How a closed-door conference between Ottawa bureaucrats and First Nations delegates produced the legal machinery still shaping Indigenous identity in Canada today
I was a judge for the Canadian National Newspaper Awards again this year, and this story submitted and reported by the National Post (it’s US hedge fund owner is said to have $2 billion of Chinese funding) was one of the three finalists in my category. I volunteer to do this judging every year, and it takes hours and hours to read over 75 submissions carefully. If you read my whole piece right here, you will see how it could link to China. Take the cookie, Canada, and get rich. Then all of the country will gain, and Canada will have more power in the world, which would be a good thing.
This year, I was less inclined for this story to be a finalist— As there were many excellent pieces— until the other judges explained to me more carefully and emphatically that it should be a finalist. I decided to agree to this story as one of the three finalists with the other judges, but not because I was enraged by the issue, but because I worry that perhaps it may be used by rogue interests, looking to gain Canadian land rights or division that divides Canadians, and it’s worth having a conversation about.
I was very curious about how the story would be used by parties that perhaps don’t have the best interests of any Canadians at heart.
The question that I think is at the heart of this story, before we get to the emotional history of the terrible things that happened to the First Nations people, is the logic of today:
At what point is someone integrated into Canada as a Canadian tax-paying citizen without any additional indigenous rights or government payments?
We all belong to some culture from the past that at one point lost land, whether that is Celtic, Anglo, Syrian, or Roman. It’s very sad. War is very sad, and we also progress as nations and build anew through that diversity. Being one population of a nation—Canada, America, and Great Britain—has a lot of strength. So the question that I would like to ask, and I think should be the real debate:
Again, at what point is someone integrated into Canada as a Canadian tax-paying citizen without any additional indigenous rights or government payments?
Once you’re 1/4 First Nation or Inuit, 1/8 First Nation or Inuit, 1/16 First Nation or Inuit?
I think that’s a real question. It seems logical that if you are half, you still have a lot of rights, maybe even 1/4 — but then what?
As many people start to use status as a way to hold up or control mining, hydro deals (note NFLD shout out in this piece), Etc. Any land deals that they need and want to counter… I become a bit suspicious. Especially when the action prevents Canada from gaining. It would be very convenient for an opposition country like China to stir up these issues so that It remains the world's largest mining power and can therefore hold that over the heads of Western nations.
We may want to ask who is really pushing these stories for gain, when it is not that of the Canadians or the First Nations people who prosper. Canada, which should be one of the richest nations in the world, continues to be very poor. Natural resource growth is an incredible opportunity for Canada to gain vast amounts of wealth for all Canadian people.
BTW: If you extract from the land faster than its carrying capacity, what you are doing is debt accumulation and not "riches". Anthropocentrism, Androcentrism, Individualism, Universalism, etc are all Western European ideologies imposed on this continent by foreign governments.
To your question: "at what point is someone integrated into Canada as a Canadian tax-paying citizen without any additional indigenous rights or government payments?" My answer would be it's long past time to put everyone on equal footing. It was a terrible mistake to enshrine Aboriginal rights into the Constitution. All Canadians should be equal before the law and have the same rights and obligations, regardless of ancestry. Race-based rights are, by definition, racism.
I read these talking points regularly, so I wonder if they are a script from somewhere?
You claimed, “All Canadians should be equal before the law and have the same rights and obligations, regardless of ancestry. Race-based rights are, by definition, racism.”
First Nations and Innuit inherent sovereignty predates the notion of the Dominion of Canada, New France, New England, New Spain, etc. In the case of First Nations, there are treaties to allow European settlers to share land. We are not talking about “individuals” who are “Canadians”, but international disputes between nations relating to treaties and other obligations under international law.
The notion that this is about “individuals” or “individual rights” is itself Western European ideologies being imposed outside of Western Europe. I am aware of Western Europe’s “Age of enlightenment” individualism and universalism, but to believe that Western European ideologies should be applied to the entire planet is what is Eurocentrist/Racist/etc.
It was not a "mistake" to enshrine pre-existing rights and treaty obligations into Canada's Constitution, as it was not a choice that "Canada" made but a requirement under international law. P.E. Trudeau tried to wipe out those rights throughout the period he was PM, but was not allowed under international law to do so. P.E. Trudeau was the most overtly racist Prime Minister during my lifetime, born in 1968 which is the year Trudeau first became PM.
The notion that these are "race-based rights" is the racist concept imported from Western Europe, as the conversation is about nationalities with inherent (genos/relational/peoples) sovereignty. What is racist is that the subjects of Western European Christian Monarchies (Primarily British and French Empires) came to this continent, never naturalized to the laws of the land, and set up Western European (IE: White) racist government institutions to violently impose Western European (IE: White) ideologies, identities, values, cultures, etc.
