The revelations in journalist Bob Woodward’s new book about what U.S. President Donald Trump knew about the threat posed by COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic have prompted new questions about the Canadian government’s response to the virus, given how much intelligence is shared between the two countries.
Trump told Woodward on Feb. 7 that the U.S. knew that the virus was essentially airborne — “The air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” he said — and that COVID-19 was five times more deadly than even the most “strenuous” cases of the flu.
Trump has been widely criticized for saying such things in private while downplaying the risk in public and failing to adequately warn the American people about a virus that would, as of Friday, claim the lives of 192,616 U.S. citizens.
Trump has defended his public statements about the virus, saying he didn’t want to create “panic” and “cause serious problems for the country.”
Watch: Trump tries to downplay his pandemic comments
The White House has denied that U.S. President Donald Trump intentionally misled Americans about the coronavirus after Trump was heard — on recordings of interviews with journalist Bob Woodward for a new book — acknowledging he downplayed the deadly COVID-19 threat to avoid creating panic. 1:36
But Canadian officials also were reluctant to pronounce on the threat posed by the virus in the early days of the pandemic. Health Minister Patty Hajdu even suggested at one point that the news media was stoking fears about the novel coronavirus.
Hajdu and senior public health officials were saying publicly that the risk of transmission was low in Canada right up until early March. When the risk level suddenly jumped to “high” on March 15, the government scrambled to impose an economic lockdown to curb the spread of the virus.
A week after Trump’s call with Woodward, Hajdu told the Thunder Bay Newswatch on Feb. 14 that Canada had seen “a stabilization of cases.”
“I’ve talked a lot about how we have the outbreak that is obviously related to a physical illness … but there’s also the outbreak of fear and the pandemic of fear is a very common partner to pandemics or outbreaks of other illnesses,” she told the local news outlet.
“We need to remind Canadians that the risk factor for contracting this virus in Canada is a close contact with someone who recently travelled to the region,” she added, referring to Asia.
Two months later, there’d be tens of thousands of new cases — many of them generated through community spread by returning travellers from Europe and the U.S.
Wesley Wark, a professor at the University of Ottawa and one of the country’s foremost experts on Canada’s intelligence agencies, said the U.S. likely had better reconnaissance on the virus than the Canadian government did in the early days.
But Wark said he believes it’s “very likely” that some information about the real threat posed by this virus flowed from the U.S. to Canada, especially at the “liaison” level between U.S. officials and Canadians embedded at the embassy in Washington.
He said that, like many U.S. officials, the federal government here downplayed some hard truths of the pandemic, such as the risk of asymptomatic transmission.
“It seems clear to me that Canadian officials — even though they didn’t have, I don’t think, access to the more alarming intelligence the U.S. had — were clearly concerned in ways similar to the Trump administration about creating panic, sowing confusion in the Canadian public, and they were certainly concerned about the resource implication of taking earlier measures against COVID-19,” he told CBC News, citing the government’s initial reluctance to close borders and impose quarantines on returning travellers.
Vehicles cross the Peace Bridge into Canada on March 18, 2020, in Buffalo N.Y. (Jeffrey T. Barnes/The Associated Press)
Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, warned against border closures for weeks. “They are inappropriate and could actually cause more harm than good in terms of our global effort to contain,” she said on Feb. 3, before travel was brought to standstill seemingly overnight in mid-March.
Hajdu repeated those lines on Feb. 17, saying border closures were “not effective at all” at controlling the spread of disease.
Tam said at the end of January that she expected Canada would be spared the brunt of the virus.
“Canada’s risk is much, much lower than that of many countries. It’s going to be rare, but we are expecting cases,” she told the Commons health committee.
Asked on Jan. 28 if the federal government was preparing to help provinces and territories deal with a possible surge in cases and strained hospital capacity, Hajdu said that while Canada was ready to assist, she didn’t see an imminent risk.
“I think it’s very premature to say that there will be additional resources needed at the hospital level,” Hajdu told CBC’s Power & Politics. “Every indication is that we will not at this point in time.”
She said Canada was “phenomenally well-coordinated” and “well-prepared” for a possible onslaught of COVID-19.
As CBC reported last month, the public servants who manage the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile (NESS) warned in early February that there was a shortage of the personal protective equipment (PPE) needed to weather a pandemic. It still took weeks for the federal government to sign contracts for goods like N95 respirators, the masks used by health-care professionals to protect themselves from COVID-19.
