Can Russia Teach Us Anything About Ethnically-Based Federalism

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Political scientists seek to understand events and processes in one place through juxtaposing them with their contemporary equivalents in at least one other society.

So much of the reason we teach comparative politics courses is so that students can compare and contrast political systems elsewhere to our own and perhaps consider potentially adapting some of their features to our own federation.

Russia has a complicated asymmetrical federal structure. There are 85 units, all called “Subjects of the Federation.”

The main grouping is the 46 oblasts, usually named after their main city, for example Sverdlovsk or Volgograd; they have a predominantly ethnic Russian population. They are simply territorial subdivisions, like American or Brazilian states, with no ethnic connotations.

The same is true of the nine krais, such as Kamchatka or Krasnodar. They are named differently than oblasts because they are found in outlying, frontier areas, mainly in Siberia. A Canadian parallel might be Yukon.

Then there are units with a distinct ethnic basis, named republics, which enjoy more autonomy than the other types of jurisdictions.

These 22 republics range from big ethnic entities named for a “titular” nationality, such as Chechnya and Tatarstan, down to tiny entities created as homes for smaller ethnic groups. Some of the latter are even enclaves found within the regular oblasts or krais.

For example, Adygea is one such entity, representing the indigenous Adyghe people. It is the fifth-smallest Russian federal subject by area, with its territory situated within Krasnodar Krai.

Each region, regardless of its status, has an elected leader -- in oblasts and krais, governors or the heads of administration; in republics, usually presidents of the republic.

Regardless of type or size, all 85 “subjects” are represented by two delegates each in the Council of the Federation, the 170-seat upper house of the Federal Assembly, the Russian parliament. The lower house, the State Duma, with 450 members, is an elected body, with representation by population.

In my course on the Russian political system, I introduced the students to this complex system. Then I brought to their attention the ill-fated 1992 Charlottetown Accord, in which aboriginal peoples were to have been a “third order of government.”

The Charlottetown Accord would have substantially altered the status of aboriginal groups in Canada. Under the Accord, an aboriginal right to self-government would have been enshrined in the Canadian Constitution. Moreover, the Accord would have recognized aboriginal governments as analogous to the federal government and the provinces.

There was provision for aboriginal representation in the Senate, and Aboriginal senators would have had the same role and powers as other senators.

Aboriginal legislation, however, would have been required to be consistent with the principles of “peace, order, and good government in Canada,” and would have been subject to judicial review under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Beyond these general principles, the Charlottetown Accord did not provide any details on the precise form that such self-government would have taken. Further, it provided for a breathing period before they could access the right to self-government.

This would have allowed the federal government and the provinces time to negotiate the details. But how would this have worked, territorially? There are 633 reserves in this country, all within provinces and territories, like raisins in a cake. What would their status become? This remained vague.

But what if we adopted the Russian system, making them all small ethnic republics within the larger provincial entities created by the settlers who came to this country? After all, Nunavut is already effectively an Inuit polity.

So, for example, Kanehsatake, near Montreal, would become a Mohawk republic, within the province of Quebec. The Tsuutʼina First Nation southwest of Calgary would become a self-governing ethnic polity. And so on.

Some First Nations are already, in a de facto sense, on this road. British Columbia is home to 198 First Nations, about one third of all in Canada. The Nisga’a in 1998 signed a treaty with Canada, and as part of the settlement, nearly 2,000 square kilometres in the Nass River Valley in northwestern British Columbia was officially recognized as theirs.

The Wetʼsuwetʼen, in the central interior of the province, last May signed an agreement with the federal and provincial governments, in which Ottawa and B.C. recognized Wet’suwet’en rights and title to their land.

Doing the same with other indigenous nations would make for a more complex federal system than the one we have now, but it might open up all sorts of possibilities for further reconciliation.