The signal facts of this federal election campaign are that the government is not running on its record, and cannot, and it is not promising to do anything beyond the retention of a faddish attitude and professed altruism. In the past four years, as I mentioned hastily last week, the entire focus has been on native, environmental and gender issues, as well as the legalization of marijuana.
In native matters, the government has prostrated itself before the hundreds of separate tribes and bands, purporting to deal with each one on a “nation-to-nation” basis, which, in so far as it implies that it is analogous to dealing with the governments of France or Japan or any sovereign country, is nonsense. Canada’s jurisdiction is everything that is within Canada and that includes all these native groups and organizations. The tedious practice of beginning every official public comment with a dutiful expression of consciousness that the speaker is on territory that once supposedly belonged to some native group known only to the most recondite is indicative of an intangible respect for the natives. But it achieves nothing in the material areas where native issues are urgent, and it incites the inference that all non-natives in this country are invaders or descendants of invaders who came here and seized the natives’ country, in a manner morally indistinguishable from what Hitler and Stalin did to Poland in 1939. The natives did not number more than 200,000 people in what is now Canada when the French and British began settling in this country in the 17th century. They did not, wholly or in groups, govern or purport to govern the territory that is now Canada.
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See Also:
(1) CBC sues the Conservative party over copyright, ‘moral rights’ of journalists
(2) Odds of a minority government rise, Liberal chances drop as Bloc surges in polls
(3) Trudeau loses another pop culture moment
(4) Trudeau drops, Singh bounces as voters turn from Liberals
(5) The goal of reducing Canada’s debt is not something to be ridiculed
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