Government spending at Louis Riel’s house shuts down guided tours
By Paul Waldie, Globe and Mail, June 12, 2012
Winnipeg, Manitoba–Louis Riel is considered a Father of Confederation, founder of Manitoba and a significant figure in Canadian history. But his family home in Winnipeg is facing a more modern-day challenge – budget cuts. Some worry that a staffing decision could jeopardize the future of the Winnipeg house.
(Further below, articles on the historic land claim of the Manitoba Metis.)The 131-year-old house has been owned by Parks Canada for nearly 50 years and is managed as a National Historic Site. For 30 years, the St. Boniface Historical Society provided guides in period costumes who gave tours of the house between May and September and explained the history of Riel.
Last month, the federal agency told the society that the contract, costing about $50,000 annually, was being terminated for budget cuts.
“It’s certainly not the best situation,” said Tom Kynman, superintendent of operations for Parks Canada’s Southern Manitoba region. “As part of our response to the [federal] budget of 2012, one of the decisions taken was not to renew an interpretive contract.”
Mr. Kynman said Parks Canada will continue to maintain the property. Instead of guided tours, visitors will pick up a pamphlet at the house and make their own way around. Mr. Kynman said it is not clear if the house will be staffed at all, even by volunteers. “We’re not quite sure how it is going to work,” he said.
The Riel house is one of more than two dozen historic sites across the country that will no longer have guided tours because of budget cuts. The government is trimming $29-million from the Parks Canada budget over the next three years.
The decision could put the future of the house in jeopardy, said Gilles Lesage, the society’s executive director. “The big concern that we have is in terms of what’s going to happen to the site on the longer term,” Mr. Lesage said. “When a site is not in use, or where you have no onsite personnel, certainly it can become open to more problems [such as] people coming in the middle of the night or making a campfire close to the house.”
Mr. Lesage added that the society was surprised at the decision since Parks Canada had already contracted out guided tours at the house; at many other sites across the country, Parks Canada staff do the tours themselves. A few years ago, the federal service also introduced an admission fee at the Riel house to help cover some of the costs of managing it.
“We were somewhat surprised because the option of contracting out like this is probably a cheaper way to operate a site like that, and so we thought that we probably wouldn’t be on that list,” he said.
Mr. Lesage said the tour included details about Métis life in Manitoba, as well as history of Riel’s struggle for Métis rights. The house “has been significant for making the history of the Métis known,” he said, adding that about 4,000 people visited it last year. Riel never lived in the house, but his family did and it’s where he laid in state after being hanged in Regina in 1885.
“Hopefully there will be a way found to keep that site open and keep the interpretation going,” Mr. Lesage said. “At this point I really don’t know what’s possible.”
In September 2007, the Manitoba Legislature established the third Monday of February as an official holiday in the province of Manitoba, ‘Louis Riel Day.’ For a history of Louis Riel and the Metis people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Riel#Political.
Final showdown looms in Manitoba Métis land claim
By Kirk Makin, Justice Reporter, Globe and Mail, Monday, Dec. 13, 2011
A chapter of Canadian history comes under scrutiny in the Supreme Court of Canada when the court considers a claim by Manitoba Métis to a vast tract of land in the province.
If the Métis are successful on Tuesday in proving that they had legitimate title to the land and deserve compensation, it could lead to other land claims for Métis in other provinces and provide greater recognition of the Métis’ role in the inception of the country.
The claimants, descendants of Louis Riel and his rebellious, one-time provisional government, say the federal government breached the agreement that brought Manitoba into Canada under the 1870 Manitoba Act.
“This is the unfinished business of Confederation,” said Thomas Berger, a former judge who represents the Métis and paved the way for a host of aboriginal land-claim negotiations in a similar court battle in 1973. He said because the agreement made Manitoba a part of Canada, it was “a turning point in Canadian history.”
In return for losing their right to land title, the Métis were to receive about 5,600 square kilometres of land for 7,000 of their children to settle on. But the claimants argue that because of lengthy delays and inopportune governmental decisions, about 6,000 of the children got disparate plots scattered about the province far from parents and siblings. The other thousand got nothing.
“The Métis say they were to have been a land-holding population at the heart of the new province,” Mr. Berger said in an interview. Instead, they were subjected to so much violence and bigotry over the ensuing years that many left the province, he said.
Mr. Berger said he has documents showing that Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, promised the land to Louis Riel and his confederates. The documents include quotes from Macdonald conceding that, by the time the land plots were doled out by lottery, most of the prime land in the region had been “swamped” by an influx of white settlers from Ontario.
The Métis want the court to rule that the government owed them a fiduciary duty to provide prime land where they could settle in close-knit communities.
However, federal government lawyers argue in a brief to the court that the claimants cannot establish bad faith on the part of government and that the Métis have been impermissibly late in making their claim. Because of the lateness, the government maintains that the question of Métis title to the land and their relationship with the government do not need to be decided.
A federal legal brief also alleges that delays in parcelling out the land were inevitable given the scale of the process. Moreover, the government contends that it would have been practically impossible to locate family members alongside one another.
The case has cost the claimants an estimated $3-million and involved years of searching archives, translating and transcribing handwritten documents from the 1860s and 1870s.
It has gone through the trial courts and Manitoba Court of Appeal three times on different points of law. In the most recent decision, the Métis lost a 5-0 ruling in the Manitoba Court of Appeal.