Hajdu said in an interview Thursday that she took the virus “deadly seriously” at the outset and that she “absolutely” knew the virus had the potential to “kill many more people than the flu.”
A man wearing a mask and full face shield talks on the phone at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport June 23, 2020. (Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press)
“We were doing things very early. All along the way, we were taking appropriate measures based on the risk it was presenting to Canada,” she said, adding there was “extensive screening at the airports.” But the government didn’t begin collecting personal contact information from travellers inbound from Hubei province in China — site of the initial outbreak — until Feb. 19.
Wark said Hajdu’s message wasn’t clearly communicated in those early days — and there was a clear push by the government to minimize threats.
“What was the evidence that the Canadian public was prone to panic about the government being bold about the truth? Where’s the evidence?” Wark said.
“That wasn’t the public’s response to SARS in 2003. It wasn’t the response to other outbreaks, like H1N1. It’s a politician’s mindset that is frequently rolled out and it has no basis in evidence or in history and it was certainly misapplied to COVID-19.”
While senior U.S. officials were sounding the alarm in late January to Trump about the imminent risk the pandemic posed to the American people and the world, Canadian public health officials continued to rely on what we now know was often questionable advice from the World Health Organization.
In a Jan. 28 intelligence briefing, U.S. national security adviser Robert O’Brien gave Trump a “jarring” warning about the virus, according to Woodward’s reporting.
A ‘national security threat’ unlike any other
He told the president that COVID-19 would be the “biggest national security threat” of his presidency. He urged swift border closures to stop Chinese nationals from transmitting the virus on U.S. soil, according to Woodward’s book.
“This is going to be the toughest thing you face,” O’Brien told Trump.
Three days later, during a January 31 interview on Power & Politics, Hajdu said Canada would take its cues from Tam — who also had a senior role at the WHO, where officials were said to have a strong working relationship with China, then the global hotspot.
“You’ve heard Dr. Tam speak about China’s efforts to contain the virus. They indeed have been extraordinary,” Hajdu said.
“That is part of what gives the World Health Organization confidence that the risk of further exposure and spread globally is low … I along with Dr. Tam am very confident that China is working very closely with its partner countries to contain the spread.”
The Associated Press would later reveal that the Chinese regime suppressed evidence of the virus’s transmissibility for six days in early January before going to the WHO to brief the agency on the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak.
O’Brien’s intelligence warnings, along with recommendations from U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, would prompt Trump to declare a national health emergency on Jan. 31.
Canada — deferring again to the WHO instead of tracking the path of its closest ally — would not follow suit.
On Jan. 31, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, publicly warned the American people that new, troubling research about COVID-19 had emerged.
Fauci said there was no longer any doubt that people displaying no symptoms of COVID-19 could still pass the virus along to someone else.
Canada slow to react to asymptomatic transmission
“In the beginning we were not sure if there was asymptomatic infection, which would make it a much broader outbreak then what we’re seeing. Now we know for sure that there is,” he said.
“It was not clear whether … [a] person could transmit it to someone while they were asymptomatic. Now we know, from a recent report from Germany, that that is absolutely the case.”
Canada ignored Fauci’s about-face. Later on Jan. 31, Hajdu downplayed the German report on asymptomatic transmission Fauci cited — which would later prove to be accurate — saying it was out of step with what the WHO had told Canada.
Anthony Fauci testifies before a House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis on July 31, 2020. (Kevin Dietsch/AFP/Getty Images)
“The science is still quite weak,” she said in another interview with Power & Politics. “There are some reports but the World Health Organization does not believe, at this point, that the virus is contagious when people are asymptomatic.
“I’m extremely comfortable with the leadership of Dr. Tam and her level of expertise. Our position is completely in line with the WHO’s position. There is no sufficient evidence to say the virus can be spread when people are not exhibiting symptoms.”
Other senior public health officials in Canada also deferred to Tam and the WHO, while dismissing recent U.S. conclusions and the German report.
“The WHO and Dr. Tam … their assessment of the situation is the information supporting that is still very weak,” said Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, on Jan. 31.
“The Public Health Agency of Canada and the WHO are saying that, at this point, we don’t have hard evidence of infectious infectivity of an asymptomatic person,” added Dr. Barbara Yaffe, Ontario’s associate chief medical officer of health responsible for communicable and infectious diseases.
