Late in the day yesterday, Justin Trudeau announced that he had come to the limit of his patience, that his calls for dialogue were not being heeded, and that it was time for the barricades to come down – something that was hinted at during Question Period a couple of hours earlier when the parliamentary secretaries sent to recite scripts said that “dialogue has its limits.” Trudeau did not say how those blockades were to come down – he wasn’t issuing orders to police, given that the enforcement was a matter of provincial jurisdiction, but part of the call was for Indigenous leadership to basically get their own people to stand down (though that didn’t seem to go so well on Wednesday after one Mohawk grand chief had to walk back his calls for de-escalation). And while some of the premiers, Scott Moe included, said they were pleased by the changed message, Doug Ford continued to blame Trudeau for things happening in his own backyard.

https://twitter.com/mattgurney/status/1230971079092514816

In the hours after the press conference, one sympathetic blockade south of Montreal was abandoned when riot police showed up to enforce the court injunction there. And in BC, the province’s Environmental Assessment Office suddenly told Coastal GasLink that they needed to engage in further consultations with the Wet’suwet’en people, since deficiencies in their previous efforts were pointed out to them over the course of the past couple of weeks, and were given 30 days to do so, which could further de-escalate the situation as the RCMP are moving out of their enforcement operations. But at the same time, that same group of hereditary chiefs has been shifting their demands, so that one minute on TV they’re saying the RCMP physically removing themselves from those operations was enough to start talks, the next minute putting out a press release saying that the RCMP needed to be out of their territory entirely, including routine policework, and then telling a radio station that because of Trudeau’s statement that they’re going to delay talks even further – all things that seem to me to further bolster Trudeau’s position that he’s been the reasonable one and the other side hasn’t been. And as for all of those people who insist that Trudeau is simply saying what Scheer did four days ago are ignoring the very important nuances of what has happened, as Andrew Coyne points out below.

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1230958409530429440

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/1230958637696344064

As for the handwringing by the likes of Scheer and Jason Kenney that these protests send a signal that things can’t get built in Canada, perhaps the signal is that things can’t get built the same way, cutting corners and running roughshod over these First Nations like they used to be able to. It’s like people who lament that we couldn’t build the railways these days, who seem to blithely ignore that said railways were built by displacing First Nations along its path, and importing virtual slave labour from China to do the work. If they think that’s the kind of thing that would fly today, then perhaps they need to give their heads a shake.

Meanwhile, Chantal Hébert worries that these protests were the “dress rehearsal” for future protests against the Trans Mountain construction, however I have a feeling that there are enough points of difference between the facts related to Wet’suwet’en territory and the Trans Mountain route that it will wind up playing very differently if that were to happen. Matt Gurney delves into the logistics and supply chains that depend on the rail corridors in this country, and how vulnerable the blockade has made us. Gurney also has a very good three-part series on Wet’sewet’en law and how it relates to the situation, which is well worth your time (parts one, two, and three). Paul Wells is dubious about Trudeau’s four-day limit to his patience, and the signals that it sends.

Good reads:

• Jim Carr says the decision on Teck Frontier Mine will come next week (while Alberta says they will put regulatory teeth behind their emissions cap).
• The Supplementary Estimates were tabled this week, and they contain a request for an additional $2.1 billion allocation for Indigenous programmes.
• Surprising nobody, an Ontario court has ruled parts of the new prostitution laws unconstitutional, something that everyone said was going to happen.
• The federal privacy commissioner and several provincial counterparts will look into Canadian use of facial recognition software provided by Clearview AI.
• Anti-hate groups say that calls for vigilante action against Indigenous-led blockades are growing in far-right circles.
• Peter MacKay keeps digging as he now calls those who engaged with protesters to remove blockades “Good Samaritans.”
• Éric Grenier tracks the fates of all those also-rans in the last Conservative leadership to make the case that a leadership bid doesn’t actually help build one’s profile.
• Lawyer Michael Spratt recounts Peter MacKay’s record when he was justice minister, the laws he enacted that were struck down, and record of appointments.
• Kevin Carmichael looks at how Alberta’s pension plan could replicate the success of Quebec’s Caisse model – if they can keep the politics out of it (which is a big if).
• Colby Cosh boggles at the conceptual underpinnings of the Buffalo Declaration, and how it is about stoking a sense of victimhood for its readers.
• My weekend column takes apart the ridiculous claims in said Buffalo Declaration, and call them out for farce that they are.

Odds and ends:

Canadian geologist and professor Chris Herd has been selected by NASA to be part of a team helping the next rover mission to Mars, which aims to bring samples back.

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