Premier Notley's s lost opportunity for reconciliation
Not always is the difference between lip service and meaningful action as visible as with the continued exclusion of First Nations from the Council of the Federation meetings, this time under Premier Notley's auspices in Edmonton.
A profound lack of generosity in Premier Notley's stance against a very feasible evolution of the council, well within its mandate, is striking.
The word profound is meant to indicate she might have an above premiers' average capacity to comprehend what is right.
This can't be about charity. Profound generosity is the kind with gumption that finds the courage to do better than what one is used to.
Think of doing away with the old Indian Act in 1951, which was partly driven by the desire not to once again humiliate returning indigenous war veterans by removing their freedoms with extreme racial segregation.
This step in the right direction happened in an era not without problems, but of vibrant democratic trends, and before arrival of the kind of neoliberal/neocolonial foulness we witness in Edmonton.
Or in lose human rights analogy consider perhaps allowing LGBT marriage rights that partly materialized in balance to a history of barbaric state brutality against all who insisted on expressing sexual liberties.
Human freedoms that perhaps are indirectly triggered by indigenous wisdom traditions that citizens recently aspired to, even if on a personal level some have family ideals leaning towards a more Victorian model.
On the other hand consider as another negative example former Quebec premier Pauline Marois's disaster at introducing an islamophobic religious charter, which she deceptively had called a secular charter.
Naturally Quebecers threw Marois out of office, right along with her christian theocratic proposals.
Rachel Notley already had delivered a twisted neoliberal sense of political compromise, aiming to satisfy elites, instead of ordinary people.
On that track, left of a neoconservative right wing, political status quo technocrats like her stand at attention for every shift of goal posts by reactionaries, so they can head towards them, aim for them or even overshoot them.
Notley's climate plan put forward carbon price stimulated subsidies and expansion plans of tar and frack extraction beyond anything Alberta PC or Wildrose parties thought they could get away with.
And all to prove Goody Two-Shoes Social democrats like her are holier-than-thou fossilized. Leadership in unfolding crises times means compromise with the community of peoples, not derailed elites unknown to display gratitude for useful idiots.
Leadership would have meant to lead collaboratively, to get out in front of overdue and mounting reconciliation challenges.
Marilyn Poitras, technocratically sabotaged (by feds) and resigning Commissioner for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, only indicating one more of recent examples.
As Canadians everywhere, Albertans face the kind of Brexiteer/Trumpismo voter demobilization the Alberta remake of Unite-The-Wrong is dreaming about.
And Rachel Notley is obligingly inserting the coffin nails into her reelection campaign.
Seemingly in a broader decolonization context Author Lee Maracle has a question Ms. Notley obviously has not heard: "Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one?"
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