Barriere Lake: The first casualty of negotiation breakdown

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Even the most casual observer of First Nations' politics knows there's something strange going on at Barriere Lake in Quebec. With so many different stories being told by the various factions in and around the community, however, the question of exactly what it is that's going on is hard to answer.

The Algonquin band claims the federal government backed out of negotiations in 2000 just as the end of a long, and troubled 11-year-old process looked to be in sight. They had been involved in trilateral negotiations with the federal government and Quebec on an Integrated Resource Management Plan (IRMP) that would eventually allow Barriere Lake to share in the management of, and the profits from, logging and other resource harvesting on its traditional territory.

Band officials claim the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (DIAND) abandoned the IRMP process when the direction of the talks turned towards a deal that would have expanded the department's limits set in its specific claims policy.

Native leaders across the country claim the policy has been rendered obsolete by recent court decisions (Delgamuukw, particularly), but DIAND has so far refused to review or re-write it.

Government sources say they stayed at the table far longer than could reasonably be expected before making the decision to walk away.

"The only thing to say about Barriere Lake is they get more than $9 million a year and things are still a mess," said one government source.

Logging in the area was suspended for more than a year after the federal negotiators walked away. This summer, Domtar, the company that holds the logging permits in the region, threatened to close its mill in Grand Remous, putting at risk hundreds of jobs. In order to get the band to allow logging to resume, the Quebec government went back to the table with Barriere Lake to continue negotiation on the IRMP. Those talks are on-going.

That agreement with the Quebec government is just the most recent development in a long and complex story.

The community itself has a complicated history. Although it's called the Barriere Lake First Nation, it is actually on the Rapid Lake reserve after the Hudson's Bay Co. relocated the community from Barriere Lake in the late 1940s.

To visit the community, located in Quebec's La Verendrye Wildlife Reserve, you must first survive a seven-kilometre drive along a rough and dusty gravel road.

You reach that point after a one-hour drive from the nearest town-Val D'or to the north or Maniwaki to the south-along provincial Highway 117.

Unlike other communities in Quebec, things don't get better when you reach the settlement's limits. A network of unpaved roads connects the cluster of ramshackle federal bungalows that make up reserve #74. Even in this remote location, several police cruisers regularly patrol the tiny community of 400 people.

In what would otherwise be a serene and picturesque setting framed by white birch and tall sugar maples, the reserve seems mired in desperation.

The Barriere Lake chief and council and employees of the Algonquin Nation Tribal Council will tell you the desperation is caused by under-funding and indifference on the part of the federal government.

But some members of the community will tell you that their own leadership is the real cause.

There are three breakaway communities of Barriere Lake members. One - Kookumville - made the news last year when a logging blockade caught the attention of the country and the Surete de Quebec, the provincial police service that will be forever linked to the confrontation at Oka in 1990.

Maigan Najik (Algonquin for Wolf Lake) is located in the woods a few kilometres to the east, just down the highway from Airport, the third breakaway settlement.

No new housing has been built at Rapid Lake for almost 20 years, band officials claim. As many as 22 people live in a single home designed for a family of four. There is only one phon line into the community.

Barrire Lake residents who support their current chief and council have made a habit of making the three-hour trip south to Ottawa during the last two years. First, a tent city was set up on Parliament Hill to protest federal decisions that they say have adversely affected their quality of life. The minister refused to see them and eventually they went home.

In August, they were back, only to be brushed aside as they tried to get Indian Affairs Minister Robert Nault's attention as he left the National Press Centre after releasing a draft version of the proposed First Nations Financial Institutions act. The band charges that someone in the minister's car tossed a quarter at the protesters, an act they saw as the worst kind of insult, given the extreme poverty of Barriere Lake residents.

Tribal council staff sent a videotape of the incident to this publication, but no clear evidence that a quarter was actually thrown is visible. Departmental sources deny the event happened.

The minister himself sounded quite frustrated when he was asked about Barriere Lake on Sept. 19. He was asked if Barriere Lake was an early example of his recently announced decision to walk away from negotiation tables that appear to have little chance of success.

"Yeah, Barriere Lake is an example of that. We made our final offer. They rejected the final offer. The mandate has run out and I have no intention of going back," he said. "But in the exit strategy that we're using at these tables, we are also leaving the door open and if people are prepared to go back to the table, they have to give us certain guarantees of a process that we will conclude and that we can't continue going back over and over the same ground."

He said a lot of government money has been poured into the Barriere Lake community with little result.

"Barriere Lake has serious governance issues in their community. They have been given more financial resources in Quebec than any Frst Nation and are still way behind everyone lse in a sense that does not seem correct. It's high time that the community recognizes it has a role to play itself and take some responsibility for its actions and stop blaming the government for the fact that nothing has occurred. We have spent over $15 million in the last five years above and beyond our regular programming just to help the community and have got no results."

Fifteen million dollars in addition to more than $9 million dollars the band receives annually, Windspeaker asked.

"And $5 million of it has been for negotiations on resources with the province and the other 10 was for housing improvements and infrastructure improvements in the community," he said. "So we have been working extremely hard to try and improve."

He suggested that the band was on the edge of being put into third party management.

"And again, the situation at Barriere Lake having a financial crisis and it's going to come to a head here shortly simply because they're like any other community. There comes a point when, if they can't manage their own affairs, we will have to put them in third party," Nault said.

He accused the band of doing nothing to help itself and depending entirely on the government for its needs.

"Let me give you just one example of the frustration I have at Barriere Lake. I went in there a year or so ago and made them an offer that we would build a hydro grid between ourselves, the Quebec government and our regional development agency for Quebec. I'm told that they don't want to accept the offer simply because they have diesel-generated power and we have been funding their power so they get free power and if they went to the grid they'd have to pay, the individual homeowners, a cost every month for electricity," he said. "And so they're refusing to hook themselves up to the grid. Now you know if you're not on the grid that there's some complications with that, like for example, you can't hook up te same kind of hardware. You don't have the same kind ofappliances. It's not the same quality of life and if you want to build businesses and things like that... And they're not that far away from the grid. That's one example of, you know, you need to have co-operation if you're going to do things like that and people have to take some responsibility and accept that they're going to pay to some extent for services and programs."

Hector Jerome, a negotiator and spokesman for Barriere Lake, had a different version of events. He said Barriere Lake refused to opt in to the plan to connect to the power grid because they were being treated unfairly. He said Hydro Quebec wanted the band to create a reserve fund of between $200,000 to $300,000 to cover costs if people couldn't pay their bills. He said the band simply didn't have the money.

"Do they do this with white people? No, they don't do this with white people. They were doing it only to us," he said.

As for the breakdown of negotiations on the IRMP, Jerome blames others for delays that the minister is now using as an excuse to walk away from talks.

"One thing I can say is when all of this was happening it was Quebec that always wanted to get away from the agreement. Where was Canada to try and bring back Quebec to the table at the time? Canada wasn't doing anything to help the community at all to bring back the provincial government to the table. They never said anything; they never did anything," Jerome told Windspeaker.

He said it was incredibly hard to deal with Canada and Quebec, two governments that don't see eye-to-eye on very many issues.

"We even got Judge Rejean Paul, a Quebec Superior Court judge, to mediate this problem. He basically told Quebec and Canada that it's a treaty that you signed with this community and you need to respect it. It took two years to get Quebec to obey the orders from the judge, but at least the three, four years that we worked on the agreement, we had it 80 per