Of cigarettes and land claim negotiations

Jeff Green | May 13, 2010

Editorial by Jeff Green

Just over two years ago, on April 24, 2008, to be exact, the Frontenac News published an article about a cigarette store. The store was selling bags of 200 tax- and duty-free cigarettes for a fraction of the commercial price. The Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nation had opened the store on Highway 7, across from Silver Lake Provincial Park.

The article quoted Shabot Obaadjiwan Chief Doreen Davis as saying that she had met with federal and provincial authorities in January of 2008, and they had no problem with the store being open.

In the same article, RCMP spokesperson Walter Veenstra denied that the meeting had ever taken place, and said, “No one can sell cigarettes in contravention of the excise act. The rules are the same for everyone, even on reserves”. However, Veenstra also said the RCMP was not likely to investigate the smoke shop to find out if taxes were being paid. “The rules are the same, as I said; however, it’s not the mandate of the RCMP to do inspections of stores. Most of our activities deal with the transportation of cigarettes.”

Two years later the cigarette shop at Silver Lake is still open, and a second one, just west of Arden, has also been opened. The Shabot Obaadjiwan also have their offices at that second location.

At the corner of Highway 7 and Road 38 there are two service centers. Both are owned by people who do not claim any Aboriginal heritage and both sell brand name cigarettes at the market price.

If bags of tax-free cigarettes were being sold at either of those stores, the owners would face legal consequences. Of that there can be no doubt.

Everyone knows that there is a double standard at play here. Everyone knows that the law is not being applied in the same way. The general attitude is to ignore it and carry on as if it isn’t happening, even though we all know it contravenes one of the basic tenets of our society, equality before the law.

I do not want to linger on the cigarette issue here, but I should point out that the Algonquins make an argument in support of their decision to sell cut-rate cigarettes. They say that federal and provincial governments are happy to make a profit by taxing cigarette sales throughout the country, so why shouldn’t Algonquins make a profit within Algonquin territory?

Doreen Davis is also a key player in the Algonquin Land Claim process, and the opening of the cigarette stores, in addition to generating revenue, amounted to an assertion of her own community’s rights within the context of that land claim.

It is by no means far-fetched to surmise that the federal and provincial governments are turning a blind eye to the cigarette stores because they do not want to jeopardize the land claim.

In this context, in addition to persistent concerns about hunting and fishing rules, under which Algonquin and non-Algonquins are subject to different sets of rules, the public has every reason to be concerned about what is or is not being negotiated at the land claim table.

There are lots of issues to be explored when discussing any land claim, and this one has some particular issues of its own, particularly because of the sheer amount of land that is encompassed by the claim and because of the inclusion of off-reserve communities that exist outside of the Canadian Indian Act.

These communities are not physical communities, like villages or towns; they are more akin to ethnic communities.

But the exploration of these complex issues is being carried out only by a select few, and the general public can only guess about what is being discussed.

Everyone who is at the negotiation table must adhere to a confidentiality agreement, which is similar to the kind of agreements for media blackouts that occur during labour contract negotiations. But labour contracts negotiations take hours or days to resolve, while land claims take years and years.

Even though information about the negotiations is scarce, there are more and more indications that after 20 years the land claim process is finally on track to produce an agreement in principle within the next year.

Negotiators for the federal and provincial governments have now been holding more frequent meetings with municipal officials and with stakeholder groups such as tourist association and hunting group representatives to apprise them of the progress that has been made during negotiations.

But the public is not invited to these meetings, and people who attend these meetings are asked not to share information with the public by talking to the press.

A meeting will be occurring next Monday that is particularly troubling.

Councilors from all four Frontenac County townships have been invited to receive an update from federal and provincial negotiators. This meeting is being called a private information session, and it was organized by county staff on behalf of the land claim negotiators.

According to Frontenac County Chief Administrative Officer Liz Savill there will be no action taken by the County or any of the townships at the meeting. According the Ontario Municipal Act, however, elected municipal officials are not supposed to meet in private except to discuss specific legal or property matters. There has been no announcement, not even a notice on a township or county website, about this information session.

It might be a quibble, but in my view this meeting places an unfair burden on municipal councilors. How can they represent voters if they cannot share information with those same voters?

Just because next Monday’s meeting will be private, it would be wrong to assume that municipal politicians will be brought up to speed about the meat of the negotiations. They may receive some information that is not available to the public, but not likely any details. I have talked, off the record, to people who have attended some of the other meetings, and they said that not much of substance was revealed.

I believe these meetings have only been closed to the public because of the collective obsession with controlling information that has characterized the current federal and provincial governments, but that might just be my own paranoid view.

To be clear, I support the Algonquin Land Claim in principle. I see the resolution as perhaps the best last hope that Algonquin culture and knowledge can be salvaged for future generations in eastern Ontario, and I think it will bring economic benefits to the region. Opportunity to make a land claim work should be seriously explored by everyone involved.

But there is a serious concern that people at the table could come up with deals that confer benefits, in terms of hunting rights, commercial advantages and other areas, in ways that would be objectionable and perhaps unfair to the general public. There are concerns that it will create different rights for different people, as is the case with the cigarette stores.

Instead of fostering reconciliation the land claim could create divisions in our communities, and the secrecy that has surrounded the process thus far will not make it any easier to sell the eventual deal to the general public.

It is worth noting that several Algonquin communities are opposed to the land claim process, on a variety of grounds, and one of those is the closed nature of the process.

For the record, all public information about the state of the negotiations is posted at aboriginalaffairs.gov.on.ca/english/negotiate/algonquin/algonquin.asp. It’s probably easier to find by using Google. Just put Algonquin Land Claim in the search bar. It’s the first site that comes up.