A gap in intelligence-gathering
It wasn’t until April 7 — 66 days after Fauci’s initial alert — that Tam would publicly concede that “the virus causing COVID-19 can be spread from an infected person in the period just before their symptoms appear.”
“Evidence suggests that this is happening more often than previously thought … some infected people who never develop symptoms are also able to transmit the virus,” Tam said in a tweet.
Wark said the early failures of public health officials can be traced to a gap in Canada’s intelligence apparatus. The country just doesn’t collect enough health-related intelligence, he said. “We didn’t have a lot of independent sources of our own,” he said — which explains the reliance on the WHO.
Wark said much of Canada’s intelligence-gathering on disease is carried out by the Public Health Agency of Canada. But recent reporting has suggested that the agency’s Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) was sidelined in the early days of the pandemic.
The GPHIN raised the alarm about a strange, pneumonia-like virus circulating in China at the end of December.
Security intelligence expert Wesley Wark in 2013. “We weren’t connected,” he said. “The Canadian security intelligence system doesn’t do global health.” (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
But GPHIN scientists have since come forward to say they felt muzzled and ignored by Health Canada officials when they tried to warn them about the pandemic threat. Hajdu conceded in an interview with CTV on Thursday that, when she became minister of health in November 2019, she had never heard of the GPHIN.
“I think it’s clearer and clearer that the U.S. had its own sources that painted a much darker picture of COVID than anything Canada had from its own sources,” Wark said.
“We weren’t connected. The Canadian security intelligence system doesn’t do global health. We don’t have a system to make good use of that U.S. intelligence.”
In 2018, the Trump administration released its National Biodefense Strategy. The first goal of the strategy is “surveillance and detection activities to detect and identify biological threats and anticipate biological incidents.”
“There’s no comparable Canadian intelligence community mandate,” Wark said.
Wark said that by late January, it was clear that there was considerable human-to-human transmission of the virus, based on reporting out of China and Thailand — but Canadian officials continued to question the science of asymptomatic transmission for weeks.
Turning a ‘blind eye’
“There was absolutely no reason to assume a rosier picture. At the end of the day, there was no reason not to assume that human-to-human transmission was going to occur. The evidence was mounting by the last week of January that this was the reality,” he said.
“Why they turned a blind eye to that … why the health authorities continued to think that basically COVID was going to be contained in China, that just represents a profound failure of intelligence or assessment and of imagination.”
Speaking to reporters in northern Ontario Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked when it became clear to his government that COVID-19 posed a major threat to Canada.
Watch: Trudeau on Canada’s early indications of COVID-19’s threat
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau answers a question about when he knew how serious a disease COVID-19 was. 1:46
Trudeau said Tam convened a meeting with public health experts on Jan. 2 to address “concerns we had and talk about our preparation.”
He said his government was well-briefed throughout and responded to challenges as they arose.
“Every step of the way, we were informed by our experts as to how to keep Canadians safe, what needed to be done, what measures would be helpful in continuing to support Canadians as we were aware of this potential,” he said.
“But, as people know, we were very much learning on the way as we responded.”
OTTAWA – Canada isn’t ruling out expelling additional diplomats from India, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly suggested Friday following bombshell allegations that Indian diplomats in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver were involved in state-sponsored violence targeting Canadian citizens.
Canada expelled the Indian high commissioner and five other diplomats on Monday and when asked at a news conference in Montreal Friday if any more expulsions would follow Joly did not say no.
“They’re clearly on notice,” she said.
The minister said that Canada will not tolerate any foreign diplomats that put the lives of Canadians at risk.
A year ago Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada had clear evidence that Indian agents were connected to the murder of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia in June 2023. The allegations suggest India is trying to snuff out a movement to create an independent Sikh state in India known as Khalistan.
On Oct. 14, RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme rocked the diplomatic relationship further, saying the national police force had launched a special investigative unit last February to investigate multiple cases of extortion, coercion and violence, including murder, linked to agents of the Indian government.
In more than a dozen cases, Canadian citizens were warned about threats to their personal safety and Duheme said the national police force was speaking out to try and disrupt what it deemed a serious threat to public safety.
The six diplomats expelled are persons of interest in the cases, with allegations that diplomats used their position to collect information on Canadians in the pro-Khalistan movement and then pass that on to criminal gangs who targeted the individuals directly.
