This Day In Snookland...We Don't Need No Stinking Faith (Good Or Bad).

DividingAndAttemptingToConquer
ByCanadaPostVille


So.

The Snooklandians are trying to make a pipeline deal with the Gitsxan.

And in their latest gambit they sent letters to hereditary chiefs offering  a low-to-midlevel hockey contract-type deal ($12 million) with a similarly pegged 'signing bonus' ($2 million).

Interestingly, the letter was not sent to the nation's official bargaining agent, the Gitxan Treaty Society.

Mark Hume has the story in the Globe:

...Bev Clifton Percival, a negotiator for the Gitxsan Hereditary Chiefs, didn’t know about the letter until contacted by The Globe and Mail last week.

She said the B.C. government had been negotiating with the Gitxsan Treaty Society through the Gitxsan Development Corp.

But those talks were stopped June 22 to protest a treaty settlement the government had made, which gave some land claimed by the Gitxsan to the neighbouring Kitselas and Kitsumkalum bands.

Ms. Clifton Percival – whose group last week “evicted” logging, mining and sports fishing from Gitxsan territory to demand a bigger share of resource activities – accused the government of acting in bad faith by trying to go around the Gitxsan Treaty Society and resume talks directly with chiefs.

But John Rustad, Minister of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation, said the letter is simply an attempt “to engage with the Gitxsan Hereditary Chiefs” who are the decision makers in the community...


Sure thing Mr. Rustad.

'Engage' one group while excluding another.

Sounds like a slightly different tactic to me that many might describe as, at the very least, duplicitous.

And another thing, as Paul Willcock asks on the Twitmachine, how come the companies themselves aren't doing the negotiating?


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