigenous peoples in the post-WWII period came with the appropriately named “White Paper” on Indian policy, produced in 1969 by the minister of “Indian Affairs,” Jean Chrétien. It aimed to abolish Indigenous status, do away with the treaties, and leave Canada’s quarter-million treaty Indians then covered by federal services at the mercy of the provinces. The White Paper “would have been the death knell of distinct First Nations cultures and rights, as paltry as these rights were under the Indian Act, including funding for housing, health and education.” It “is inconceivable,” Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau proclaimed, “that one section of a society should have a treaty with another section of society…. They should become Canadians as all other Canadians.”

The White Paper sparked a new rise of Indigenous resistance — the Red Power movement — expressed in such organizations as the Native Alliance for Red Power (modelled on the Black Panthers),[1] Equal Rights for Native Women, to fight the sexist provisions in the Indian Act, and the Saskatchewan Native Action Committee (SNAC), founded by Howard Adams to “provide a radical alternative to a leadership he saw as co-opted.”

Although Trudeau was forced to withdraw the White Paper, its thinking has informed government policy and practice to this day. In the 1970s, Ottawa launched a “comprehensive claims process” ostensibly to settle unresolved land title issues among Indigenous nations that had not signed treaties. But as in the “model” James Bay and Northern Quebec “modern” treaty in the mid-1970s between the Cree Nation and the Quebec and federal governments, which allowed Quebec to develop hydro-electric generation throughout much of the province’s territory, governments always condition any such agreement (and there are very few) on a prior surrender of indigenous title.

When Pierre Trudeau “patriated” the Canadian constitution from Britain, a massive Indigenous mobilization managed to gain the last-minute adoption of a section (35) of the new Constitution recognizing “[t]he existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada.” However, it was left to the courts to clarify what those rights were in substance. The result, as indigenous scholar Pam Palmater argues, has been an “extensive, costly litigation of our rights on a right by right, species by species and First Nation by First Nation basis.” And any recognition of such rights is always made subordinate to (“reconciled with”) Canadian sovereignty and Canadian law.

V. Recognition and Reconciliation. A Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was appointed in 1991 following the standoff between the Canadian army and the Mohawks of Kanehsatake defending against a private golf course on their lands. In 1996 the RCAP issued a five-volume 4,000 page report with 440 recommendations “covering all the key aspects of the lives of Aboriginal peoples, albeit within the confines of the Canadian state and economic system.” Among these were:

• Establishment of a new Nation-to-Nation relationship
• Creation of an aboriginal parliament
• Termination of the Indian Act and the department enforcing it
• A public inquiry into residential school abuse
• Fulfillment of existing treaties and a new framework for negotiating new treaties
• Recognition of the Aboriginal right to self-determination
• Provision of land sufficient to foster Aboriginal economic self-reliance and cultural and political autonomy
• Financing of Aboriginal economic development
• A series of measures to establish Aboriginal control over social services, education.

“Critically, it called for doing away with racist legal covers for colonization: ‘concepts such as terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery are factually, legally and morally wrong.’”

Most of these recommendations (many of them echoed 20 years later by the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) have been ignored by governments, which instead employ a “recognition and reconciliation” approach that (in the words of Indigenous scholar Glen Coulthard) entices Indigenous peoples “to identify, either implicitly or explicitly, with the profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition either imposed on or granted to them by the settler state and society.”

Most recently, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, initially opposed by the Harper government, has given the First Nations a new weapon in their struggle. Indigenous leaders point out that the UNDRIP urges states to give legal recognition and protection to the lands, territories and resources of the Indigenous peoples, and to condition the adoption of measures that may affect them on “their free, prior and informed consent.”[2]

VI. Indigenous Resistance Today. This section documents numerous struggles led by a militant new leadership — examples are the activists in Idle No More and Defenders of the Land — prepared to engage in direct action initiatives, to stand up to corporate and government intrusions on Indigenous lands, and to work with non-Indigenous activists in defense of First Nations rights and the environment.

“Indigenous resistance and solidarity has helped transform the small environmental movement of the 1990s into the broad climate justice movement of today. While loggers angrily denounced environmentalists protesting at Clayoquot sound in 1993, in 2013 Unifor (representing some tar sands workers) signed the Solidarity Accord with the Save the Fraser Declaration, stating: ‘We, the undersigned, say to our First Nations brothers and sisters, and to the world, that we are prepared to stand with you to protect the land, the water and our communities from the Enbridge pipelines and tankers project and similar projects to transport tar sands oil.” … With this spirit the climate justice movement — unifying labour, environmental and Indigenous movements — flows from the heart of the tar sands across Turtle Island.”