The "equal before the law" framing keeps coming up, and it consistently misreads what Section 35 actually is. I pulled up the Constitution Act directly: before 1982, the federal government could extinguish an Aboriginal right through legislation or through signing treaties. Section 35 didn't create new rights. It protected existing ones from being quietly legislated away, which had already happened repeatedly. Treaty rights were enforceable before Section 35 came into force. The Constitution Act, 1982 did not create a new cause of action. These are nation-to-nation obligations, not individual benefit programs tied to ancestry percentages.
I know you know as someone who reads the source, so this is for someone else reading. My other replies weren’t intended to try to convince the person I replied to to change their minds (and I'm not interested in "debate"), but for me to send out “signal flares” to find other like-minded people.
What I find interesting in these conversations is that people keep discussing Western European Liberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism as if it is a new and definitive thing, when in fact one of many foreign ideologies which has been disputed on this continent since before the passage of British North America Act 1867.
As with BNA 1867, Canada Act 1982 was international in nature. There are settler primers who promote their centrality in the process, when even the PM at the time wasn't able to get their own way as international law didn't allow it.
Those who are trying to deny that the Dominion of Canada engages in many genocidal policies (Residential Schools only being one) aren't debating the evidence, but the definition of genocide itself.
Western Liberalism tries to suggest that different groups such as discussed under the Greek word "Genos" don't exist at all, and that what is being discussed is mass homicide (Crimes Against Humanity, an entirely different concept under the Rome Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Statute
Liberalism makes populations of mere "individuals" simpler for the administrative Westphalian state, but requires most of what makes us who we are to be wiped out.
For some, even Canada's Boutique multiculturalism (performative fake multiculturalism -- Canada is an example of bi-colonialism by the British and French Empires) is too complicated.
While Canada can legislate and not recognize a right or honour a treaty, that isn’t the same as legislating it away. Canada, like the USA, are allies of convenience and dishonour treaties and other obligations as soon as they aren’t in their favour. That is only one side of a disagreement, and Canada being dishonourable doesn’t change the nature of the other peoples or international law.
I worry that many Canadian loyalists who believe the government version of events will be surprised when other governments and their citizens no longer believe any of that mythology.
In a "Canadian" context, we even have people confused between the concept of Western European Liberalism and the Liberal Party of Canada, when in fact all the parties with seats in Canada's House of Commons adheres to Liberalism. They also all believe in exclusive centralized governance, so under more neutral definitions of "left wing" and "right wing" all those parties (CPC, LPC, Bloc, NDP) are "right wing" https://imnotyourechochamber.substack.com/p/what-left-and-right-actually-mean
The imprecision of English and the misinformation built into the Canadian dialect is so "fun".
My first reaction when I saw a reply from what felt like a foreign interference bot (Hard to differentiate Russian, Chinese or USA foreign government interference from each other any more) was to just block and ignore, but then I thought what was written was worth discussing.
Canadian loyalists regularly think of empathy as one of the defining values and part of their Canadian identity. It is core to how they present themselves internationally, including the desire to contrast themselves with the USA (and feel a sense of superiority).
Some think of "Canada" as a large group of people with shared identity, values and culture.
I wish that were true -- Canada was formed specifically as a rejection of relational sovereignty (where it is the group of people, and their relationships with land, that defines the sovereignty, where governance is non-exclusive, and there is an ethic of non-interference with other peoples) and the imposition of Western European Westphalian sovereignty (where it is specific imaginary geographical lines that define an exclusive government that effectively "owns" in a Western European sense all the land and life within that boundary).
In the context of Canada, this all is forced within the context of Western European Liberalism which flattens the human experience into Western European ideologies.
Saying that empathy would end "Canada" will generate some interesting thoughts. If that is true, then what exactly is "Canada"?
I know I grew up with many mythologies, including believing that Canada was a group of people with some sort of shared identity, or the name of a place. I no longer believe that.
Maybe recognizing that "empathy" is incomparable with "Canada" will cause more people to want to radically reform the REALITY of the institutions of Canada to more closely math what they incorrectly believe that Canada is.
Note: I believe in correctness, not performative political correctness. If I were being politically correct I would be constantly promoting the mythology around "Canada the good", and that time magically ended the "bad things of the past" without policy ever having to change, rather than the reality around the institutions of Canada.
