By George Jonas.

I was multitasking: rummaging in old notebooks, while listening to the news. That’s how I discovered that I had commented on last week’s news events 20 years ago.

Prescience? Time warp? No, just serendipity.

News item #1 A student defends himself against a racially motivated assault in school –and he’s suspended. Not only that, but the authorities threaten him with expulsion. Yes, the victim, not the bully. Apparently, the victim defended himself too successfully and the bully got the worst of the fight.

Victims aren’t supposed to do this. If they do, they lose their victim-status. They risk being hauled before the Unvictimlike Activities Committee.

News item #2 A mob shuts down a main thoroughfare in downtown Toronto for days to demonstrate in support of a separatist movement at the other end of the Earth. Some wave the banners of a terrorist group outlawed in Canada. No, it’s not Palestinians for Hamas this time; it’s Tamils for Tigers. The police bravely disperse — who, the obstreperous obstacles? No, rush-hour motorists trying to get to their jobs.

At this point serendipity strikes. I come across some lines in an old notebook.

“A visitor from outer space describing our place and times (I wrote in 1989) would say that our society is split into two groups: A vast, passive, compliant majority and a tiny, vociferous, militant minority.

“In contemporary Western countries most people are law abiding, civilized and mature to an extent unknown, and perhaps even unimagined, on other planets or periods. They’re civilized and mature to a fault; to the point of parody.

“Their tolerance of crime is a dramatic illustration, but they tolerate intrusions and indignities of other kinds, too. The extent to which Western citizens allow themselves to be bullied, intimidated, expropriated and regimented — internationally, nationally and even municipally — is almost without precedent.
“Even tyrannies imposed limits on themselves. The modern state imposes none. Mediaeval rulers allowed serfs some sovereignty within their own households. Subjects of contemporary serfdoms trying to assert sovereignty at home would have restraining orders slapped on them before they could say, “Father knows best!” An intruder into a serf’s hut used to be confronted with the best technology available to the serf — probably a pitchfork. If a Canadian householder confronted a burglar with the best technology available to him, chances are he’d be hauled away in handcuffs — the householder, not the burglar.

“In the Dark Ages a tenant farmer paid no more than a tithe of his income–10% — to the ecclesiastical authorities or to his liege lord. On his own land, he could build a shack or a pigsty with no reference to higher authorities. Try to build a tool shed without a permit on your own land today.

“Tyrants raiding a citizen’s home could seldom count on his ‘mature’ or ‘civilized’ compliance when robbing him of his property — to say nothing of taking control of his wife or his children. Today our tax authorities, social agencies, family courts, municipal officials, environmental, labour or ‘human rights’ boards, house-or home-breakers, muggers, rapists and other terrorists can safely rely on our quiet compliance when they hand us their hold-up notes.

“In the past, bandits, dictators, officials or seducers had to fight, at some risk to themselves, for what they can now take from our mature and civilized citizenry with a flick of a pen. Today a person who isn’t ready to hand over 50% of his income to social engineers, runs the risk, in addition to being fined or jailed, of being viewed as anti-social. And if he threatens to look askance at someone who is after his wife, or keeps a shotgun in his bedroom to make things a little tougher for the uninvited, he’ll be considered a Neanderthal.

“It’s not surprising that street crime flourishes in a climate where people run almost as great a risk of a criminal charge if they defend their property as they do if they try to take somebody else’s. Where a man is less likely to find himself before a tribunal for snatching a woman’s purse than for ‘ogling’ — that is, taking a prolonged look at her.

“The same climate that has ensured the general wimpification of the West has simultaneously given rise to a miniscule minority of hardened militants. These desperadoes, whether they’re muggers, house-invaders or political-religious-environmental-feminist-animal-rights terrorists, think nothing of stopping traffic. They’ll disrupt, threaten or mob individuals, institutions, businesses or cities to extort their demands — and the authorities give in to them.

“Our society has split into two distinct groups: A placid majority, conditioned or intimidated into believing that giving up their property, opinions, traditions or habits is a sign of maturity and civilization and a vicious minority that thinks disrupting and terrorizing peaceful citizens is a sign of commitment and justice. We’re truly reaping what we have sown.”
Ronald Reagan was still president when I jotted down these notes (Brian Mulroney ran Canada). If Reagan’s America was like this, imagine what Barack Obama’s will be like.

