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A bipartisan
approach to
Aboriginal
affairs
James Hughes
N
ot a day goes by in
Washington that appeals to take a “bipartisan”
approach to America’s problems don’t flow like water
down the Potomac River.
Despite the deep tribal gridlock that currently afflicts
Washington politics, bipartisanship still has a constituency and cachet in the
United States. Washington
even has a Bipartisan Policy
Centre, founded by former
Senate majority leaders Bob
Dole (Republican), George
Mitchell (Democrat), Howard Baker (Republican) and
Tom Daschle (Democrat),
which focuses on policy
development in the areas of
health care, energy, national and homeland security,
transportation and the economy. The current fundamen-
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talism among Republicans
and Democrats in Congress
has only stoked a greater
longing for cooperation.
Bipartisanship is an American concept that has come
about after 250 years of a
two-party political tradition.
In Canada, with our multiparty parliaments, we don’t
talk about bipartisanship very
much, but we should. The
most recent Samara Democracy Report shows that barely
half of the population is
satisfied with how our democracy works, a decrease of 20
percentage points in just over
a decade. Samara attributes
this drop to the sense among
Canadians that members of
Parliament are interested only
in advancing the partisan
position of their party. Finding a way to increase bipartisanship in Parliament may
be one way to address this
dismal state of confidence in
our democracy.
It also offers a possible
way to make progress on
policy problems that have
bedevilled us for decades.
Consider the bipartisan
success story on poverty
reduction in New Brunswick. In 2008, the New
Brunswick Minister of Social
Development asked me and
a colleague to present the
Liberal government’s nascent
plans to launch a provincial
poverty reduction process to
the Progressive Conservative
opposition caucus. With the
help of a veteran member of
the opposition, Percy Mockler (who is now a senator),
we got ourselves invited to
its weekly caucus dinner
(nothing fancy — it was piz-
An Ideas Exchange
Au marché des idées
za). Our instructions were to
ask the opposition party to
consider being a full partner
in the development of the
plan. We made our presentation, extended the invitation,
responded to questions and
waited for a response.
A few weeks later, an agreement was reached whereby a
representative of the opposition caucus would participate
actively in all three phases
of the public engagement
exercise and the Leader of the
Opposition would join cabinet members, leaders of the
business and community sectors and people who had lived
in poverty for the final stages
of adopting a provincial plan.
In effect, the government
and opposition had agreed,
unusually, to the terms of a
bipartisan initiative.
The handshake between
New Brunswick’s two political
parties in 2008 has already
had huge and lasting impact
on the poverty file. Welfare
reform is under way, early
learning initiatives have been
strengthened, homelessness is
shrinking, a vision and dental program for children in
low-income families has been
introduced, communities
are actively engaged in local
transportation, food and social enterprise programs, and
much more. This has occurred
despite a change in government in 2010.
Treating poverty reduction in a bipartisan way was
arguably the key to allowing
the plan to be developed
without overt political
interference and boosting
its chances of being implemented for the long term.
Was the New Brunswick
case a one-off; was it political lightning? Or does it
reflect an underappreciated
tradition of bipartisanship
in Canadian history?
Confederation itself
would appear to be an early example of Canadian
bipartisanship. Although
they were both of Scottish
descent, Conservative John
A. Macdonald and Liberal
George Brown were neither
friends nor allies. Brown
once wrote in the Globe
that “a great deal of time
has been wasted by John
A. Macdonald in learning
to walk, for the sword suspended to his waist has an
awkward knack of getting
between his legs, especially
after dinner.” Macdonald responded that voters “would
rather have a drunken John
A. Macdonald than a sober
George Brown.”
Yet despite their personal
animosity, Brown extended
his hand to Macdonald and
offered his support in 1863 to
the great enterprise of creating a nation. His gesture led
to a coalition government
with les bleus in Lower Canada led by George-Étienne
Cartier. The coalition had
a single purpose: creating a
union of the Canadian and
Maritime colonies.