I was a judge for the Canadian National Newspaper Awards again this year, and this story submitted and reported by the National Post (it’s US hedge fund owner is said to have $2 billion of Chinese funding) was one of the three finalists in my category. I volunteer to do this judging every year, and it takes hours and hours to read over 75 submissions carefully. If you read my whole piece right here, you will see how it could link to China. Take the cookie, Canada, and get rich. Then all of the country will gain, and Canada will have more power in the world, which would be a good thing.
This year, I was less inclined for this story to be a finalist— As there were many excellent pieces— until the other judges explained to me more carefully and emphatically that it should be a finalist. I decided to agree to this story as one of the three finalists with the other judges, but not because I was enraged by the issue, but because I worry that perhaps it may be used by rogue interests, looking to gain Canadian land rights or division that divides Canadians, and it’s worth having a conversation about.
I was very curious about how the story would be used by parties that perhaps don’t have the best interests of any Canadians at heart.
The question that I think is at the heart of this story, before we get to the emotional history of the terrible things that happened to the First Nations people, is the logic of today:
At what point is someone integrated into Canada as a Canadian tax-paying citizen without any additional indigenous rights or government payments?
We all belong to some culture from the past that at one point lost land, whether that is Celtic, Anglo, Syrian, or Roman. It’s very sad. War is very sad, and we also progress as nations and build anew through that diversity. Being one population of a nation—Canada, America, and Great Britain—has a lot of strength. So the question that I would like to ask, and I think should be the real debate:
Again, at what point is someone integrated into Canada as a Canadian tax-paying citizen without any additional indigenous rights or government payments?
Once you’re 1/4 First Nation or Inuit, 1/8 First Nation or Inuit, 1/16 First Nation or Inuit?
I think that’s a real question. It seems logical that if you are half, you still have a lot of rights, maybe even 1/4 — but then what?
As many people start to use status as a way to hold up or control mining, hydro deals (note NFLD shout out in this piece), Etc. Any land deals that they need and want to counter… I become a bit suspicious. Especially when the action prevents Canada from gaining. It would be very convenient for an opposition country like China to stir up these issues so that It remains the world's largest mining power and can therefore hold that over the heads of Western nations.
We may want to ask who is really pushing these stories for gain, when it is not that of the Canadians or the First Nations people who prosper. Canada, which should be one of the richest nations in the world, continues to be very poor. Natural resource growth is an incredible opportunity for Canada to gain vast amounts of wealth for all Canadian people.
Interesting. This could have been written in 1926 or 1826.
For a different position, from a settler of Scottish, Irish and French descent.
https://r.flora.ca/p/canadian
BTW: If you extract from the land faster than its carrying capacity, what you are doing is debt accumulation and not "riches". Anthropocentrism, Androcentrism, Individualism, Universalism, etc are all Western European ideologies imposed on this continent by foreign governments.
To your question: "at what point is someone integrated into Canada as a Canadian tax-paying citizen without any additional indigenous rights or government payments?" My answer would be it's long past time to put everyone on equal footing. It was a terrible mistake to enshrine Aboriginal rights into the Constitution. All Canadians should be equal before the law and have the same rights and obligations, regardless of ancestry. Race-based rights are, by definition, racism.
I read these talking points regularly, so I wonder if they are a script from somewhere?
You claimed, “All Canadians should be equal before the law and have the same rights and obligations, regardless of ancestry. Race-based rights are, by definition, racism.”
First Nations and Innuit inherent sovereignty predates the notion of the Dominion of Canada, New France, New England, New Spain, etc. In the case of First Nations, there are treaties to allow European settlers to share land. We are not talking about “individuals” who are “Canadians”, but international disputes between nations relating to treaties and other obligations under international law.
The notion that this is about “individuals” or “individual rights” is itself Western European ideologies being imposed outside of Western Europe. I am aware of Western Europe’s “Age of enlightenment” individualism and universalism, but to believe that Western European ideologies should be applied to the entire planet is what is Eurocentrist/Racist/etc.
It was not a "mistake" to enshrine pre-existing rights and treaty obligations into Canada's Constitution, as it was not a choice that "Canada" made but a requirement under international law. P.E. Trudeau tried to wipe out those rights throughout the period he was PM, but was not allowed under international law to do so. P.E. Trudeau was the most overtly racist Prime Minister during my lifetime, born in 1968 which is the year Trudeau first became PM.
The notion that these are "race-based rights" is the racist concept imported from Western Europe, as the conversation is about nationalities with inherent (genos/relational/peoples) sovereignty. What is racist is that the subjects of Western European Christian Monarchies (Primarily British and French Empires) came to this continent, never naturalized to the laws of the land, and set up Western European (IE: White) racist government institutions to violently impose Western European (IE: White) ideologies, identities, values, cultures, etc.