Does character matter? We are obliged to say yes. Character must matter. But where does character show itself in the pre-eminent economic conundrum of our times – the market meltdown of 2008 and the deepening recession of 2009? Yes, Chrysler workers accepted pay and cuts to benefits to save their jobs. But that concession was forced on them, and they remain ready to bill the people of Canada for any pension defaults down the road. In this case, the retreat on wages speaks more to strategic necessity than moral choice.

The Chrysler workers are not alone. They exhibit the same traits as the other special interest constituencies that rely on government for economic advantages denied to the people who wind up paying for them. As Fraser Institute senior economist Niels Veldhuis put it in his critique of the federal budget in January, the government “caved in to the special interest groups lined up in Ottawa with their hands out for federal cash.” In the lineup this year, he noted, were such “select groups and preferred industries” as senior citizens, farmers, the auto industry, forestry, tourism and arts and culture.

The phenomenon is sustained by an exaggerated sense of personal entitlement and by the time-tested principle of the squeaky wheel. It is a characteristic of governments, whether affluent democracy or criminal gang. It is ostensibly economic in nature, but is actually political (enabling governments to appear benevolent). It is amoral (giving governments cover to buy elections, which is otherwise a crime). And it imposes consequences (letting governments determine corporate winners and losers). How can people still believe in the concept and promise of equal treatment before the law when so many other people are singled out for special treatment? They can’t.

Against all odds, though, some integrity remains. The Fraser Institute itself, for example, accepts neither government grants nor government research contracts. This is character – which, in part, is simply the refusal to nationalize your personal wants and needs. But with trillions of dollars already pumped into the economy around the world, how many have said “no thanks” – aside, this time round, from Ford? (Thank you, Mr. Ford.) For its part, the U.S. government now requires companies to accept federal money whether they want it or not. Why? The answer lurks in the explanation that the Wolf gave Little Red Riding Hood when she asked him about his big hands: “All the better to hug you, my dear.”

We are tempted to think things were different in the old days, that character played a more important role than it plays today. Did it? The answer is an unequivocal yes. Until the Great Depression, more or less, governments discharged their responsibilities with only single-digit resort to GDP. A fierce independence was the default position of good citizenship. As one Canadian historian put it, Jeffersonian democrats – deeply distrustful of expansive government – “littered the ground” on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border.

In his recent blog on the devastating recession that followed the War of 1812, New York author C.J. Maloney wrote persuasively on the question of character: “The response of America’s intellectual and political elite to the Panic of 1819 was, in most ways, vastly different from what it has been so far in our current [crisis],” he writes. “Although we live under the same legal constitution and within the same lines on the map, the America of 1819 had a citizen who was, culturally speaking, utterly alien to the modern American.”

The panic of 1819 had its origin in the easy-credit economy of the War of 1812. The United States was on the gold standard when the war began but was compelled – by war debt – to abandon gold in 1814. For the next five years, the federal and state governments printed money with great abandon. Prices rose by 25 per cent, import prices by 70 per cent, in three years. In 1817-1818, credit increased by 40 per cent.

Although guilty of the same credit excesses as modern consumers, people responded differently in the recessionary days of yore. The Massachusetts Legislature repudiated stimulus spending in 1819 because, it said, this would simply increase the state’s indebtedness; rather, it determined to leave the solution to “the community itself, according to public wants and needs.” Virginia’s United Agricultural Society, an important coalition of farmers, declared that it would “not harass our representatives with high-wrought pictures of distress which their wisdom could not have anticipated and cannot remove.” The Union newspaper of Pennsylvania castigated state plans to extend emergency credit, asserting correctly that more excess credit would only make things worse.

“Who … would dare express such heresy today?” Mr. Maloney asks. “In my lifetime, I have never seen nor heard such a thing.” He mourns for “ideals long dead to my time.” Left to the people, the panic of 1819 was over in three years. The Great Depression, in contrast, lasted 10 years. The current recession deepens. Who knows how indebted to governments we will be when it ends, or how more dependent on governments we will be? And who cares in our own times that the best plan – as Mr. Maloney astutely expressed it – is often no plan at all?

By NEIL REYNOLDS
Globe and Mail
April 29, 2009

I was reading in this week’s Maclean’s how Michelle Obama’s goal is to make employment more family friendly – unpaid time off for having a baby, 24 hours of some sort of leave to attend to a sick child, stuff like that.