The main political parties
agreed on a remarkable and
audacious objective without knowing what the final
contours of the deal might
be. They toiled together for
three years to achieve their
common purpose. They
did so through an intense
process that fully engaged
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the resources of the main
proponents across a wide
spectrum of issues until they
found a workable solution
to their multiple challenges.
In 1917, Prime Minister
Robert Borden proposed to
the opposition Liberals under
Sir Wilfrid Laurier a unity
government aimed at successfully prosecuting the world
war, including the enactment
of conscription. Laurier refused the offer, but most of
the Liberals eventually migrated to the Conservatives as
“Liberal Unionists.” Although
Laurier and his loyal Quebec
caucus held Quebec in the
December 1917 election,
the Unionists under Borden
swept English Canada, and
Borden built a cabinet consisting of a balance between
members of the two parties.
His Union government oversaw the management of the
war and the country for the
next three years.
The patriation of the
Canadian Constitution in
the early 1980s included a
crucial bipartisan element.
Against the wishes of four
western MPs in his party and
Saskatchewan NDP Premier
Allan Blakeney, NDP Leader
Ed Broadbent and the majority of his caucus locked
arms with Pierre Trudeau’s
government at a crucial time
in its negotiations with the
provinces. The NDP negotiated additional terms into the
federal package, specifically
on Aboriginal rights, women’s
rights and provincial resource
revenues. The NDP’s support
gave Trudeau the credibility
to take the package unilaterally to Britain for passage.
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Photo: CP photo
Through the litigation and
negotiation that followed,
the federal NDP stood with
the government against the
opposition of the Progressive
Conservatives and many
provinces, thereby preventing
the isolation of the federal
government in Parliament
and in the country. This
partnership between the government and the NDP transformed the patriation of the
Constitution into a bipartisan
initiative (though not a multiparty one).
Another example is the
Liberal-NDP entente in 1985
that ended 42 years of Progressive Conservative government in Ontario and ushered
in a general program of reforms, including pay equity,
an end to extra billing by
doctors and new campaign finance legislation. The Meech
Lake and Charlottetown initiatives also had a bipartisan
flavour, though they had far
less successful outcomes.
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Because bipartisanship is
an exceptional form of political expression that defies the
normal laws of oppositional
politics, it is not a sword to
be drawn often or lightly. It is
probably best deployed when
the everyday political process
has run aground. Confederation, winning the First
World War and bringing the
Constitution home were seen,
at the time, to require a new
decision-making paradigm to
break the stasis. Bipartisanship was the answer in each
case, as it was in New Brunswick in addressing chronic
poverty, a file that had been
stalled for decades.
At the Canadian federal
level, when we think of issues
that are prime candidates for
deploying this underused
strategy, one issue stands out.
It is imperative that we deal
with Aboriginal issues, which
have languished for decades,
burdened by policy mediocrity and problems that grow
more complex and urgent all
the time. All political parties
have as an objective to make
progress where there has
been so little, and at least two
parties — if not three or four
— should be able to agree to
work toward a common plan
that would lead to equipping
Aboriginal people with the
necessary tools to fully participate economically and socially
in their communities and in
Canadian society.
The Prime Minister should
consider extending his hand
to the opposition parties
to design — in partnership
with Aboriginal leaders, the
provinces and territories
— a structured process that
leads to a consensus plan to
achieve their common objective. It’s not easy to hand
over control of a file to an
extra parliamentary process
or other public engagement
undertaking and then live
with uncertainty about the
final outcome. The process
may even fail to reach any
consensus at all.
But a bipartisan approach
— with the attendant political
cover it offers the government
of the day to take the risk — is
preferable to the current stagnation, with its terrible human
cost. If ever an issue presented
the moral case for moving
beyond partisan bickering
and toward cooperation to
get something done, it is the
Aboriginal file. A concerted
investment of top people, patience and appropriate resources may just result in better
lives for people in Aboriginal
communities and a lasting legacy for this generation of political leaders, to achieve what
has eluded us throughout
history. A bipartisan approach
could get us there.
James Hughes is the president of
the Graham Boeckh Foundation
in Montreal. He was deputy
minister of social development
for New Brunswick. n