An Indigenous leader who raised allegations of corruption is impeached

While it does not speak for all indigenous peoples in Canada, the Assembly of First Nations has long been their most prominent public voice. This week, a protracted period of unrest culminated on Wednesday with a vote to remove RoseAnne Archibald as its national chief.

The AFN is not the only national organization to have experienced leadership turmoil of late. Being the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, for example, has not been an extended tenure job in recent years. But the events leading up to the removal of Ms Archibald, who became the first woman to be elected national head just under two years ago, were unusually troublesome and hinted at wider problems in the group.

And the situation is full of counterclaims and denials.

The motion that ultimately deposed Ms Archibald, during a virtual meeting which was only accessible to the CBC, was prompted by an independent human resources review that found she had harassed two employees. The report also said that five employees experienced retaliation from Ms Archibald and that she violated their privacy. Four out of five people are women.

The report, prepared by a law firm last year, said the working environment at the AFN was “highly politicised, divided and even fractured.”

Ms. Archibald was suspended for a period after the complaints were filed. An attempt to remove her as national head last July was delayed until a final version of the investigation was released.

Throughout, Ms. Archibald has portrayed the investigation as a “slander campaign” in response to her calls for an inquiry into the meeting’s financeswhich she said were handled through a “crooked system” that diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars into personal bank accounts.

“What’s happening is wrong, but it’s not about me,” she wrote on Twitter after her suspension last year. “It is a contrived diversion from my repeated calls to investigate misconduct within the AFN over the past eight years” (Earlier this week, Ms. Archibald closed her social media accounts and has not spoken about her removal.)

In the end, the special assembly voted 71 percent to remove Ms. Archibald — 163 of the 231 votes cast. An interim national chief will be appointed to serve out the remainder of Ms Archibald’s term, which ends in July 2024.

Niigaan Sinclair, a professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba, told me the unrest stemmed from the fact that the assembly “isn’t a government; it’s really important to establish that AFN is just a lobbying group for chiefs.

He said that until 1969 the National Indian Brotherhood, as it was then known, was a political body pushing for indigenous sovereignty. But the government at the time, led by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the father of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, struck a deal where the AFN began receiving significant amounts of federal money to provide various programs and services.

“It was a wonderful way to turn an organization invested in sovereignty and autonomy for First Nations into a federal government program agency,” Professor Sinclair told me. “And the AFN never recovered.”

While Professor Sinclair said that Ms. Archibald “definitely deserved some discipline” regarding the personnel issues, she had nevertheless raised legitimate and important questions about how the Assembly worked and where the government money that poured into it ultimately ended up.

“None of the answers to those questions will be given now,” he said.

Professor Sinclair questioned why the vote was not held later this month, at the annual National Meeting of Chiefs, noting that the 231 chiefs who took part were about a third of those eligible.

“Are we really satisfied with 200 chefs showing up at a social gathering online as the constituency removed her when they could have waited only two weeks?” he said. “It just says that the regional chiefs targeted her two years ago for the questions she asked. And now they have succeeded in removing her.”

Trans Canada

• My colleague Vjosa Isai has been researching how Canada’s $10 a day childcare program is being rolled out.

• Olivia Chow, who arrived in Canada as a 13-year-old immigrant, became the first Asian-Canadian mayor of Canada’s largest city this week. One of her first tasks is dealing with Toronto’s unstable comeback from pandemic restrictions.

• Toronto briefly had the worst air quality in the world this week, reports Dan Bilefsky. More than 1,500 firefighters from around the world are now helping fight the fires in Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec that have once again sent smoke into southern parts of North America and part of Europe. Raymond Zhong and Delger Erdenesanaa have investigated the links between climate change, high heat and fires. And Gaya Gupta explains why the smoke from the wildfire sometimes smells like burning plastic or chemicals.

• A professor and two students in a gender studies class at the University of Waterloo were stabbed by an assailant, in what police described as a “hate-motivated incident”.

• The ship that took the Titan submarine out to sea — where it imploded while diving to see the Titanic’s wreckage — returned to St. John’s, Newfoundland, with relatives of some of the five victims on board. It was later followed by a ship carrying part of Titan’s wreckage, as well as presumed human remains.

Born in Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported on Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.

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