As far as gross cultural insensitivity goes, it would be hard to trump what happened last Friday on Parliament Hill.
Friday was the First Nations day of action, a time for indigenous peoples to tell the rest of Canada that they were fed up with being marginalized. The climax was a protest march along Wellington Street past the houses of Parliament, the centre of power that native people believe is ignoring them.
Parliament Hill was also home to the giant stage for an official Canada Day party. And what transpired next could have been the corniest of pitches from a cliche-happy film student.
"So the protestors are trying to make their voices heard, OK? Some are singing and banging small drums. But guess what? At the very moment they get to the Hill, one of the performers rehearsing for Canada Day starts belting out a tune so loudly that it drowns out the marchers -- so no one gets to hear their voices. Do you get the irony?"
I certainly did. The ancient chants were no match for a modern sound system, and we listened as a forgettable pop song blew everything else away. After four minutes or so the cacophony stopped but by then Parliament was already in the background.
The demonstrators had learned yet again that Canadians as a whole really don't seem too bothered about the problems of the aboriginal population. One unhappy band had pitched 10 small tents not far from the stage, yet I'm not sure the Canada Day organizers noticed them or the grubby barefoot children walking on the pavement. The march seems to have escaped them completely.
Years ago an official in the then-Reform party told me that in poll after poll, Canadians consistently put the First Nations at the bottom of their list of concerns.
I've not seen anything to indicate much has changed since then.
The official line last Friday was very much "Go on, complain if you have to, but don't disrupt business." Canadian Pacific Railways ordered all its freight trains to halt for a minute that day to show solidarity. One whole minute: way to go, CP! That gesture will resound for years to come.
Anyone who actually blockaded a road or a railway faced arrest. So the First Nations lose both ways -- either they obey the law and are ignored or they do something disruptive and run the risk of being labelled an extremist.
A few years ago I sat down with a colleague and tried to sketch out a package explaining to the rest of the world why so many indigenous people here lived in such wretched conditions. What about residential schools? What about the allegations of corruption? Just what is happening to the $10 billion that Canada spends each year on the First Nations? What role does racism play? The two of us gave up when we reached 40 separate story ideas.
Whomever you want to blame, there's no denying this is a complex mess. And many people have enough complexity in their lives without wanting to consider a problem so few of them have to deal with directly. An Ipsos-Reid poll last week noted that only a third of Canadians could correctly identify the number of provinces and territories.
Given that level of ignorance, I wondered, how many people realized what Assembly of First Nations chief Phil Fontaine was referring to when he told a post-march rally that "understanding how and why successive governments tried to destroy us, our cultures and our languages in Canada's name will go a long way to creating reconciliation"?
Some, perhaps, but not enough. Arbout 40 per cent of the 1,000 people present were non-indigenous Canadians there to show support. "Instead of looking at their well-being and caring about them it's 'Us and them' and not 'We,' and I think they should be treated as 'We,'" said Ken Billings from Ottawa.
The scent of burning ceremonial grasses mingled with bittersweet reality. Fontaine said his 13-year-old niece had killed herself that week. He also mentioned with pride the name of Tony Mandamin, sworn in recently as the country's first native federal court judge. We noted that government representatives did not address the crowd.
Back on Parliament Hill, though, the deputy minister from Indian Affairs (the department's top bureaucrat) visited the unhappy campers. For those of you not fully familiar with the civil service, this is big. It's like writing an angry letter to the Prime Minister and then discovering Stephen Harper on your doorstep the next day, asking how he can help.
The two sides struck a deal. The federal government agreed to send a special representative to look into the band's grievances and the protesters went home. And thus it came to pass that the well-rehearsed performers put on a Canada Day celebration free of unsightly tents and other unwelcome distractions.