A major battle today is the fight to stop a planned expansion of the TransMountain pipeline, now owned by the federal government, that would triple its flow of tar-sands bitumen from Alberta to the Pacific Coast. Another battle is in northern British Columbia, on Wet’suwet’en lands, where the B.C. government is building a gas pipeline to serve a huge LNG complex on the coast that is the biggest private-sector undertaking in Canada. In both these battles, the companies and governments involved have gone to great lengths, with some success, to enlist support from Indian Act band councils hoping to alleviate their peoples’ poverty through construction jobs and other promised benefits.

“Whereas colonial violence in the 19^th century paved the way for the railroad,” the authors comment, “colonial violence today facilitates the latest ‘nation-building project’: tar sands and pipelines.”

VII. Indigenous Sovereignty & Socialism. The authors list key immediate demands raised in the struggles outlined in previous pages. “These reforms, and the fight necessary to win them, are essential to push back against the injustice of the Canadian state.” And they single out the First Nations’ role in fighting climate change, although surprisingly they do not mention the Leap Manifesto’s recognition that

“This leap must begin by respecting the inherent rights and title of the original caretakers of this land. Indigenous communities have been at the forefront of protecting rivers, coasts, forests and lands from out-of-control industrial activity.”[3]

They note, however, the obstacles and limits to achieving these goals posed by the institutions of the Canadian state: courts, governments, legislatures, etc. They call for “revolutionizing settler society, by building unity and solidarity within the working class, which includes Indigenous workers.”

“Only the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism — a truly democratic, environmentally sustainable, economically and socially just society — can stop capitalism’s endless drive to accumulate, achieve Indigenous sovereignty, and heal the metabolic rift that separates us and which alienates us, mind and body, from nature.”

Socialism, they say, “can only be won by the leadership of Indigenous peoples themselves, in alliance with settlers [their compendious name for all non-Indigenous]…. This means breaking free of Canada’s prison-house of nations and removing the three mountains of sexism, racism and national oppression..., intertwining Indigenous national liberation with working class revolution.”

What would this entail in practical terms, as a strategic objective for socialists? A constituent assembly, a plurinational state in place of the colonialist capitalist state? The authors don’t say. Here we encounter a certain tension that runs throughout this book.

Is Indigenous oppression to be analyzed as essentially national oppression, or is it mainly a distinct form of class oppression, albeit deepened by national oppression? The book is unclear on this. For example, the authors say the Canadian state aimed at both genocide of the Indigenous population and their proletarianization as cheap labour. But this confuses the objective with its effect. Against all odds, the Indigenous peoples survived, and today seek to develop their remaining lands in their interests as First Nations. Their urbanization and proletarianization — as the authors note, “most Indigenous people are part of the paid workforce” — is the result of the theft of much of their land by the colonizing regime, and the poverty of most of the reserves.

Most urban Indigenous people retain some links and identification with their land-based communities, however. And although it may be difficult for many socialists to grasp this, most Indigenous militants see their future in the defense of their lands, and in the belief that their self-determination as peoples or First Nations lies in achieving unfettered ownership and control over the collective development of their lands, thereby avoiding or escaping the proletarian status of their landless settler co-workers. These aspirations are progressive, and suggest ways to overcome the colonialist structure of the Canadian state.

The Indigenous nations are many, and widely dispersed throughout the territorial expanse of Canada today. But their struggles for self-determination have the potential to win important allies from other national struggles within the state. As Glen Coulthard notes,

“the significant political leverage required to simultaneously block the economic exploitation of our people and homelands while constructing alternatives to capitalism will not be generated through our direct actions and resurgent economies alone. Settler colonization has rendered our populations too small to affect this magnitude of change. This reality demands that we continue to remain open to, if not actively seek out and establish, relations of solidarity and networks of trade and mutual aid with national and transnational communities and organizations that are also struggling against the imposed effects of globalized capital, including other Indigenous nations and national confederacies; urban Indigenous people and organizations; the labor, women’s GBLTQ2S (gay, bisexual, lesbian, trans, queer, and two-spirit), and environmental movements; and, of course, those racial and ethnic communities that find themselves subject to their own distinct forms of economic, social, and cultural marginalization.”[4]

Obvious candidates for solidarity include the Québécois, whose national self-determination is constrained by the Canadian state structures and institutions. It is no accident that the progressive wing of Quebec’s pro-sovereignty movement, Québec solidaire, fully recognizes the right to self-determination of the Indigenous peoples, and welcomes the opportunity to establish equal and harmonious relations between an independent Quebec and sovereign First Nations cohabiting within it.

QS promises to establish a democratically elected Constituent Assembly that will adopt the constitution of an independent Quebec. The Assembly, it says, “will also reaffirm the sovereignty of the Aboriginal nations” and these nations will be invited to “join in this democratic exercise through whatever ways they decide, including, if they wish, by accepting an important place within the framework of the Constituent Assembly itself.” I append my translation of the part of the QS program that is addressed to relations with the Aboriginal Peoples.

