Hudak, Hutton, and Harris: forgetful about First Nations
By Maurice Switzer
Unless it’s hidden in the fine print, Tim Hudak’s platform to be Ontario’s 26th premier does not contain a single reference to First Nations, Aboriginals, Indians, Metis, Inuit, or Indigenous peoples.
Did he forget there are 134 First Nations communities in this province and that the provincial government has a Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs to deal with the interests of over 300,000 people?
That might mean the Conservative leader doesn’t see any need to appeal to First Nations voters, even though we account for a significant slice of the electoral pie in Northern Ontario’s 10 electoral districts. Indigenous peoples represent 11% of eligible voters in Sudbury riding, 12% in Sault Ste. Marie, 13% in Nipissing, 14% in Thunder Bay, 35% in Kenora-Rainy River, and 38% in Sioux Lookout. They could also be a factor in a number of southern Ontario ridings where winners and losers were separated by mere hundreds of votes in the 2011 provincial election.
Maybe we shouldn’t take it personally; Hudak didn’t think it was worth his while to show up for the May 26 leaders debate on Northern Ontario issues. That could be related to the fact that his party only holds one of those 10 Northern Ontario seats, Nipissing Riding, where Vic Fedeli is the Conservatives’ lone ranger for northern Ontario.
Still, it seems strange that the man whose campaign is built on a promise to create a million jobs in Ontario – right after he fires 100,000 provincial employees – passed up a chance to talk about his plans to develop the massive Ring of Fire mineral deposit. His federal colleague, Tony Clement, Canada’s Treasury Board President, says the Ring of Fire will be the economic equivalent of the Athabasca oil sands, with a potential of generating $120 billion. He also calls it a “once-in-a-life opportunity to create jobs and generate growth and long-term prosperity for northern Ontario and the nation.” ( Incidentally, that ore body lies smack in the traditional territories of nine First Nations.)
Hudak must know what he’s doing. After all, he’s being mentored by his old boss, former Ontario premier Mike Harris.
Harris took a brief sabbatical from tutoring Hudak when Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed him to head up a mission of some 300 Canadian observers to make sure the upcoming election in Ukraine is conducted in the most democratic fashion.
A watchdog on democracy? This can’t be the same Mike Harris who was called before two commissions of inquiry to explain why his government policies contributed to the death of an unarmed First Nations protestor (Ipperwash), and the deaths of seven citizens related to drinking contaminated water (Walkerton).
It surely can’t be the same Mike Harris who got so teed off when his golf game was interrupted by the Ipperwash protest that he yelled at his cabinet members: “I want the f-ing Indians out of my park!” (The then-premier testified under oath that he didn’t remember saying that, although others in the room said he did.)
The political atmosphere created by THAT Mike Harris was deemed by the Ipperwash Commission to be a contributing factor in the subsequent death of Dudley George at the hands of an OPP sniper.
Speaking of Ipperwash, here’s an interesting Tim-bit: Hudak’s wife – and mother of his two children – is none other than Deborah Hutton, who served as Mike Harris’s principal aide during those turbulent times. The inquiry criticized Hutton’s role in the government’s handling of the Ipperwash tragedy, an observation that seemed to be borne out by the 134 occasions on which she testified that she had no recollection of high-level discussions about the First Nations protest.
A major plank in hubby Tim’s current election campaign is reducing Ontario’s sky-high electricity rates. Hudak partly attributes that to what he sees as a “bloated bureaucracy” at Hydro One and Ontario Power Generation, where he says 11,000 people make over $100,000 a year.
That bureaucracy began to be bloated during the years when Hudak sat around the Harris cabinet table. His wife’s reward for having 134 memory lapses about her boss’s Ipperwash actions was an appointment as vice-president of government relations at Hydro One, where she was paid $639,000 for less than three years of employment before returning to work as a backroom Conservative organizer.
Mike Harris, Deborah Hutton, and Tim Hudak may have bad memories.
On June 12th, election day in Ontario, we hope that First Nations voters don’t.
Maurice Switzer is a citizen of the Mississaugas of Alderville First Nation. He serves as director of communications for the Union of Ontario Indians and editor of the Anishinabek News.