November 2000 Fraser Forum: The Stockholm Syndrome and Treaty Negotiation
Interest-based negotiations require an understanding of the motives of the other parties around the table for maximum efficiency. (Of course true motives may be concealed with sometimes useful results in the short run, or one-off deals, but not in the long run. Even in the short run, if multiple players conceal their true motives the results will probably be sub-optimal.)
In the treaty negotiation process of the Indian Industry, the motives of one group crucial to the talks has been very puzzling. That group is the public service, both federal and provincial. How, one asks, can a group of otherwise decent, intelligent people buy into a totally failed policy which includes such an outrageous idea as race-based governments, totally out of place at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and sincerely defend the idea? What can explain this?
It is not enough to say that public servants are simply loyally doing what the politicians ask them to do. Anyone who knows the dynamics knows that the politicians are, on this file, reluctant and relatively uninformed observers, increasingly horrified at and paralysed by the growing evidence of failure.
Neither are the public servants involved following some wide and deep consensus among the Canadian people. There is a deep vein of sympathy and guilt out there to be mined, but only in terms of compensation for the past. Surveys show that a strong majority of those who have an opinion think the idea of governments based on race is wrong, believe that Indians have no more right to such ethnic governments than any other ethnic group, and that once redress is made for the past, Indians should simply be ordinary Canadians. The policies being advanced by the public servants involved in these matters are 180 degrees opposed to these public attitudes.
And neither are the public servants following legal requirements. The Supreme Court of Canada in Delgamuukw laid down some guidelines with respect to inherited Indian property rights, but has never given any shade of support to the concept of partially sovereign Indian government with no vote for non-Indians in the territory involved, as set out in the Nisga’a Treaty.
So what is going on here? The motives of the other parties at the table are quite clear. For the Indian elites, there is a natural mixture of motives found in any human beings, base and noble. There is a desire for power and land and money and good things for their people and a continuation and escalation of their own importance. It is the typical "priesthood" argument for special moral control. Some individuals no doubt have motives entirely noble, some entirely base, but the elements going into the mix are clear enough.
For the lawyers and consultants in the Industry, the same mix of motives is at work. Most believe in their cause, and are making pretty good money out of it.1
For the politicians, things are a bit more confused. The Indian issue is not large in the career plan of most of them, even for the ministers pro tem. It is considered a file rife with misery, little upside, and a place to escape from as quickly as possible with minimal damage to one’s prospects.
But what about the bureaucrats? They are supposed to be professional. They are supposed to serve the public interest. At a very minimum, they should seek to maintain the values of citizenship and transparency and accountability that are the rocks of our relationships one with another as Canadians. And yet the public policy relative to Indians undermines common citizenship and transparency and accountability. Could it be in pursuit of some greater good that only they, in their particular circumstances, can see? Therein lies the key.
When one sees bizarre behaviour by otherwise intelligent people in matters of public policy, history gives us a number of explanations. The easiest is covered in Lenin’s derisive reference to "useful idiots," being the fuzzy minded dupes who supported the ideals of communism.
A second class of fatal errorists is made up of the zealots, who have come to believe in the necessity of a particular solution. Such belief in the efficacy of social engineering reached a high point in the Prohibition and eugenics movements,2 and from a longer perspective included racial segregation. While each theory would be thought foolish or down- right evil today, in their time they controlled the high ground of public dialogue.
But somehow neither of these descriptions works in the case of public servants in the Indian Industry. They are not fuzzy minded dupes, and they do not attempt to base their views on pseudo-science. However, there is a third possible explanation.
In 1973 three women and a man were taken hostage in a bungled bank robbery in Stockholm. Their captors threatened their lives, but also showed them small kindnesses. At the end of the six-day standoff, and to the surprise of the world media, the hostages actively supported their captors. They resisted rescue and refused to testify against their kidnappers, to whom two of the women even became engaged.
This identification of captive with captor was at that time given the name of the "Stockholm Syndrome." It was first thought to be a weird anomaly, but on reflection was seen as a not unusual development in such profoundly threatened circumstances as concentration camps, cases of incest, prostitute/pimp relationships, and hijackings.
