Critical minerals.
2025’s leading political slogan used to denote our future prosperity and well-being.
Premier Ford rode an excessive use of the term to a third straight majority government in February. Critical minerals, and the pursuit thereof, now feature prominently in Bill 5, rammed through the provincial parliament last week, its centrepiece being the concept of ‘Special Economic Zones’, ministerial edicts that will run roughshod over things like environmental regulations. 
Special economic zones like, say, northern Ontario’s remote Ring of Fire, long lusted after because of its wealth of critical minerals.
And our newly elected federal government isn’t far behind. According to a now deleted June 11th post by The Economist, the country’s resources and critical minerals are being waved like a white flag to entice America back to the bargaining table for a renegotiating of a trade deal that U.S. President abrogated shortly after reassuming the Oval Office in January with a scattershot flurry of tariffs aimed at friends and foes alike. ‘Carney’s colossal Canada-US pact’ with a ‘guaranteed first right of refusal on Canadian resources’, purportedly on the table, among other things, thereby putting Canada ‘on the verge of cementing its place in the vanguard of Trumpian geopolitics’.
One hitch on this path toward economic good fortune and security lies in the fact that huge swaths of the territory in which anyone could access said resources and critical minerals are on Indigenous and First Nations land, both treatied and unceded. A detail our Prime Minister has yet to address, as far as I know. The Ontario government also forgot to mention it in its rush to pass Bill 5 into law, post-hockly assuring critics that robust consultation would happen around any issuance of Special Economic Zone that involved Indigenous and First Nations lands. There would be no need for any of that Idle No More business.
In a demonstration of their goodwill and good intentions, as Bill 5 came into being and the legislature shut down for its summer recess, Queen’s Park announced that the Sir John A. Macdonald statue that had stood crated up on the southern grounds since 2020 would finally be unboxed and opened to the public. Yep. A major architect of the residential school system, a government led program that stole Indigenous children from their homes and families in order to de-savage the Indian out of them, Canada’s first Prime Minister, the statue in his honour would be put back on view as a symbol of the Ford government’s commitment to respectful, mutually beneficial settler-First Nations relations.
I guess it could be just a coincidence, the timing of Bill 5 and the burnishing of Sir John A.’s statue after five years in the dark. The business of running the thing that is Queen’s Park and the government that operates inside of it aren’t always, I’m sure, one and the same. Operations versus governance.
Yet, you might think, being made aware of the plans to free up the statue, that someone in the government would click to the bad timing of it, what with the delicacy of negotiating land and resource rights with Indigenous and First Nations communities being of utmost importance to the government going ahead, apparently. What’s a few more years of no glimpses at a hundred and thirty year old or so statue when a fair and equitable access to critical minerals, CRITICAL minerals, is at stake? Maybe I’m just getting a little hard of hearing in my old age, but the clamoring of demand to see Sir John A. in the bronze hasn’t been loud lately.
For a government that is so relentless and so good at messaging, lives and dies by it in fact, it taxes belief that this is a misstep on its part, an overlooked coincidence. Without getting into the whole What Should We Do With Problematic Historic Statues debate, I mean, who can counter the Steve Paikin Just Put A Plaque Up On It argument he put forth last week? (That man cannot retire soon enough.) I wouldn’t put it past the Ford team to be deliberately using the dynamics of that dispute as optics in what will surely be fraught negotiations going forward with First Nations and Indigenous peoples.
What would those optics be?
First,
we don’t care about concerns expressed about the impact and historical statements being made with statues like Sir John A. He’s one of our heroes, warts and all, and our attitude about that supersedes any of your concerns. Tell you what we’ll do. We’ll put up a plaque telling everybody he wasn’t a perfect guy. Who is, amirite?
Second,
we’re going to be tough with any upcoming negotiations with ‘these’ people. There’s going to be no room for sentiment or hurt feelings. This is business not personal.
Third,
when it comes down to the crunch, the brass tacks of critical minerals, when it comes down to who owns what, treaties and all that may be a consideration but, in the end, as that statue of Sir John A. Macdonald at Queen’s Parks proves, ‘we’ won and ‘you’ lost. Not to put too fine a point on it, as they say, To the winner goes the spoils. Take what we give you and be happy with that.
Overreach on my part?
Maybe.
But it’s difficult to see anything at this critical time for critical minerals but provocation at the Ford government’s freeing up of ol’ Sir John on the lawn at Queen’s Park.