Too close to call - AFN Election

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Third place in race can make or break a chief

As predicted here last month, the campaign for Assembly of First Nations national chief will be a three-candidate affair involving incumbent Matthew Coon Come, former national chief Phil Fontaine and Roberta Jamieson, a recent arrival as an elected participant, but no stranger to the national political stage.

The election will be the centrepiece of the three-day AFN annual general assembly to be held this year at the Shaw Conference Centre in downtown Edmonton from July 15 to 17.

With three strong candidates in the running, many backroom organizers are predicting a heavy turnout for the election.

Windspeaker contacted each campaign team shortly after the race officially began on June 12. On- and off-the-record conversations revealed the candidates all know it will be a tightly contested battle. With only three people in the running, the AFN election format that calls for the last place finisher in each ballot to be dropped will be a huge factor. All three camps are now playing the political chess game, trying to figure out how to stay out of that last place position in the first ballot and also working on a plan to attract support from the candidate who does end up being eliminated first.

Each of the candidates has a solid core group of support. Coon Come brings support from his home territory in Northern Quebec. Jamieson has the allegiance of the implementation committee, a group of chiefs that formed in March 2002 to push the sovereignty agenda. Fontaine appears to have most of the all-important British Columbia First Nations Summit support along with his base of Manitoba chiefs.

Coon Come, 47, has been criticized for alienating the federal government and presiding over substantial budget cuts as a result of his confrontational stand, but he offered no apologies. Vote for him and you'll get more of the same, the former James Bay Cree leader said. In fact, any First Nation leader who isn't earning the wrath of the federal government just isn't doing the job, he added.

"That has always been my view. There is a strategy to undermine the leadership in this country, cutting the funding when you speak the truth, attempting to marginalize the people. To me, the greatest indicator when you're fighting for the rights of your people is when you see the reaction of the government. That means that you are doing the right thing," he said. "When I led this fight, I knew that the government would come after me. I knew that from my own experience when I was with the Crees. I was told we had no rights. So we went to the court of public opinion. When they wanted to build dams, we stopped them. When they wanted to secede from Canada and take our land without our consent, we stopped them. When they tried to cut trees on our land, we stopped them. We declared we had rights. We didn't ask the courts. For me, it goes beyond the courts. Justice will not be obtained from colonial courts. It will be obtained through the political realm. That's where I feel comfortable. That's where I will pursue advancing our causes."

Fontaine believes Coon Come lost sight of the real issues. The 58-year-old former Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs grand chief, who resigned as chief commissioner of the Indian Claims Commission in order to pursue the job he lost to Coon Come in 2000, advocates getting away from confrontation and putting the attention back on the bread-and-butter issues.

"In the informal surveys and polling we've done, clearly the pressing issues have to do with social conditions, and I am suggesting that we have to refocus. We have to turn our minds and attention to the serious challenge about what to do about social conditions. What are we going to do about housing, health, education, the environment, creating jobs, revitalizing our economies? And I believe there has not been, in the last while, enough serious attention on these matters. They've been given short shrift and I believe our peole have been short-changed in this regard. We've been largely ineffective, set back years," he said. "The big issue, bar none, from what we've learned, is that people are interested in getting on with the job of turning things around, turning crisis situations into opportunity. Five families living in a two- or three-bedroom house don't care whether we're running from protest to protest. I believe that we've been consumed by rhetoric and we have to move beyond that. We have to focus on building strong people whose voices themselves will deliver our communities back to strength and to be self-governing."

Roberta Jamieson, a 50-year-old Mohawk woman who expects to become a grandmother for the first time during the campaign, seems to be offering something in between the approaches suggested by her opponents.

"I would not have stepped up to the plate if I felt that I could support one of the candidates. I do feel we're in a crisis, a political crisis in this country such that we've never seen before in our generation on relations between First Nations and government. I mean, I am witnessing the kind of daily poisoning that's going on by the kind of agenda the government of Canada seems intent on pushing forward with. So I think it is a time for very proactive leadership with a very clear view of what the AFN can and should be," she said.

"I think you have to have a clear sense of what the office was created to be and ought to be about. I think the AFN has been manipulated by government over the years because it likes to pretend to be, excuse the word, but a kind of national Indian government. It isn't. It never was meant to be and I don't think it should be.

"In a time when our people are reasserting their nationhood at the level of nations, you don't need people who are pretending to negotiate for all First Nations. It can't be done. We're very diverse. If there's one thing the last couple of years have demonstrated, it is the tremendous diversity. What will wor in Southern British Columbia will not play in Northern Ontario and so on throughout the country. So what you need, it seems to me, is a body that understands that. That will be a strong advocate and educator and communicator amongst the Canadian public at large and will also facilitate the opportunity for First Nations to come to the table and negotiate themselves. That is the approach that the royal commission recommended. I'm not talking the 633, I'm talking the 60 or so nation-based representatives that RCAP was talking about. The bands are the starting point but the end point is nations."