India has denied the allegations and expelled six Canadian diplomats from New Delhi in return.
Joly said Friday the allegations were extraordinary in Canada.
“That level of transnational repression cannot happen on Canadian soil,” she said. “We’ve seen it elsewhere in Europe, Russia has done that in Germany and the U.K., but we needed to stand firm on this issue.”
The allegations will be studied in more detail by the House of Commons national security committee following a vote by the committee Friday. Joly and Duheme will both be asked to appear, as will Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc
NDP MP Alistair MacGregor, who put forward the motion to launch the study, said the fact the RCMP came out with such “explosive revelations” underscores how serious the situation is.
“The RCMP made a point that they were doing this because some individuals in Canada had their lives directly in danger and the threat reached such a level they felt compelled to ignore the traditional way of going through the judicial process and make these accusations public,” he said.
Canada’s allegations were followed Thursday by charges announced by the U.S. Justice Department against an Indian government employee who is accused in an alleged foiled plot to kill a Sikh separatist leader living in New York City.
U.S. authorities say Vikash Yadav directed the New York plot from India. He faces murder-for-hire charges in a planned killing that prosecutors have previously said was meant to precede a string of other politically motivated murders in the United States and Canada.
The Indian government didn’t immediately provide comment on the U.S. charge.
American-Canadian lawyer Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a lawyer and dual Canadian and U.S. citizen, said in a statement that he was the target of the alleged murder plot in New York. He said he was targeted because he is a lawyer for Sikhs for Justice and was helping to organize votes in a non-binding referendum on the creation of an independent Sikh state.
Nijjar helped organize a similar referendum in B.C. prior to his death.
The House committee Friday also voted to call Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown to testify, as well as other candidates from the 2022 Conservative leadership contest. A report released in June by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) contains a redacted paragraph that details alleged Indian interference in a Conservative leadership contest. A specific year is not mentioned.
The Conservatives have said they have been given no information about any such interference.
The committee is also now considering a second NDP motion calling for all party leaders to apply for a top-secret security clearance within 30 days, along with a Conservative amendment to demand Prime Minister Justin Trudeau release the names of parliamentarians listed in top-secret documents as being engaged in or at-risk of foreign interference.
At the foreign interference inquiry this week Trudeau said Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre refused to get the clearance that would allow him to access the names of Conservatives from those documents, while Poilievre accused Trudeau of lying and demanded he make all the names public.
Trudeau acknowledged the documents include the names of members of other parties, including the Liberals, but said if Poilievre doesn’t get the clearance that is needed to know who is at risk he can’t take any steps to prevent or limit the impact.
Manitoba Conservative MP Raquel Dancho told the committee that Poilievre getting a briefing would be a “gag order” against criticizing the government on foreign interference.
“We can put this to bed, it’s rapidly devolving into some McCarthy witch-hunt as a result of the prime minister’s actions and we can clear this up today by releasing the names,” Dancho said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 18, 2024.
VANCOUVER – British Columbians go to the polls on Saturday after a too-close-to-call campaign that saw David Eby’s New Democrats and John Rustad’s B.C. Conservatives tangle over housing, health care and the overdose crisis — as well as plastic straws and a billionaire’s billboards.
Forecasters say election day will be soaked in several parts of the province by heavy rain from an atmospheric river system.
But the campaign has already been drenched in negativity, with Eby and Rustad each devoted to telling British Columbians why they shouldn’t vote for the other.
The NDP’s election platform mentions Rustad more than 50 times, compared to only 29 times for Eby, while the B.C. Conservative platform names Eby 50 times, and Rustad only 11 times.
“I hope we never see another election like this,” Eby said this week in Nanaimo, describing the tone of the campaign where he felt compelled to tell voters about controversial public statements made by Rustad and some of his candidates.
“We don’t call people who are gay ‘groomers,'” he said. “We don’t tell Indigenous people that what they experienced in residential schools wasn’t real. We don’t propose that health-care professionals be put in front of an international tribunal similar to the trial of the Nazis called Nuremberg 2.0.”
Rustad, who campaigned in Nanaimo on the same day Eby visited the Vancouver Island city, said the NDP leader has consistently attempted to shift focus away from what he says are the real issues facing the province — mismanagement of the economy, the crumbling health-care system and the ongoing drug overdose crisis that has resulted in more than 15,000 deaths since 2016.