The necessary conditions do not require death threats, but simply a belief that one’s captor has power over you. They also require relative isolation from other support systems, the impossibility of escape, a plausible grievance claimed by the captors, and evidences of friendship and humanity within the larger context of psychological pressure.
In intellectual terms, much of the public service3 involved in the Indian Industry has been taken hostage. They have been beaten down, little supported by their distant political masters, held hostage and made to feel guilty (a special technique of the Industry) or otherwise mentally roughed up in a thousand interminable meetings under bright lights in windowless rooms. And the other conditions are met: surely their captors have real grievances, and surely they are mostly decent people showing small kindnesses. So in the end, as in the incident that gave rise to the original identification of the Stockholm Syndrome, many in the process are broken and brainwashed, then crumble and adopt the perspectives of their captors.
Yes (it is easy to conclude after a few months or years of pressure), the hostage takers have suffered mightily. Yes, their tactics might be a bit over the top, the demands a bit high, but the cause is at least understandable, even worthy. And so the hostages go along, sign the ransom notes and even draft the communiques.
Of course the "captors" here are neither terrorists nor bad people. And indeed, the captor is as much the situation itself, as any identifiable group. A good case can be made that the captor is really Section 91(24) of the constitution, and the tragic history that has flowed from that identification of one race of people as different. But certainly whoever or whatever the captor may be for the purposes of this analysis, most of the Indian Industry is captive, and there has been a special impact on the public service.
There will be many cries of outrage at this point of view from people who will say they are just doing the best they can. They will particularly and justifiably cite a lack of political support for any tough-minded initiatives at all. That may be, and fault may be laid elsewhere, but that "best" is demonstrably not good enough. The Stockholm Syndrome, if that is what it is, validates a fatalism in a long and weary captivity.
Anyone who has examined the progress of negotiations has to wonder who has been sitting on the public side of the table. Indian Affairs has a brief to advance the cause of Indians, so they adopt the most articulate Indian definition thereof without considering an overarching duty to the public. Government has a fiduciary duty to Indians which is clearly reflected in the talks, but who looks after the fiduciary duty to the general taxpayer?
So there is a theory for a very puzzling phenomenon. Nowhere else in the public service do you see an active conspiracy against the clearly held views of the public (with a few exceptions like EI, which has a much larger client constituency than the aboriginal file).
The sad thing, of course, is that this failure of the public service to do its higher duty has had the most devastating consequences for Indians not a part of the elite. If for no other reason, this problem must be addressed.
The solution is a virtual putting into trusteeship of the public service side of the Indian Industry. (Every other part of the Industry is doing its expected job.) The logical trustee would be the Finance Minister. He or she cannot avoid having a very clear picture in their own accounts, not available to the public, of the most massive and tragic policy failure in Canadian government today. The voice of the public interest could then be returned to the table.
The alternative is what happened with terminal policy failure in the Soviet Union. The people in that system were not all corrupt. Decent public servants were scurrying around for a decade, justifying and attempting to fix communism as it crumbled under Brezhnev and his short-lived successors, but it was a rotten system and no amount of fixing could hold it up.
In the end, it suddenly collapsed. This will surely lead to long term good in the former Soviet Union, just as did the almost overnight collapses of the Prohibition, racial segregation and eugenics policies in the North America of the past century. It will be the same with the ultimate and inevitable collapse of today’s Indian policy. However, delayed, sudden, and violent transition is needlessly painful. It is better to get smart sooner.
Notes
1It is estimated that the negotiating costs in the BC Treaty process have now reached $400 million, almost all in the last decade.
2Which called for keeping the human race strong, clever, and pure by denying alleged defectives the ability to reproduce.
3Much, but by no means all. There are a few tough-minded bureaucrats known to this author who have maintained balance by way of scepticism about prevailing Indian policy as fuzzily articulated by their political masters, and there are certainly others unknown to me. Exempt as well are those bureaucrats who rotate through the system so quickly that they do not have time either to be captured by it, or to make a difference.
Gordon Gibson (gordong@fraserinstitute.ca) has an MBA from Harvard and is The Fraser Institute’s Senior Fellow in Canadian Studies. He has served in the Prime Minister’s Office under Pierre Trudeau and as both an MLA and as leader of the BC Liberal Party (1975-79).
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