Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during the First Nations Summit at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que., on Thursday.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
The Grand Hall of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Que., can make you feel small.
It’s a soaring, glass-walled space that stretches across the belly of the museum, facing the Ottawa River and Parliament Hill on the opposite shore.
The Grand Hall is set up like a Pacific Northwest coastal village from the 19th century, with the undulating shape of the massive space emulating a shoreline. A boardwalk runs along the “waterfront,” before the facades of houses from six different First Nations along the coast of British Columbia, from the Coast Salish in the south to the Haida and North Coast communities further up.
But what gives the space much of its arresting drama are the monumental totem poles that spike into the air throughout the hall. These imposing sentries − the tallest are more than four storeys high − are history carved in red cedar, recording the lineage of the chief or family that owned each one.
On Thursday, Indigenous leaders met among them with Prime Minister Mark Carney to debate his plans to build big things fast in Canada. To Andrew Robinson, attending the meeting as chief executive officer of the Nisga’a Lisims Government, the setting was perfect, because it felt like the past was watching.
“They aren’t actually just symbols of art, they’re actual memorial markers, like headstones,” he said of the poles, noting that most people don’t understand that.
“It’s funny − it’s not even funny, it’s fitting − that we’re sitting here with the Prime Minister of the day and all this stuff, being able to move forward in a good way while our ancestors and our past sits and looks at us,” Mr. Robinson added. “Can you imagine how far we’ve come as people? As Canada?”
Up to this point, everything in Mr. Carney’s leadership of the country has seemed to gallop along on greased rails.
Donald Trump’s desire to gobble up Canada created the perfect conditions for the former central banker’s leadership run and a seemingly impossible bounce-back for the Liberals.
Then, anxiety about how to survive the American economic vandalism made for an unusually united and motivated Canadian public: Everyone sort of nodded together in mute worry, agreeing that the man with the tidy haircut should be allowed to fix this however he saw fit.
What Mr. Carney has been rolling in since January, in other words, is permission, but this week he suddenly faced a group of leaders who were not inclined to write him a blank cheque for more.
Some Indigenous communities have expressed deep concerns that Bill C-5, the Building Canada Act, was rammed through Parliament too quickly or offers too much latitude for the federal government to bypass certain conditions if a project is deemed to be in the national interest. Nine First Nations from Ontario have taken the government to court over the matter.
“Our rights can’t take a back seat in terms of how decisions are made,” said Terry Teegee, regional chief of the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations, in a press conference the day before the summit. He added, “Free, prior and informed consent cannot be an afterthought.”
On Thursday, just before Mr. Carney headed down to the Grand Hall to begin the summit, he scrummed with reporters briefly on a landing above. In contrast to the “build, baby, build” urgency in which the Prime Minister has painted his national aspirations for months, here he took pains to underline that nothing is decided yet, no stone is rolling inexorably down a hill, and he had come to listen.
Soon after he started speaking, Mr. Carney was drowned out by a mic check; a few minutes later, the tourism-ad view of Parliament Hill behind him dissolved in sudden curtains of rain. The universe’s department of dramatic symbolism seemed to be drunk on its own power.
Once the meeting got going, at the tables arrayed between the big houses and towering poles on the ground level, Mr. Carney and his ministers were seated near - but very specifically not at − the front of the room.
After a prayer by an elder, the Prime Minister opened the meeting with a brief speech, ad-libbing away from his prepared remarks to again underline his assignment.
“I’m going to say a few words, and then I’m going to listen, listen for the day,” he said, adding, “We are starting as we mean to go forward, by listening, engaging, working together.”
No one else would know much of what the Prime Minister heard from Indigenous leaders, because right after his opening remarks, staff from his office hustled reporters out and the rest of the meeting was private.
Chiefs criticize Indigenous advisory council for Bill C-5 projects after meeting with Carney
Even still, it was tough to miss the fact that at no point were the two sides talking about the same things or even speaking the same language. The Prime Minister, as he has for months, talked about a unified and more robust Canadian economy that can at least partly compensate for the Trump blast radius, diversifying international trading partners and building big projects that will fundamentally alter and improve the fortunes of this country.
Indigenous leaders, on the other hand, talked about sovereign rights that they are not willing to be rolled on, fighting for constituencies that fly and swim and sway in the winds, thinking seven generations into the future. And then there are the basic services like roads and schools and water that they feel need to be better tended to before they’ll be interested in talking about what the government wants.
“I can’t stress that enough,” Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, told reporters on the sweltering pavement outside the museum, after the media had been ushered out.
“I don’t want my little grandchildren someday, your little grandchildren, having these same discussions.”
Permission sometimes requires a lot more than simply listening.