“I don’t know why, I guess as premier he thinks it’s OK to be lying to the people of B.C.,” said Rustad. “The premier of a province like B.C. should be able to be out, being straight up with people and telling them the truth as opposed to lies.”
Regardless of the outcome, the election will go down as a sea change for B.C. politics, with the Conservatives poised to either form government or become the official opposition, after the implosion of the BC United party under Kevin Falcon, who halted his party’s campaign to support Rustad and avoid centre-right vote splitting.
Polls have put the NDP and the B.C. Conservatives locked in a close battle. It’s a remarkable turnaround for the Conservatives, who won less than two per cent of the vote in the last provincial election.
Eby and Rustad spent Friday making last-ditch pitches for support in vote-rich Metro Vancouver.
Eby started in Coquitlam, while B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad was scheduled to be in North Vancouver.
“We have left nothing on the table,” said Eby, adding every vote will count Saturday. “I have really no regrets about the campaign.”
On Friday, the Conservatives said that if elected they would launch “a full public inquiry” into the use of taxpayer money to buy drugs on the dark web.
That is a reference to a so-called “compassion club” that was operated by the Vancouver-based Drug User Liberation Front to buy drugs including methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin, test it for safety and then sell it to its members.
The club was ultimately shut down and the group’s founders arrested and charged with trafficking.
“This inquiry will seek to uncover who knew what, when they knew it, and what actions were or weren’t taken by the New Democrats, including Premier David Eby,” the party said in a statement.
Rustad was not available to reporters on Friday, but he was holding photo opportunities in Metro Vancouver.
Green Leader Sonia Furstenau was in Victoria, where she is looking to capture a seat in the NDP stronghold of Victoria-Beacon Hill. She has acknowledged the Greens won’t win the overall election, but is hoping to retain a presence in the legislature where the party currently has two members.
The campaign’s only televised debate saw Furstenau tell voters that Eby and Rustad were more closely aligned than people may believe on issues including support for the fossil fuel industry and placing people with mental health and addiction issues into involuntary care.
The month-long campaign has featured regular controversies for the Conservatives surrounding past comments by Rustad and his candidates.
Rustad dropped several potential candidates before the start of the official campaigning period over extreme views posted on social media.
But during the campaign he continued to support Surrey-South candidate Brent Chapman, who called Palestinian children “inbred” and “time bombs” in a 2015 Facebook post.
Eby mentioned Chapman during visits to two mosques in Surrey.
“John Rustad and the B.C. Conservatives are standing with that candidate,” he said at the Guilford Islamic Centre. “They should have got rid of him.”
Eby said the NDP are running two Muslim candidates in the election, including candidate Haroon Ghaffar in Surrey-South against Chapman.
“It’s important to have diverse candidates in the legislature,” said Eby, adding B.C. has yet to elect a Muslim.
Eby faced tough questions from people at the mosque about teaching sex education at schools and the rise of Islamophobia.
Rustad also stood by North Coast-Haida Gwaii candidate Chris Sankey, who suggested vaccines caused AIDS by posting about “Vaccine Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then there was Vancouver billionaire Chip Wilson, co-founder of the Lululemon athletic clothing line.
Wilson injected himself into the campaign with a series of anti-NDP billboards outside his waterfront Vancouver home, located in Eby’s Vancouver-Point Grey riding.
Eby and the NDP embraced the moment, saying Eby was on the side of ordinary people in B.C. struggling to make ends meet and not the owner of a home assessed at more than $81 million.
Rustad said he supported entrepreneurs like Wilson, but they couldn’t expect a break on their property taxes.
Rustad’s campaign promise to reverse a ban on plastic straws prompted Eby to begrudgingly agree that “paper straws suck,” but he suggested the B.C. Conservative leader was trying to stir up controversy by diverting attention from major issues facing the province.
Election day coincides with an atmospheric river system that is dumping heavy rain across much of the province.
Furstenau used the weather event to highlight her party’s climate promises, saying the Greens are the only party that offers a serious response to the climate crisis.
“It’s very interesting the timing of an atmospheric river arriving right on the moment of this election campaign, an election campaign where we have one party led by a climate denier and another party led by a climate delayer,” she said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 18, 2024.
