CBC neglected its mandate in Trudeau coverage

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Dear Editor:

I want to thank William G. Lindsay for his tribute to the memory of Pierre Elliot Trudeau and his legacy with respect to First Nations peoples. I also want to thank Windspeaker for carrying the full text of this moving and important commentary.

The content of Mr. Lindsay's tribute serves as a reminder of the negligent silences of many media outlets, but especially the English-language service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation when it comes to the challenge of keeping the Canadian public informed about the history and contemporary life of Indian Country.

I single out Her Majesty's broadcaster for particular criticism, because, as a public company vested in the federal Crown, I believe the CBC has a high level of responsibility to see that First Nations peoples and issues are fairly and intelligently reflected in what goes out on our own air waves. I'd go so far as to associate the CBC's responsibilities with section 35 of the Canadian Constitution which, as Mr. Lindsay mentioned, recognizes and affirms the existence of Aboriginal and treaty rights.

In a world where communications is the very life blood of all peoples' existence, the failure of Canada's public broadcaster to competently report on Aboriginal Affairs arguably represents not only a violation of professional ethics and its original mandate, but also a violation of the constitutional law detailed in section 35.

The intense public interest surrounding the death of Trudeau presented the CBC with a rare opportunity and responsibility to share with Canadians many interpretations of what this important individual meant for the life of our shared country. Indeed, the telecast tributes, documentaries and retrospectives marking Mr. Trudeau's death embodied for many younger people their first major encounters with the memory of several important episodes in our recent past. In the many programs put together by the CBC on the meaning of Trudeau's life, we saw considerations of the former prime minister's legacies concerning, for instance, official bilingualism, the Quebec question, and the role of the National Energy Policy in the alienation of Western Canada. Many reports pictured immigrants to Canada praising Pierre Trudeau and crediting him with helping to engender a more open, less Eurocentric country. The CBC's telecast tributes, therefore, made Trudeau's legacy to "multiculturalism" a big story.

Amidst the flood of images, however, I didn't see one item on the CBC that focused particularly on Trudeau's large and significant involvement in modifying the framework of Canada's relationship with the First Nations. The implication of this oversight was that too many Canadians will remain ignorant of the episodes in history that William Lindsay referred to in his Windspeaker letter. Once again, therefore, the public broadcaster neglected its responsibilities to portray authentically the Aboriginal dimension of the experiences of a changing Canada. The real history of the Trudeau years was thus misrepresented by the CBC with its dumb silence on a very important aspect of the Trudeau years, namely the very significant outcomes of the former prime minister's encounters and learning curve on the frontiers of Indian Country.

What this blind spot conveys to me is that while Pierre Trudeau grew to see the wrongness of what he had proposed in 1969 in his assimilationist White Paper on Indian policy, the CBC failed to mature along similar lines. In failing to tell the story of Mr. Trudeau's gradual embrace of the distinct political character of the First Nations, as well as of the distinct legal character of existing Aboriginal and treaty rights, the CBC helped block from public memory and public consciousness very important developments in the genesis of the First Nations and, indeed, of the whole country. The effect is a kind of intellectual equivalent to ethnic cleansing on the part of our negligent public broadcaster, who has internalized a Whie Paper mentality reflected in the CBC's failure to accommodate journalistically or artistically the distinct existence of the First Nations.

The exception, of course, is in the public broadcaster's Northern Services, a part of the Crown Corporation that remains largely marginalized from the CBC's ethnocentric core in Toronto, where headquarters feeds the rest of the country a steady diet of the blinkered cultures of Rosedale and Forest Hill.

As I have repeatedly pointed out to officials at the CBC over the last decade, the public broadcaster has no fixed centre of corporate memory, corporate continuity or basic expertise when it comes to the distinct issues involving the depiction of the First Nations on the airwaves.

While the CBC radio show, "Our Native Land," once gave the public broadcaster at least one point of reference when it came to Aboriginal issues, that one venue of informed articulation has long since been silenced.

While individual reporters or producers from time to time may endeavor to tell First Nations' stories fairly and well, there is no single part of the CBC that is specifically devoted to coverage of Aboriginal Affairs. Thus there were significant institutional factors beneath the CBC's sad failure to include in the reflections on the meaning of Mr. Trudeau's life any well-considered commentary on how his career so significantly touched the First Nations and their relations with the other people, peoples and governments in Canada.

I collaborated in a small way with Mr. Trudeau when many of us worked hard to prevent the Meech Lake Accord from being entrenched in Canada's constitutional law. That effort eventually ore fruit in Elijah Harper's standin Manitoba and in Premier Clyd Wells' stand in Newfoundland. On July 4, 1990, a few days after the demise of Meech, Mr. Trueau wrote me from his office onBoul. Maisonneuve in Montreal.

In his note, he exclaimed, "I can only say 'well done' to the Aboriginal people and those that advise them. I is remarkable that Canada was finally saved by its first inhabitants and its last (Newfoundland)."

So there it is. Pierre Trudeau was of the opinion that First Nations "saved" the country, not only for themselves, but for everyone. That kind of detail in Mr. Trudeau's life never found its way into the wall-to-wall coverage rightfully afforded by the CBC to the death of the former prime minister.

What First Nations peoples have saved, however, is being put at risk by the negligence of the CBC, which is still one of this country's most important national institutions. The provincialists in the Canadian Alliance Party would like to kill the CBC, just as they would like to implement a variation on Trudeau's discredited White Paper policy of 1969. Too bad that there does not seem to be the wisdom within the CBC to reach out to constituencies that should be natural allies, including the First Nations. The First Nations and the CBC are both imperiled by the provincialist zealots congregating around Stockwell Day, whose short-sighted policies represent the very antithesis of much of what Pierre Trudeau came to stand for, including in his eventual coming to terms with the existence of Aboriginal and treaty rights.

Anthony J. Hall

Professor, Native American Studies

University of Lethbridge