Arguably, however, no court in the land has been as sympathetic to aboriginal and Métis claimants as the Supreme Court of Canada. So, the final showdown looms large. Mr. Berger said a victory would bring the government to the negotiating table with the Métis to work out a fair disposition for their claim.
“I’m not complaining about the length of the case,” he said. “After all, this is a vast canvas we are trying to paint on. We want a declaration that Canada has not fulfilled its fiduciary obligations under the Constitution.”
Manitoba Metis Federation land claim case to be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada
December 13, 2011, published on the website of the Manitoba Metis Federation
On the morning of December 13th, Métis Nation citizens gathered in Ottawa to march to the steps of the Supreme Court of Canada in support of the Manitoba Metis Federations’ court land claims appeal that has been 30 years in the making. It was a great day for the Métis Nation.
Métis citizens entered the Supreme Court of Canada to be a part of history as the rights of the Manitoba Metis and therefore Métis from across the Homeland were on to be discussed. The courtroom itself was filled, the overflow room, too, was filled – and off-site, Métis citizens gathered in a meeting room where two big screens webcasted the appeal live.
This case, was launched in 1981 by the MMF asserting that Canada did not fulfill its constitutional obligations agreed upon by the Riel government as part of Manitoba’s entry into Confederation and today the Métis got their day in Canada’s highest court.
The Métis Nation legal team, which is lead by Thomas Berger, Q.C. and Jim Aldridge, Q.C. presented strong evidence including letters and copies of statements from Canada’s highest officials including former Prime Minister John A. MacDonald. (Please see below for the major points that were presented to the Judges).
It will be several months until the MMF is back at the Supreme Court of Canada to hear the Judges remarks, but after today the Métis Nation is confident that the next steps will be positive. THE CASE FOR THE MANITOBA METIS
The case involves two historical leaders, Sir John A. Macdonald and Louis Riel, and the promise of land for the Metis people.
It goes back to 1869-70 and the negotiations between the government of Canada and the Provisional Government established by the Metis of the Red River Settlement, headed by Riel.
In 1870 the Red River Settlement had 12,000 people; 10,000 were Metis. Seven thousand of them were children.
Promises by the federal government contained in the Manitoba Act of 1870 were supposed to confirm the possession of land held by the Metis settlers along the Red and Assiniboine Rivers.
The Federal Government also assumed the responsibility to appropriate 1.4 million acres and to distribute it among the 7,000 Metis children.
It was on the strength of these and other promises that the Metis laid down their arms and agreed that Manitoba should enter Canada.
The Metis established at the trial of the case that the distribution of 1.4 million acres to the 7,000 Metis children was delayed for a decade and more. Indeed almost a thousand children received no land at all.
The Metis lands were traditionally held by extended families along the Red, Assiniboine and other rivers. But no provision was made for the children’s lands to be contiguous or clustered together. Instead, Ottawa ordered the land to be distributed by lottery in each parish. The result was that each child’s land might be 10, 20, 30 or 40 miles from their parents and their siblings.
The Metis rely on what Sir John A. Macdonald and his colleague, Sir George-Etienne Cartier told the House when piloting the legislation through Parliament.
Macdonald told the House of Commons on May 2, 1870 that the grant of 1.4 million acres was “for purposes of settlement by their children.” On May 4, he said “No land would be reserved for the benefit of white speculators, the land being only given for the actual purpose of settlement.”
A year later, Sir George-Etienne Cartier told the House on April 13, 1871 that “Until the children came of age, the government was the guardian of the land, and no speculators would be suffered to get hold of it.”
The Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie, in office from 1873 to 1878, took the same position: Sir Richard Scott, Secretary of State, told the Senate on March 14, 1877: “The Government was the guardian of these people, and it was their duty to see that they were protected in their rights to their properties.”
The trial judge and the Manitoba Court of Appeal held that these provisions of the Manitoba Act were intended to provide a “head start” for the Metis against the influx of new settlers.
But in the meantime a great influx of settlers from Ontario had entered the new province. They received their land without delay. There was no “head start” for the Metis. In fact they did not get to the start line for ten years or more.
Paragraph 200 in the MMF Factum sums up the situation. “By the time the grants were finally issued in the names of the children the Metis had been in Macdonald’s phrase, “swamped by the influx of settlers”. The Metis had become marginalized and were now, to a great extent, a landless minority. It may be that half the Metis population had left Manitoba by 1881.”
Argument of MMF case
The Manitoba Metis Federation, in showing that there was an inexcusable delay in implementing the original promises, argues that there was a breach of fiduciary obligation by Canada, which left the Metis a marginalized minority in the province. The breach by Canada was a breach of a constitutional obligation.
The Manitoba government then passed a series of laws which the MMF alleges were designed to ensure the children’s grants passed from Metis ownership to non-Metis ownership. The MMF contends that these laws were unconstitutional.
The MMF will argue that since the federal government had a constitutional obligation to the Metis and their children that it failed to fulfill, the Supreme Court of Canada, notwithstanding the passage of time, can rule on the question, since it involves the rightful place of the Metis within the constitutional system.
History of Case
The MMF lost earlier in the Manitoba courts. The trial judge and the Manitoba Court of Appeal held that there had been no breach of fiduciary obligation, even though both held the purpose of the grant of 1.4 million acres was to give the Metis families and their children “a head start.” The Supreme Court of Canada earlier this year agreed to hear an appeal.
