Broken promises, denial of systemic racism strain CAQ-Indigenous relations going into Oct. 3 vote

When Ghislain Picard received a call from the newly elected premier, François Legault, two days after Legault's Coalition Avenir Québec won the 2018 provincial election, his first reaction was that relations between Indigenous people and the new government had started on the right foot.

"We don't see that often, so I was kind of encouraged by it," said Picard, a longtime Innu leader and the chief of the Assembly of First Nations for Quebec and Labrador.

But that sense of optimism was short-lived.

Over the course of its first mandate, the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) tested that goodwill repeatedly, breaking promises in some instances and ignoring the demands and concerns of Indigenous people in others.

Perhaps the most blatant betrayal, in the eyes of First Nations leaders, was Legault's reversal on a 2018 electoral promise to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which would harmonize Quebec's laws with the 2007 international agreement.

By 2020, Legault had concluded adopting the declaration would give First Nations and Inuit people too much power over economic projects, which he was reluctant to concede.

"I cannot say today that there's a sound and positive political relationship with the province," Picard said, in the final days before the Oct. 3 election.

In September 2019, the Viens commission — a three-year inquiry into the treatment of Indigenous people by Quebec's public service — released its report, which included 142 calls to action.

In it, retired Superior Court justice Jacques Viens wrote that "it seems impossible to deny the systemic discrimination members of the First Nations and Inuit face in their relations with the public service."

Legault moved quickly on the report's first call to action, apologizing to First Nations and Inuit people in Quebec in a lengthy address to the National Assembly.

The government "has to absolutely avoid imposing solutions" on Indigenous communities, Legault said in his apology. But he stopped short of acknowledging that Indigenous people face systemic discrimination.

That denial is at the heart of what remains the CAQ's "totally paternalistic" relationship with Indigenous peoples, Picard said.

"This all falls back to a situation where the government is deciding for us," said Picard, describing the CAQ government as taking "still very much a colonial approach."

The CAQ government's resistance to the concept of systemic discrimination was underscored in 2020, when Legault again denied the role it may have played in the death of Joyce Echaquan, an Atikamekw woman who filmed her abuse by health-care workers.