The "equal before the law" framing keeps coming up, and it consistently misreads what Section 35 actually is. I pulled up the Constitution Act directly: before 1982, the federal government could extinguish an Aboriginal right through legislation or through signing treaties. Section 35 didn't create new rights. It protected existing ones from being quietly legislated away, which had already happened repeatedly. Treaty rights were enforceable before Section 35 came into force. The Constitution Act, 1982 did not create a new cause of action. These are nation-to-nation obligations, not individual benefit programs tied to ancestry percentages.
I know you know as someone who reads the source, so this is for someone else reading. My other replies weren’t intended to try to convince the person I replied to to change their minds (and I'm not interested in "debate"), but for me to send out “signal flares” to find other like-minded people.
What I find interesting in these conversations is that people keep discussing Western European Liberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism as if it is a new and definitive thing, when in fact one of many foreign ideologies which has been disputed on this continent since before the passage of British North America Act 1867.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga?title=British%20North%20America%20Act
As with BNA 1867, Canada Act 1982 was international in nature. There are settler primers who promote their centrality in the process, when even the PM at the time wasn't able to get their own way as international law didn't allow it.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1982/11/body
Those who are trying to deny that the Dominion of Canada engages in many genocidal policies (Residential Schools only being one) aren't debating the evidence, but the definition of genocide itself.
Western Liberalism tries to suggest that different groups such as discussed under the Greek word "Genos" don't exist at all, and that what is being discussed is mass homicide (Crimes Against Humanity, an entirely different concept under the Rome Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_Statute
Liberalism makes populations of mere "individuals" simpler for the administrative Westphalian state, but requires most of what makes us who we are to be wiped out.
For some, even Canada's Boutique multiculturalism (performative fake multiculturalism -- Canada is an example of bi-colonialism by the British and French Empires) is too complicated.
While Canada can legislate and not recognize a right or honour a treaty, that isn’t the same as legislating it away. Canada, like the USA, are allies of convenience and dishonour treaties and other obligations as soon as they aren’t in their favour. That is only one side of a disagreement, and Canada being dishonourable doesn’t change the nature of the other peoples or international law.
I worry that many Canadian loyalists who believe the government version of events will be surprised when other governments and their citizens no longer believe any of that mythology.
In a "Canadian" context, we even have people confused between the concept of Western European Liberalism and the Liberal Party of Canada, when in fact all the parties with seats in Canada's House of Commons adheres to Liberalism. They also all believe in exclusive centralized governance, so under more neutral definitions of "left wing" and "right wing" all those parties (CPC, LPC, Bloc, NDP) are "right wing" https://imnotyourechochamber.substack.com/p/what-left-and-right-actually-mean
The imprecision of English and the misinformation built into the Canadian dialect is so "fun".
My first reaction when I saw a reply from what felt like a foreign interference bot (Hard to differentiate Russian, Chinese or USA foreign government interference from each other any more) was to just block and ignore, but then I thought what was written was worth discussing.
Canadian loyalists regularly think of empathy as one of the defining values and part of their Canadian identity. It is core to how they present themselves internationally, including the desire to contrast themselves with the USA (and feel a sense of superiority).
Some think of "Canada" as a large group of people with shared identity, values and culture.
I wish that were true -- Canada was formed specifically as a rejection of relational sovereignty (where it is the group of people, and their relationships with land, that defines the sovereignty, where governance is non-exclusive, and there is an ethic of non-interference with other peoples) and the imposition of Western European Westphalian sovereignty (where it is specific imaginary geographical lines that define an exclusive government that effectively "owns" in a Western European sense all the land and life within that boundary).
In the context of Canada, this all is forced within the context of Western European Liberalism which flattens the human experience into Western European ideologies.
Saying that empathy would end "Canada" will generate some interesting thoughts. If that is true, then what exactly is "Canada"?
I know I grew up with many mythologies, including believing that Canada was a group of people with some sort of shared identity, or the name of a place. I no longer believe that.
Maybe recognizing that "empathy" is incomparable with "Canada" will cause more people to want to radically reform the REALITY of the institutions of Canada to more closely math what they incorrectly believe that Canada is.
Note: I believe in correctness, not performative political correctness. If I were being politically correct I would be constantly promoting the mythology around "Canada the good", and that time magically ended the "bad things of the past" without policy ever having to change, rather than the reality around the institutions of Canada.
If Canada dies the post mortem will list Political Correctness as the primary cause.
.
SOURCE ... Gad Saad's latest book SUICIDAL EMPATHY.
.