The Man Behind Stephen Harper

It would take Flanagan another four years to get around to the subject of land claims. Along the way he became a one-man Riel industry, turning out a flood of books and papers, then constantly updating them with new research that spurred him to increasingly damning conclusions. In his 1983 preface to Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered, Flanagan confessed that earlier he’d taken for granted that the Metis had justified gripes. Now he was recanting. “I concluded that . . . the Metis grievances were at least partly of their own making,” he wrote. Flanagan admitted he was rushing his revised opinions into print with a motive: to block lobbying for a posthumous pardon that would exonerate Riel in time for the 1985 centennial of the Northwest Rebellion. A pardon, he declared, “now strikes me as quite wrong.”

By the 2000 edition, he was even more adamant. Rehabilitating Riel’s reputation, he warned, could cost Ca nadian taxpayers billions in Metis land claims. What seems most striking about the revised text is its notched-up adversarial tone. Flanagan’s closing argument reads not like a measured scholarly assessment, but political scare-mongering. In establishing his Metis provisional governments, Riel had twice issued unilateral declarations of independence from the federal government, Flanagan pointed out – exactly what Ottawa feared from Quebec.

What had happened to provoke not only Flanagan’s hardened line, but his rush to man the federal barricades? He has said he simply had a chance for more research – an exercise that turns out to have been financed largely from federal coffers. Between 1972 and 1994, he received nearly $620,000 in research grants on the subject from the Canada Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. That largesse includes a rare scholarly bonanza: $500,000 for a five-year project with four other academics, co-editing the collected writings of Louis Riel.

But Flanagan’s views wouldn’t have raised more than eyebrows if his telephone hadn’t rung on a June afternoon in 1986. The Justice Department offered him a $103,000 contract as its chief historical consultant on one of the biggest land-claims cases before the federal courts: a suit by the Manitoba Métis Federation for 1.4 million acres promised to Riel and his followers in 1870.

Flanagan has gone on to repris that role in a half-dozen other federal aboriginal disputes, including Victor Buffalo, et al. vs. The Queen – a landmark claim for more than $1 billion in damages by the Samson Cree Nation at Hobbema, near Edmonton, over Ottawa’s handling of its oil and gas royalties. The Manitoba and Alberta governments have also hired him for their own battles over treaty rights. “What he’s become is a very convenient tool for the government,” says David Chartrand, president of the Manitoba Métis Federation.

Flanagan’s expert-witness stints have not proved unrewarding, but friends insist he is driven not by money but ideology. “He’s concerned the state should not adopt people as wards,” says Allan Kornberg. “It eventually has a corrosive effect on the entire society.” That libertarian loathing of special rights for any group is the philosophical underpinning of Flanagan’s most provocative work, First Nations? Second Thoughts, which unleashed outrage not only in aboriginal circles, but in the usually restrained corridors of academe. “These aren’t second thoughts,” says Joyce Green, an associate professor at the University of Regina and a Metis herself. “They’re the same old first thoughts that the colonizers came with from Europe. It’s a celebration of the original arguments that supported the subordination of indigenous peoples.”

What ignited the most fury was Flanagan’s contention that aboriginals were simply conquered peoples who’d been bested by Europeans with a higher degree of “civilization,” as he termed it. That argument, peppered with references to “savagery,” hadn’t been heard in polite company for decades. “There’s a fundamental racism that underpins his view,” says Radha Jhappan. “It’s an amazingly selective reading of history and it’s driven by a particular right-wing agenda that wants to undermine the claims of collectivity.”

But Flanagan’s fans cheered the book as a brash intellectual ice breaker on a subject that has bedevilled Ottawa policy-makers for years. “What Tom was trying to do was demythologize a lot of stuff that needed demythologizing,” says David Bercuson. “Political correctness had settled over the issue like a wet blanket.”

When First Nations? Second Thoughts won the $25,000 Donner Prize in 2001, Flanagan’s foes weren’t surprised. The award is funded by the Donner Canadian Foundation, which set out to promote a Reaganite agenda in this country. The foundation, in fact, funded Flanagan’s basic research with a $25,000 grant.

But when the Canadian Political Science Association cpsa awarded Flanagan’s book its prestigious Donald Smiley Prize, all hell broke loose. Gurston Dacks, an expert in aboriginal rights who chaired the three-member jury, quit after finding himself outvoted. In a tense, closed-door session, the cpsa’s board decided to keep Dacks’s walkout under wraps and even today no one will talk about it. But in political-science circles the decision left lasting bruises. “It fractured the community,” says Joyce Green, “because it implicated us all in rewarding something that many of us felt was deeply wrong.”