In August 1973, a group of employees held hostage for six days in a Stockholm, Sweden, bank robbery later defended their captors, and gave us the emotional attachment tagged the Stockholm syndrome. Perhaps its time to apply the label to civil servants who defend the negotiating positions of the side opposite.

The latest example of the syndrome comes from the Department of Oceans and Fisheries (DFO) and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC). Both ministries actively undermined Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s promise last summer to end race-based commercial fishing. That’s a practice not enshrined in Canada’s Constitution or in treaty rights but begun in 1992 by federal Oceans and Fisheries bureaucrats. They established commercial fishing days for certain native fleets, while non-aboriginals of every creed and colour (including natives who disliked the policy) sat on the dock.

The extent of last summer’s bureaucratic dissatisfaction with Harper was revealed recently in 300 pages of now-released e-mails between bureaucrats in both ministries and contacts within the Privy Council Office.

The pages were released under an Access to Information request made by the BC Fisheries Survival Coalition.

In an e-mail to colleagues entitled, Harper and Fish, Lucie Zaharoff with the federal treaty negotiation office wrote, Can it get any worse?

Helen Dundass at INAC flagged Harpers position for other bureaucrats, [i]n case this escalates, as if a prime ministers political position should be a cause for civil servant concern.

Meanwhile, after Harpers July position on the issue, the Privy Council Office requested a public opinion survey.

According to internal e-mails among the various departments, the Assembly of First Nations was offended when it caught wind of the planned poll. It wanted to help design the questions and told INAC the organization wanted to see the results before they were made public.

But civil servants were already actively helping one side in Canada’s saga of endless, expensive negotiations, a dance prolonged by too many aboriginal leaders who pace Quebec separatists pronounce themselves never satisfied and who occasionally issue veiled threats, most recently about how rail lines across Canada may be blocked this summer.

In an initial draft list of poll questions, one bureaucrat objected to the suggested wording in the preamble.

It originally read: As you may know, there is a separate commercial fishery in B.C. for First Nations people. This means there are different rules for how the non-First Nations commercial fisheries and First Nations commercial fisheries are operated.

That’s an accurate characterization; the bureaucracy’s policy prevents equal access.

But a fisheries department director, Rose Marie Karns, objected that the Pacific Region wouldn’t characterize it this way. (Of course they wouldn’t.)

Karns argued there is one fishery under an integrated management plan. That rather missed the point that asking non-native commercial fishermen to stay on the docks while some native fishermen drop their nets was never about who manages it all. It was, and is, about racially divisive, bad and unnecessary policy.

One senior civil servant didn’t even know that the Constitution does not require separate commercial native fisheries.

Gregory Jack, a senior analyst in the Privy Council Office, which advises the prime minister, asks if the reason we cant link fishing rights to the constitution [is] that the SCC [Supreme Court of Canada] have never ruled on whether first nations rights in the constitution extend to commercial fisheries? He is corrected by Daniel Breton, who points out correctly that it is factually wrong to link the Constitution to First Nations commercial fishing rights.

So at least one civil servant, Breton, got it right. In three cases, Sto:lo, Smokehouse and Gladstone, the highest court reaffirmed there was no general native right to a commercial fishery. The Constitution gives natives a limited right to fish, hunt and gather fish for sustenance, social and ceremonial purposes.

At the end, the $24,000 government-commissioned poll revealed what anyone familiar with British Columbia public opinion would know: most people don’t like unnecessary racially divisive separation in the workplace.

In response to the statement, Some people say all commercial fishers, regardless of whether they are members of First Nations, should be subject to the same rules and should be treated equally by the law, 76% of respondents answered yes.

The bureaucrats were supposed to release the results of the poll within 90 days, last October. It never happened. It only came out in an access to information request.

One supposes the poll results didn’t fit with the agenda within the fisheries and native affairs ministries, and which so far seems to be winning, regardless of public and prime ministerial objections.

Despite the prime ministers promise to end race-based fishing last year, federal mandarins involved in treaty negotiations and in the commercial fishery have successfully inserted the native/non-native commercial fishing division into yet-to-be approved treaty side agreements.

Which raises this question: who else has been a victim of the Stockholm syndrome?