The book under review acknowledges that Québec solidaire “sees Quebec sovereignty not as an end in itself but as a means to win democratic demands including Indigenous sovereignty.” But it is vague about whether or how this might play some role in what it terms “the ultimate strategy to win Indigenous sovereignty and socialism,” which it says is “to break free of the prison-house of nations which is the Canadian state, reclaiming land and labour.” Yet there is no question that a Quebec decision to break from the existing Canadian state, by hugely disrupting the territorial and political unity of Canada, would do more than any First Nations actions, by themselves, to put the recomposition of Canada, with or without Quebec, in a radically different — and plurinational? — form on the agenda.

The book does not address many aspects of today’s Indigenous reality in Canada. Among these are the conflicts between and within many First Nations over economic development, as illustrated by the success oil and gas interests have achieved, with government support, in aligning band councils behind pipeline expansion projects. Another is the difficulty in forging credible militant leaderships at the pan-Canadian level, where there is a long record of opportunistic collaboration with governments and corporate interests on the part of the Assembly of First Nations chiefs.[5]

The book would have benefited as well from drawing attention to outstanding examples in the literature of Indigenous community attempts to manage their natural resources in harmony with Mother Earth. Important accounts include Glen Coulthard’s chapter on his Dene Nation’s struggle for self-determination in northern Canada, registered in the Denendeh proposal and its articulation in the Dene Declaration of 1975. Another is Shiri Pasternak’s stirring account of the Barriere Lake Algonquins experience in achieving a trilateral agreement with the Quebec and Canadian governments giving them jurisdiction over their land, and in particular sustainable management of its rich timber resources — an accord subsequently sabotaged by government officials.[6]

A great strength of the book, however, is its citation and quotation of accounts by Indigenous activists and scholars in order to develop its argument. Although it includes a bibliography of their sources, I found myself wishing in many places that the authors had provided footnoted page references to passages cited in the text. And a serious omission — especially in a text that covers so many struggles and other resistance experiences — is the lack of an index that would help the reader find or relocate particular references in the text.

It seems the book is only available at present within Canada, at CDN $15 ($10 + $5 shipping) payable to Socialist Worker, P.O. Box 339, Station E, Toronto M6H 4E3. The authors should consider producing a pdf or e-book version.

Richard Fidler

Appendix

Québec Solidaire on the Sovereignty of the Aboriginal Peoples

(a) Québec solidaire recognizes that the aboriginal peoples have never renounced their sovereignty, either by treaty or otherwise. They remain sovereign peoples, therefore. Some of them occupy vast territories on which there are very few non-aboriginal residents.

(b) Québec solidaire recognizes that for all aboriginal peoples their sovereignty means they are free to determine their future and that this is an inherent right. This reality must be recognized if we are to avoid having a policy of “two weights, two measures.” The Quebec nation cannot deny to other peoples what it claims for itself. If its very existence as a people gives it the full right to self-determination, this should apply as well to the aboriginal peoples. It is a fundamental right, not a question of numbers.

(c) Québec solidaire recognizes that to achieve equal relations with the aboriginal peoples, Quebec’s territorial integrity as a precondition must be replaced by a completely different notion, that of the necessary cohabitation on the same territory of sovereign peoples, each free to determine its own future.

This position should allow more harmonious relations since they will be based on mutual respect and trust. This recognition will of course have to have very concrete territorial and other repercussions, and help to remedy the injustices still suffered by the aboriginal peoples by ensuring their full social, cultural, economic and political development. The negotiations to this effect should be conducted in respect of each and every one, including the non-aboriginal populations living in the territories in question. In this sense, the struggle against the racism suffered by aboriginal peoples remains one of the key concerns in a genuine recognition of their rights.

(d) Any future negotiation should be informed by Québec solidaire’s ecological vision. The discussions will have a quite different character when territorial occupation is considered a responsibility we must share, aboriginal and non-aboriginal alike, and not as a way to exploit and market resources until they are exhausted, as allowed by many states and practiced by many companies.

From Programme politique de Québec solidaire, pp. 85-86.

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[1] The NARP program is reproduced in a pamphlet I authored in 1970, Red Power in Canada, available on-line in the Socialist History Project.

[2] No Canadian court has yet interpreted these clauses in a definitive way. While Indigenous lawyers argue that such consent is mandatory, I am leery of some ambiguous wording in the Declaration. For example, the key Articles 19 and 32 both provide that “States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent….” That is not the same thing as saying that states “shall obtain” this FPIC. Thus courts may well choose to override Indigenous objections to a program or project on the grounds that the government authority manifested sufficient good faith in its (unsuccessful) effort to obtain consent, especially when conflicting Indigenous and private or government property claims are at issue, the latter being held to prevail in the general public interest.

[3] A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another, https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto/.

[4] Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Foreword by Taiaiake Alfred). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, p. 173.

[5] Excellent sources on these issues (and many others) are Arthur Manuel’s books: The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy (Toronto: Lorimer, 2017); and its predecessor Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015).

[6] Shiri Pasternak, Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.