On September 13, 2007 the United Nations adopted a Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Canada officially endorsed UNDRIP in 2016 and on June 21, 2021 passed Bill C-15 making UNDRIP law in Canada. While the Bill was being debated, there was an immediate outcry claiming the Bill was an attack on indigenous sovereignty and right to self-determination. I think you have to have “sovereignty and a right to self-determination” before those can be attacked.
While the preamble to the Bill (which is not law) was replete with the typical Trudeau flowery languages and promises, the teeth in the bill has established in Canadian law that existing statutes take precedence over UNDRIP. Basically, the Bill was another Trudeau “double cross” of people to whom he had promised much but delivered little.
The UNDRIP Act itself is interesting. Rather than define “indigenous” in the Act itself, the UNDRIP Act simply adopts by reference the language of s. 35 (2) of the Constitution Act, 1867 (originally called the British North America Act) defining “aboriginal peoples” to include Indians, Inuit and Metis Canadians. No attempt is made to differentiate Canadian immigrants from the Country of India from “Indians” presumably on the basis a reader “will know what we mean”. The inclusion of Metis is another poser. Why someone whose ancestry combines both European and “aboriginal” is defined as indigenous is beyond me.
My ancestry is Irish, my great great grandfather having been born in Ireland in 1790 and emigrating to Canada in the early 1800’s, settling in Moose Creek, Ontario on what continues today as our family farm. That predated the existence of Canada or its Constitution. Blair’s did not wrest the land from any natives, but simply settled on an uninhabited patch of rocky and heavily treed land about 45 kilometers from what is now Ottawa. After some 200 years, I think I have as good a claim to being “indigenous” to Canada than most Metis so defined by Ottawa. The United Nations seems to think that history began about the time European explorers came to North America, an absurd view point.
My own history raises a few questions. Am I indigenous to Ireland and do I have the right with others of Irish descent to self-determination, self-government and all the other rights listed in UNDRIP?
UNDRIP contains the language:
“Concerned that indigenous peoples have suffered from historic injustices as a result of, inter alia, their colonization and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, thus preventing them from exercising, in particular, their right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests”
as a fundamental basis for the provisions of UNDRIP. Any student of Irish history knows of the “historic injustices” inflicted upon the Irish by the British Parliamentarians’ agent Oliver Cromwell, who oversaw the murder of about some 500,000 Irish men and the sale into slavery (or its equivalent “indentured servitude) of another ~50,000 to ~300,000 in the early 17th century, about the same time that so-called “colonization” of Canada was taking place.
Does Canada’s adoption of UNDRIP mean I have a claim against the British for ills visited on the Irish hundreds of years ago? Will Canada prosecute that claim on my behalf? Unlikely.
I have it on good authority that every person living on Earth is “indigenous” to Earth, and that their ancestors came from somewhere on Earth. Is everyone living today whose ancestral lands were subject to historic wars, invasions, etc. have a claim on the authors of their ancestors misfortune centuries ago? Shall we try today to right the wrongs inflicted by Atilla the Hun or Vlad the Impaler?
This is the illusion implicit in the UNDRIP adoption by the United Nations and by Canada. It is nonsensical, absurd and divisive.
I see daily articles complaining of the ill-treatment of the so-called “indigenous peoples” of Canada and the complaints have substance, but the treatment of those peoples by European countries and in particular England and France are no more egregious than the slaughter of the Irish by Cromwell or the Vietnamese by the French under Napoleon in the years following Napoleon’s decision to invade Vietnam in July 1857, only a decade before Canada was created. I have yet to see protests, lawsuits, blockades, riots or land claims being made by people with Irish ancestors against Britain or Vietnamese ancestors against France, but we are treated to a daily parade of “land claims” by First Nations in Canada.
I had the good fortune to come across an interview of Arno Kopecky by Steven Paikin on The Agenda a short while ago, and listened to Kopecky, a brilliant journalist and author, trot out the usual specious narrative on climate change and a hackneyed narrative on the ills visited on First Nations by Canada for which he believes some form of “reparation” is warranted. I found it sad but not surprising that Kopecky and Paikin accepted without question the prevailing “climate change” nonsense and apparently share the sentiment that Canada owes something to “indigenous peoples” for ills their ancestors suffered long before Canada existed.
Kopecky claimed First Nations were “forced” on to reservations which has some historical support but we have long since passed the time when any First Nation person that wanted to leave the reservation system and enjoy the same rights, obligations and opportunities as all other Canadians could choose to do so. They would have a better chance of success than millions of people who have immigrated into Canada with little but the clothes on their backs and built robust lives for themselves and their families, including Robert Blair and his descendants including myself.
Many indigenous people have left the reservation system and compared to those that remain on reservations have enjoyed significantly greater prosperity, with 2010 average incomes from employment of $32,000 to $36,000 compared to $24,000 for those still living on reserves based on data from Statistics Canada.
Canada’s concept of “poverty” parallels that of many countries who consider that persons with income below half of the median household income of the population as whole suffer from “poverty” so defined. I would imagine that definition if applied to the Forest Hill and Rosedale sections of Toronto would find millionaires to be “impoverished” if they comprised the entire populaton and I shudder to think how much income comprises “poverty” in Saudi Arabia. World vision defines poverty in a more common sense way - as “lacking the resources to provide the necessities of life” and in numerical terms those earning less than $1.90 a day. By that measure, there are no impoverished Canadians.
It is an absurdity that a country with a tiny fraction of the world’s population defines wealth and poverty based on its own internal measures of income and wealth distribution creating “victims” out of people who on a world scale live like royalty. Indigenous Canadians valid complaint is restrictions on their ownership of property in fee simple.
Private ownership of property underlies the wealth of most Canadians, but First Nations right to property on reservations is stifled by the Indian Act, which inter alia provides that all lands on reservations are owned by the Crown but provided to First Nations as “Aboriginal Title” which is a collective rather than personal right. Both the Blair’s of Moose Creek and the First Nations have valid claims of ownership of the land they occupy, at a minimum as a result of the concept of “adverse possession”. It is about time a Canadian government clarified that fact by passing legislation to transfer ownership of all First Nations lands to the respective First Nations people in fee simple, permit indigenous individuals to own land and abandon any restriction on First Nations ability to alienate those lands should they choose. The Indian Act should long since have been repealed. With no dispute over ownership of their lands, First Nations peoples can decide to develop the resources therein, sell the lands to others, or borrow against them as a source of funds. That is what real “reconciliation” looks like.
But “Reconciliation” has become a buzzword for “how much will you give me to stop complaining about the ill-treatment of my forefathers?” and is a one-way street. The surest path for “reconciliaton” is with the grasp of Canada’s First Nations - just drop the pretense that you are owed anything not available to every Canadian, in return for the certainty of ownership of the lands you occupy which should never have been in dispute. With the two faced policies of the Trudeau government and activist decisions of Canada’s Supreme Court, that outcome is never happening. Instead, we will be subjected to the same litany of land claims, negotiations, “consultations” and extortion that have prevailed since Confederation.
1United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act S.C. 2021, c. 14