Horgan, Trudeau and Singh show once more "progressive" rhetoric about reconciliation is a sham

It should come as little surprise that John Horgan would so spectacularly fail to do the right thing as the RCMP prepares once more to act against Indigenous people on their own land on behalf of Coastal GasLink. After all this is the same profoundly cynical politician who said  "I’m not the first person to stand before you and disappoint Indigenous people" when greenlighting Site C.

Yesterday he echoed all the old colonialist, racist rhetoric about respecting the "rule of law" as if he was somehow powerless to do anything about a project that the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has called for the suspension of.

The NDP both in British Columbia and elsewhere  has always been spectacularly good at the grand gesture and statement from time-to-time and equally spectacularly bad at doing anything to make these a reality. And so it is with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) which Horgan's government went through the pretense of claiming to make law in BC.

As Thohahènte Wakeniáthen put it in a statement on Facebook:

I have spoken about the risks of acknowledging token gestures from the white man's government.
Each time we enthusiastically applaud a new Anishinaabe or Haudenosaunee street sign name in a major white man's city, we get invited to bring our feathers and fringe to celebrate the annual date of the creation of our oppressor, or the white man's government passes a law to acknowledge what is already ours though handcuffed by the same white man's laws of oppression and genocide, we give away our power while letting the white man insert the chisel of his divisive tactics deeper into our lives and our communities.
This morning we find ourselves bracing for another paramilitary attack on unarmed People of the Wet'suwet'en Clans, the Unist'ot'en, their Gitxsan neighbours, and allies from other Indigenous Peoples and settlers.
John Horgan, the premier of BC who recently made the token gesture of herding passage of a version of UNDRIP through the provincial parliament, is "pulling a white man" and refuses to acknowledge the supremacy of Wet'suwet'en law on lands neither he or Canada has ever made treaty to access. What I mean by a "white man" is, he did this act while all the time knowing he would trot out the "rule of law" racist trope that ignores the actual governing law and upholds a colonial fantasy when the time came to show his corporate backers that he would honour their investment over a bunch of stone age indians wearing colourful blankets and feathers getting in the way of "progress".
In the next few hours or days, we will see the inevitable breaking of 10,000 year old Wet'suwet'en laws for the expediency of enhancing shareholder value while killing the planet.
That is "pulling a white man".

 The "rule of law" in Canada is corporate law and colonial law. Any politician who claims to want to embrace UNDRIP while talking about the "rule of law" is entirely full of shit.

But as they were a year ago, Horgan's true colours are out for all but the most delusional NDP apologist to see.

And, of course, the federal NDP's alleged Indigenous affairs critic and federal leader Jagmeet Singh has done everything he can to hide his head in the sand pathetically and try to claim the whole thing is Justin Trudeau's fault.

Hence this sad tweet:

While Justin Trudeau and the federal government should, of course, be called out on their terrible and central role in this, and while without doubt Trudeau has been all talk and little action on Indigenous sovereignty and rights, to not say anything at all about Horgan and the BC government makes the "statement" a total joke.

Lots of folks wanted to let Singh know.

Even by NDP standards this is all profoundly and deeply shameful.

"Neither the provincial or federal governments have agreed to meet with the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs to address this crisis, despite serious ongoing human rights violations, protests across Canada and international attention" the chiefs stated right after Horgan's press conference.

As Horgan and Trudeau continue to use colonial law as a cover, the RCMP have blocked access to Wet'suwet'en territory in preparation, no doubt, for more violent and aggressive measures.

We see yet again that for Horgan, Trudeau and the federal NDP in the end their version of "reconciliation" means empty gestures, meaningless parliamentary declarations, doing the bidding of corporate masters and watching the colonial "rule of law" flow out of the barrel of a gun as it has for centuries.