Brian Lee Crowley looks at activism, reconciliation and resources
by Greg Klein | October 28, 2020
“Despite the Wet’suwet’en debacle,” Crowley writes, “it is mostly Indigenous communities in Canada
now who have clear procedures for ensuring widespread and documented support for a major project.”
(Photo: Neon Lilith Photography/Shutterstock.com)
“You have a beautiful home here,” an army general once told the author’s friend in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The compliment quickly turned sinister as the officer continued: “You have twenty-four hours to get out. It’s mine now.”
That in part explains why resource-rich countries can remain desperately poor. As Brian Lee Crowley states in Gardeners vs. Designers, property rights, the rule of law and stable, accountable institutions are necessary to instill the confidence to develop economy-building projects. Even without house-jacking military brass, could Canada now be facing a crisis of such confidence?
The indications are prominent enough in every Canadian resource industry, but especially in the pipeline battles. Crowley attributes the malaise to “the great fault line” between two viewpoints. They might be described as classic liberals and social engineers, but he prefers to call them gardeners and designers. Our society was not so much built but nurtured by the former, he says. More prominent now are designers who would build over what has grown.
“Liberal capitalism was not ‘designed’ by anyone,” Crowley maintains. “There is no presiding designing genius, no Karl Marx, no Betty Friedan, no Malcolm X, no Franz Fanon, no Mao Zedong. The society we have inherited grew up out of the lived experience of uncounted generations of those who went before us. The job of gardeners is therefore not to theorize, but to untangle and interpret, to understand not to design, to respect the seasons and the nature of the garden’s residents, to create the conditions in which the garden can flourish.”
Crowley expands on that at great length, applying the two perspectives to example after example, insisting that “Canadian society has largely grown up in the care of gardeners. It has not yet been overly damaged by designers.”
But one means of doing so comes from activists who’d impose their idea of ideological perfection. That can appear in the guise of environmentalism or, in a cause that’s become increasingly related, separate rights for separate groups.
Within a few years several Indigenous development corporations could well be among the largest corporations in Canada, with billions of dollars in assets.—Brian Lee Crowley
For all that, Crowley supports group rights for natives. “It goes against the grain of the individualist inspiration that underlies much of what I have said thus far. Indigenous communities are nothing if not groups and putting group identity ahead of individual identity is at the root of much social conflict in the gardener’s manual.”
But separate rights for natives constitute a fait accompli, he argues. In this case gardeners must accept that their belief in individualism “has been overtaken by events. The courts have spoken, and done so soundly, repeatedly and correctly, summoning Canadians to honour the commitments made to Indigenous people, commitments now given constitutional protection.”
Crowley presents an optimistic case for native prosperity through participation in resource-related development. But he warns that this potential could be undermined by the strategy of demanding “social licence.” In doing so, Crowley repeats some questions he’s previously asked:
What, for instance, is the address to which you need to write to obtain it? What form must you fill out? Who are the authorities who decide if your application meets the rules and to whom are they accountable? In fact, what are the rules?
This book is a contribution to the effort to reclaim for Canada and its main political parties the gardener values on which it was founded, values buried in our institutions where they labour still on our behalf, unloved, mischaracterized and often under threat, not from malice but misunderstanding and misplaced ambition.—Brian Lee Crowley
As he points out, that vagueness makes social licence a powerful weapon for activists opposed to development per se.
Crowley champions the cause of reconciliation, saying “it appears that this generation is the one called upon to right the many wrongs done to Aboriginal peoples in our history.”
But he doesn’t apply his social licence questions to this concept. What, for instance, is “reconciliation”? Who defines it? Who decides when it’s achieved? Will such a thing ever be achieved to the satisfaction of those who get to define it?
Similar questions can be asked about the “duty to consult.” Again, the vagueness confers power.
Nevertheless Crowley pins his optimism on resource development. “It is my view that the leading edge of reconciliation with Indigenous people in this country once again runs along the natural resource frontier and it is natural resource companies and Indigenous Canadians who are striking the deals that are making reconciliation a reality on the ground.”
Yet Crowley’s garden isn’t without weeds. Suggesting he’s far out of touch with reality, he actually praises the gig economy. He supports the practice of paying mentally disabled workers less than the minimum wage for tasks of mind-numbing tedium.
Even more puzzling, Crowley bases his support for undefined native powers on Canada’s courts and Parliament, two outrageous sources of flakery.
His dissertations on the gardener-designer dichotomy will belabour the obvious to many readers. But others, younger people especially, might find the gardener viewpoint a novel approach. Thanks to liberalism’s sharp left turn, what was old is new again.