It is obvious that this will result in reduced productivity. In Europe, although they tend to be more productive on an hourly basis, the US is much more productive per capita.

So, if there is reduced productivity, wealth suffers. One way or another, the US gets materially poorer – or at least does not grow.

It struck me that this continent was built on self sacrifice. The people who settled here faced uncertainty and privation to build a country. The citizens of the last century sacrificed their lives and much wealth in the defence of freedom. After the war, people worked hard and men sacrificed family life, relationships with their children, in order to build a better life for the next generation. An 80 year old friend of mine said something like, “I never had a very close relationship with my sons. If you wanted to get anywhere in your career, you had to devote yourself to it.”

It struck me that we are now living off that wealth. Fathers can afford to spend time with their kids – although perhaps, with many working couples, kids are getting less parental time. So, the question: Who is now building for the future? Who is sacrificing so that the next generation will be wealthier than we? Or do we have enough wealth? But can it be maintained so that the next generation will have at least the lifestyle we have?

OK, I will admit it: I have indulged myself as much as anyone. I am grateful for the time I have been able to spend with my kids and the fact that things like health care, retirement benefits and the like have allowed me to spend an inordinate amount of time in University, goof off and travel when I was young and work less hard than my Dad. But it makes me wonder if these sorts of social programs will result in the kind of collapse that seems likely to happen in Europe where everyone wants a secure job, lots of time off, tonnes of benefits but does not want to work for it.

It struck me that we want, want, want without being prepared to give. I often think of the Spanish Civil War. I am sure there were people demonstrating and petitioning western governments to support the Republican government against the fascist revolutionists. But many young men actually did something – went over there and fought and died for what they believed was a just cause. Self-sacrifice. Who would do that today? Who is prepared to fight (figuratively or literally) for a better world? Oh, sure, young people are constantly protesting this and that and expecting governments to DO something. But how many are prepared to personally sacrifice for it?

Ron Turley. April 16, 2009.

The Canadian character is based on the belief that a person’s actions speak louder than words. It’s driven by our cold, northern climate and mostly rockbound environment.

Canada’s glorious history overflows with individual heroes, explorers, inventors, doctors, warriors, creators, athletes, scholars, engineers, entertainers, businessmen, scientists, architects, builders paladins in every field of human endeavour.

Canadians are the world’s most inventive people and, in a few short years, our few people created one of the world’s great nations from a wilderness.

Canadians were proud of the accomplishments of their hands and brains. They were proud of the reputation they’d earned in the world as a people who could be counted on to get a job done in war or in peace.

They didn’t brag or even talk a lot about their deeds. They were too busy doing all the things that were necessary to make this vast and empty land a truly unique and wonderful country in which to raise a family, to live and work in peace with one’s neighbours, and to have a chance to make one’s dreams come true.

Some pundits have presumed to call Canadians deferential to government authority. Horseradish! They don’t know what they’re talking about. From Brule to Stojko, individual Canadians have simply chosen to follow only their own drummers or sensible leadership. We’ve been indifferent to arbitrary authority, not deferential to it.

A famous story from the first World War says it well. It is set in the army camp on Salisbury Plain in England where Canadian and other Empire troops assembled before going to the Western Front.

Sentry: ‘Alt, who goes there?
Reply: Scots Guards.
Sentry: Pass, Scots Guards.

Sentry: ‘Alt, who goes there?
Reply: The Buffs.
Sentry: Pass, The Buffs.

Sentry: ‘Alt, who goes there?
Reply a): Mind your own g-d—business.
Sentry: Pass, Canadians.

And, remember, Canadians invented hockey, basketball, baseball and American¬ rules football four of the five top sports in the world today!

Extracted from Essay 3, completed December 1999, in “Personalism v. Socialism”

1. In days of yore, from every shore,
Dauntless heroes bravely came,
And planted firm fair freedom’s flag,
On Canada’s wide domain.
Here may it wave, our hope and pride,
And bind in trust forever,
The Lion and the Unicorn,
The Maple Leaf Forever.

[CHORUS]
Long may she fly,
Our emblem dear,
The Maple Leaf forever,
God keep our land and heaven bless,
The Maple Leaf forever.

2. At Queeston Heights and Chateauguay,
Our brave fathers side by side,
For freedom’s home and loved ones dear,
Firmly stood and nobly died.
And so their rights, which they maintained,
We swear to yield them never.
Our watchword ever more shall be,
The Maple Leaf forever.

