First Nations leaders invited all premiers and Prime Minister Mark Carney to a day of ceremony on Sunday ahead of Monday’s meeting in Ottawa, but only a handful showed up. That single fact may tell Canadians more about the state of the relationship than anything said in the meeting itself, because a ceremony is the easiest part of reconciliation to attend. It costs nothing, it requires no decision, and it signals respect in the most basic way. When most premiers do not attend even that, the absence becomes a statement, whether it was intended as one or not.
What the meeting is supposed to fix
First Nations leaders are meeting on Monday with Carney and some of the country’s premiers in what Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak is calling a historic occasion, the first of its kind in years. The meeting comes as Carney works to speed up major project approvals and development, efforts some First Nations chiefs say threaten their rights, after legislation passed soon after his election in 2025 created a new office to streamline developments and approve projects within one year. Woodhouse Nepinak says First Nations are partners in Confederation and must be respected as governments seek to ramp up resource development. A ceremony that most premiers skipped does not prove they reject that partnership, but it does suggest the partnership is not yet a priority in their diaries, and diaries, in politics, are a form of honesty.
Why absence matters more than attendance
A grassroots collective of First Nations people met on Sunday afternoon at an Ottawa community centre to strategise a protest of the meeting, heavily invoking the 2012 Idle No More protest movement. Their presence, and the premiers’ absence from the ceremony, frame the same question from opposite sides: who is actually listening, and who is merely scheduling? Monday’s meeting can still matter, because decisions about major projects are made in rooms like this one, not in ceremonies. But a meeting that follows an empty ceremony will be judged harshly, because the people who were not there on Sunday will need to show, on Monday and after, that their absence was about logistics and not about indifference. If they cannot, the historic occasion will be remembered for who did not come, rather than for what was agreed.
