“People are dying left and right,” Meno Ya Win Hospital staff told Sol Mamakwa as the Kiiwetinoong MPP toured the Sioux Lookout area’s largest health care facility.
The backlog in the 55-bed acute care facility was worse than Mamakwa had ever seen it during his years as health system transformation lead for Nishnawbe Aski Nation, before he was elected. Many of those occupying 33 Alternate Level of Care beds at Meno Ya Win were members of the First Nations for whom he had aspired to make health services available in their own communities.
“And then she says, ‘I want to ask you something,’” the NDP’s Mamakwa recalls, leaning in and lowering his voice. “She looks me in the eye and says, ‘can you cross the floor?’
“She says, ‘orange is not doing it. I think if we – if you – were blue, I think we’d get that long-term care facility. Can you do that for the people? Because people are dying. There are elders dying alone.’”
Ontario’s only First Nation MPP was taken aback.
Sioux Lookout’s 76-bed long-term care facility was a promise the Liberals made in 2018 that has yet to transpire over six years of Progressive Conservative governance.
Meno Ya Win staff certainly make the case that the need is even greater now. On top of the three-fifths of all hospital beds that were holding ALC patients, Mamakwa saw elders awaiting long-term care who also occupied half of the 10 overflow beds. Another 10 had been stuck at the regional hospital in Thunder Bay for weeks. He met three people in the emergency department without beds who were sitting on the floor.
“After question period, I talked to Doug Ford. He came to me and this is what he said: ‘You know how we’re going to pay for that long-term care facility in Sioux Lookout? We’re going to need to open up the mines in the north.’”
In his role as an official opposition MPP, Mamakwa had aired these concerns in the Legislature back in April. He pointed out that the wait for a long-term care bed for Kiiwetinoong residents is between three and five years, and even when those beds become available, elders are placed in facilities located hundreds of kilometres away from their families and home communities.
But the reason he told her he couldn’t change parties wasn’t because he felt his mandate came from 58 per cent of Kiiwetinoong voters who had elected him under the NDP’s banner.
It’s what premier Doug Ford told him it would cost.
“After question period, I talked to Doug Ford. He came to me and this is what he said: ‘You know how we’re going to pay for that long-term care facility in Sioux Lookout? We’re going to need to open up the mines in the north.’
“So I told her that. She said, ‘really? Does that mean we have to give up our lands to get those [beds]?’
“‘Yep. That’s what that means.’
“That type of request, that’s desperation, for her to ask me like that to cross the floor.”
For a deputy leader to change parties has never happened in Ontario’s history. But the Legislature has never seen a politician like Mamakwa before, either.
In response to Ford’s quid pro quo, Mamakwa said he just walked away.
The Anisininew MPP has built his political identity around an allegiance that runs deeper than party stripes. He’s the first-ever representative from Kiiwetinoong, Ontario’s largest and most thinly-populated riding, whose electorate is 68 per cent Indigenous. The way he frames partisanship, he’s talking about his Indigeneity versus the vision of the settler-colonial state.
“I even say this to my NDP caucus members: left wing, right wing, it doesn’t matter. It’s the same colonial bird. It’s all the same. You still have to function under that system.”
In a time of rancorous partisanship, Mamakwa is the only MPP that no one heckles.
And in immaterial but meaningful ways, he’s made history under that system very successfully as an opposition MPP under successive majority governments.
Ford’s office did not respond to Ricochet’s request for comment by press time.
However, Mamakwa convinced Ford’s Conservatives to change the standing orders on languages to allow for the House to hear and translate any Indigenous language spoken within Canada’s borders, on moral grounds.
In May, he delivered a 10-minute speech in Anishininiimowin, marking the first time anyone had ever spoken a language other than English or French on the floor of the Legislature.
Next month, he plans to introduce a private member’s bill that would make September 30, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a paid holiday.
“I’m creating relationships just by telling the stories of what’s really happening,” he says. “I can always be kicking and screaming but I was never like that. When I was able to speak my language in the House on May 28th, that’s an example. This is a Progressive Conservative government, and I was able to do that basing those relationships on what really happened.”
