A show we witnessed last year

It’s not a summer rerun. But it is becoming a bizarrely familiar political story in Canada.

A woman takes over a prominent Canadian political organization and almost immediately faces calls for her ouster, amid allegations of a toxic workplace culture and internal mutiny from those loyal to the old guard.

This summer, that’s the story in the Assembly of First Nations, which voted on Tuesday to keep national chief RoseAnne Archibald in power, but only after a messy, public battle over her leadership. Last summer, it was the saga within the Green Party and the turmoil over Annamie Paul’s leadership, who also stared down a no-confidence threat from her party.

“It’s all embarrassing,” one chief said at the microphone late on Tuesday, just before the vote on Archibald’s suspension. Weren’t the Greens saying the same in 2021?

Archibald’s blistering speech to the AFN congress earlier in the day was in fact, remarkably similar to Paul’s public condemnations of her own party during her troubled reign with the Greens last year.

Archibald talked to the assembled chiefs on Tuesday of “colonial, lateral violence” wielded against her within the AFN. Paul talked last year of a Green Party that was “so racist, so sexist” it couldn’t handle a woman leader of colour. Both leaders have said they were being publicly humiliated for attempting to change the dysfunctional culture they were trying to expose.

It is very tempting to draw these parallels between Archibald and Paul as a warning parable for strong, opinionated women in power.

Many will do just that, especially anyone who has binge-watched the latest season of “Borgen,” the riveting Danish political TV series. The unavoidable conclusion of this fourth season, for those who haven’t seen it, is that women better watch their backs when they have the top jobs.

But for now, let’s leave aside the question of whether political organizations are harder for women leaders with designs on shaking up the culture.

A more pointed comparison might be found in where the AFN and the Greens are positioned in the context of Canadian politics overall right now: as protest movements trying to seize a unique moment to become something larger. Neither seem up to it, to be frank.

The Assembly of First Nations should be at the top of its game. Awareness and sensitivity to Indigenous issues has never been as high among the non-Indigenous population as it is right now thanks to the discoveries at old residential schools and a federal government that has placed a premium on reconciliation. It’s not just the domestic political situation, either. but the global one as well: the Pope is on his way to Canada this month to apologize for residential schools.

But suddenly the AFN has chosen this moment to crumble into chaos and recrimination. Even watching events at the Vancouver assembly from a virtual distance, one could feel the deep divisions within the assembly — the bitter, personal struggle over stakes that are a lot larger than they used to be. The AFN is being called upon in 2022 to be in charge of not just asking for more money or recognition from outside forces, but to come to terms with its own power.

The Greens, similarly, should have been in a moment-seizing space of their own last year, with climate change ascending in urgency and yes, also a federal government more committed to the environment than any of its predecessors.

Instead of getting bigger, though, the Green Party shrunk into its own internal warfare, failing to win any more substantial support in last year’s election than it has in any to date. At the same time the planet is going to hell, it seems, so was Canada’s chief environmental party, locked in discussions that seem to have little to do with the climate emergency.

There’s a larger lesson here for any politicians who are trying to tie their own fates to perpetual protesters. I’m talking here of course about Conservative leadership front-runner Pierre Poilievre, but also about Justin Trudeau, who came to power in 2015 with a platform heavily borrowed from the Occupy and Idle No More movements.

Protesting isn’t governing. Demanding urgent action on climate change or reconciliation or income inequality — or vaccine mandates, for that matter — isn’t the same as having to fix them. And before you can fix the world, you first have to have your own act together.

This year, the AFN is being called upon to see itself beyond its own history, as the Greens were last year. Poilievre, if elected Conservative leader, may find out that he’s going to have to build a fence for every gate he knocks down.

Archibald has now been given some breathing room to fix the AFN as the Greens failed to do after their own bruising battle over internal culture. There are only so many summer reruns anyone wants to see.

Both AFN national chief RoseAnne Archibald and former Green Party leader Annamie Paul said they were being publicly humiliated for attempting to change the dysfunctional culture they were trying to expose