OTTAWA – The executive team from the Assembly of First Nations will meet in the coming days to discuss how to proceed with new negotiations for a child welfare reform deal after chiefs voted against the government’s proposed $47.8 billion agreement at a meeting in Calgary Thursday.
AFN National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak, who had helped negotiate the deal and pushed for it to be approved, was blunt in her assessment of the outcome in her closing remarks to the special chiefs assembly Friday.
“We also recognize the success of the campaign that defeated this resolution. You spoke with passion, and you convinced the majority to vote against this $47.8-billion national agreement,” she said.
“There is no getting around the fact that this agreement was too much of a threat to the status quo, to the industry that has been built on taking First Nations children from their families.”
Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society which helped launch a discrimination case against Canada that led to the deal, said “that’s an unfortunate characterization of the chiefs taking a look at the agreement with their own experts and own legal staff and making an informed decision that’s best for them.”
“I respect the National Chief, and I look forward to kind of working with her and everyone to make sure that we get this across the finish line,” Blackstock said.
The defeated deal was struck between Canada, the Chiefs of Ontario, Nishnawbe Aski Nation and the Assembly of First Nations in July after a nearly two-decades-long legal fight over the federal government’s underfunding of on-reserve child welfare services.
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal said that was discriminatory because it meant kids living on reserve were given fewer services than those living off reserve.
The tribunal tasked Canada with reaching an agreement with First Nations to reform the system, and also with compensating children who were torn from their families and put in foster care.
The $47.8 billion agreement was to cover 10 years of funding for First Nations to take control over their own child welfare services from the federal government, create a body to deal with complaints and set aside money for prevention, among others.
Before the deal was announced in July, three members of the AFN’s executive team wrote letters to the national chief saying they feared the deal was being negotiated in secret, and asked for a change in course. They also said the AFN was attempting to sideline the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society from negotiations.
Those concerns largely remained when the deal was announced in a closed-door meeting at the AFN’s last gathering, with chiefs questioning how the reforms will work on the ground, and service providers saying their funding levels will be significantly cut which would impact their ability to do their work effectively.
Blackstock found support from 267 out of 414 chiefs who voted against a resolution calling for the deal to be approved.
Squamish Nation chairperson Khelsilem introduced a resolution Friday calling for a new negotiation mandate from chiefs.
“This is a lesson for the Assembly of First Nations, for the staff and legal, for the advisers, for the portfolio holder who has worked on this deal,” he said.
“The way we got here was not the way we should have done this. There’s a better way forward.”
His resolution, and another one from child welfare advocate and proxy chief for Skawahlook First Nation, Judy Wilson, called for the creation of a children’s chiefs’ commission comprised of leadership from all regions in the country to negotiate a new deal and provide oversight, along with a new legal team.
It also calls for chiefs to be given at least 90 days to review an agreement before voting on it, with the document to be made available in both official languages.
Khelsilem said the new negotiation mandate was developed with about 50 leaders from across the country, and hopes it will set a positive path forward in the best interest of kids in care after a fairly testy special chiefs assembly. He also said the new mandate will address “flaws” highlighted by chiefs across the country, and will ensure there is more transparency.
“We didn’t have to be in a situation where we had to vote down a flawed agreement and then create a direction to be able to get this back on track,” he said to chiefs.
“We didn’t have to be here if the process that was used to create the (final settlement agreement) was a meaningful process that meaningfully respected and consulted First Nations, that allowed for meaningful dialogue to improve that agreement.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the minister of Indigenous Services said Canada worked closely with First Nations on this deal, and as it was being amended.
“The agreement that chiefs in assembly rejected yesterday is the final product of those close negotiations,” Jennifer Kozelj said.
“Canada remains steadfast in its commitment to reform the First Nations child and family services program so that children grow up knowing who they are and where they belong.”
Blackstock said that Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ought to have been at the gathering in Calgary if they stood by the agreement.
In a statement Friday, the Assembly of First Nations Quebec-Labrador said they’re grateful for the work that has been done to date, but that chiefs need to work together to amend the deal so it respects diversity of communities and eliminates systemic discrimination.
“As chiefs, we have a sacred responsibility to protect our children and families for the next seven generations,” said interim regional chief Lance Haymond.
Blackstock says that even though the deal was defeated, it doesn’t mean they’re starting from the bottom.
“We have so much to build on, including the draft final settlement agreement,” she said. “This is a reset to ensure that First Nations kids all succeed.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 18, 2024.