Indigenous sovereignty in Northern Ontario has no party
The incident with the hospital staffer in Sioux Lookout wasn’t the first time the question of how to achieve more in politics has come down to deciding where to sit, and on which side of the aisle.
The Ministry of the Attorney General’s Far North Electoral Boundaries Commission issued its final report in 2017, which recommended breaking up the colossal Kenora-Rainy River riding in two, with the northern part becoming a formally Indigenous voice in the Legislature.
If the old riding had been its own country, Kenora-Rainy River would have been the world’s 66th largest by landmass, behind Finland and before Malaysia.
“If I had ran Liberal, if I had got that seat, they would have got official party status,” Mamakwa says. “I would have been the $6-million man.”
In this new riding of dozens of far-flung communities, many of which have no road access, partisans had very few connections and virtually no ground organization. They approached Nishnawbe Aski Nation, the political territorial organization and voice of the chiefs in the Treaty 5 and Treaty 9 territories, asking them to put forward prospective candidates to be the first MPP for Kiiwetinoong (the Anishinaabemowin word for “North”).
It was Valentine’s Day 2018 when the NDP took Mamakwa out for coffee and proposed that he run orange. The split partisan allegiance among Indigenous leaders in Ontario’s Far North caused him to stray into the Liberal camp instead. But after courting Mamakwa for two weeks, the Liberals announced they had instead chosen Sioux Lookout Mayor, Doug Lawrance, as their candidate.
When the election came in June, Mamakwa trounced all challengers as the NDP hopeful, pulling 50 per cent of the vote. Only 15 per cent of Kiiwetinoong voters supported Lawrance, as the Liberals suffered the worst loss any incumbent party had ever experienced in Ontario history. Their seven seats fell only one short of the eight needed to achieve official party status, as well as all the research dollars and staff salaries that would have come with it.
“If I had ran Liberal, if I had got that seat, they would have got official party status,” Mamakwa says. “I would have been the $6-million man.”
Instead, Mamakwa was a member of the official opposition, where he quickly came to occupy a unique position in Canadian politics that confounded the press: in a time of rancorous partisanship, Mamakwa is the only MPP that no one heckles.
And over time, that position has come with the responsibility to hold his tongue through the noise of question period from a front-row seat.
“I’m sitting right across from the Premier, right? And when I hear things, I don’t show emotion. Sometimes, the things they say are to get you to react. I think that’s hard too because you just hear outright untruths of what they’re doing. And when you deal with oppression, when you deal with colonialism, when you deal with racism on a daily basis, especially in that place, it’s hard not to react.”
Even Mamakwa’s portfolio, which the NDP defines as “Indigenous and Treaty Relations” makes him the opposition critic for the ministry the PCs renamed “Indigenous Affairs and First Nations Economic Reconciliation,” led by Greg Rickford, the MPP for Kenora-Rainy River.
“Economic reconciliation” is a concept Mamakwa says “doesn’t exist.” It doesn’t even appear in any of the Truth and Reconciliation’s 94 Calls To Action. Earlier this month, he challenged Rickford to release the costs the province bore in its consultations with First Nations communities to change the ministry’s name. He says he’s spoken to no one who was consulted, as he leaves space for the imagination to fill in what that means for this government’s treatment of Indigenous peoples as equal treaty partners.
“It took me a while to even say different words like ‘oppression,’ ‘colonialism,’ calling out ‘colonizers,’ that type of thing, right? It took me a while to talk about genocide. It took me a while to call them ‘old white men.’ It took me three or four years to be able to say those things in the chamber.
“I think sometimes when you say things, you don’t know that they’re points people pick up. When I say those things, they’re just normal to me, but they’re quotes to people who don’t understand the way I grew up, who don’t know the way we live as First Nations people.”
Jon Thompson is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter based in Thunder Bay. Contact him with tips and story ideas at editor@ricochet.media.