[CHORUS]

3. Our fair Dominion now extends,
From Cape Race to Nootka Sound,
May peace forever be our lot,
And plenty for all abound.
And may those ties of love be ours,
Which discord cannot sever,
And flourish green in freedom’s home,
The Maple Leaf forever.

[CHORUS]

December 4, 2004.

Letter to Lorrie Goldstein, Editor, Toronto SUN, January 14, 2007.

It will surely be a long process to unlearn the teaching of many millennia that the people in the next valley/down the coast/across the lake/up in the hills are inferior and are not “the people”. You folks in the media could help.

1. Stop using the term “race”. Science has confirmed the obvious that there is only one race – the human race. There are about 6 billion unique and distinct individual persons in it. If you must, use terms like ancestry, national origin, culture or mother tongue.

2. Make a headline banner of, and keep pounding away at, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream – that (people) should be known by the content of their character, not the colour of their skin. Character is made up of words and deeds, actions not ancestry, performance not appearance. And Dr. King might just as easily have substituted religion, sex, age, income, mother tongue, culture, ancestry, national origin, or any other characteristic of an individual person, for “skin colour”.

3. Character is a characteristic of an individual not a community. Therefore talk about the deed. The vast majority of people in every community are decent persons who basically just want to live, work and raise a family in a peaceful and orderly environment that works. That’s why so many people have chosen to come to Canada. And every community has a tiny wee minority of
psyco-sociopathic individuals who are simply incapable of decent behaviour.
They need to be dealt with, not the community within which they happen to
have been born.

4. Stop calling Canada a “mosaic”! That idiot Joe Clark pinned that one on us. Think about the nature of a mosaic. It consists of a lot of hard, unchangeable fragments of coloured glass or tile, stuck permanently in place and separated from each other by cement!

I see Canada as a Symphony Orchestra. It’s a collection of individuals of all sizes and shapes, ages, incomes, sex, religions, ancestries, skin colours, mother tongues, cultures, education, occupations and shoe sizes, who work together for a common purpose because they’ve chosen to do so and because they love what they’re doing. They play many different instruments from quite different written arrangements, but, when the lights go down and the baton starts moving, the single glorious sound of a majestic symphony transports us. Canada – the world’s most fabulous symphony orchestra!

Charles W. Conn, Mississauga.

Benjamin Franklin was one of the Pennsylvania reps to the Albany Congress in 1754 which had been convened by the English Board of Trade to discuss taking joint action to a) improve relations with the Indians and b) defend against the “canucks” who were making life miserable for the “yanqui bastonnais” on the borders of the northern colonies. He scolded them for their inability, yet again, to form a united approach to the issues. The seven colonies involved were New hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Two things emerged from the Albany Congress that were off-objective, but positive.

a) In 1755, the English established the legendary William Johnson as Superintendent of Indian affairs for the northern department. He had tremendous influence with the Iroquois due to his committment to fair dealing with them. He had built baronial mansions in the Mohawk valley and lived with Chief Hendrick’s niece and Joseph Brant’s sister, successively, after his first wife died. His influence persuaded all the Iroquoian tribes but a segment of the Senecas to stay with the English in the Seven Years’ War.

b) Ben Franklin had written a plan of Union for the Albany Congress – one of several early attempts to unite the colonies. Part of his plan was incorporated in the Articles of Confederation which kept the states together from 1781 to 1787 when the Constitution was drafted and adopted.

So that’s how myths are born from facts.

There never was a written “Iroquois Constitution”. By sifting through contemporary sources, ie; “The Jesuit Relations”, historians have tried to piece together the real story and still argue about it.

First of all, there were three groups of Iroquoian language speakers in North America. In the north, there were the St. Lawrence Iroquois whom Cartier encountered at Quebec and Montreal in the 1530′s. They gave us the name “Canada”. By the time Champlain showed up in the early 1600′s, they had shifted west to “Huronia” – 14 villages of Hurons between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay, and scattered villages of Neutrals south of the Hurons in south-central Ontario. There were about 30,000 people in each of these two groups, total 60,000. Nobody I’ve read has any solid info on why they moved from their St. Lawrence River location. One plausible reason is that “the little ice age” deepened between the 1530′s and the early 1600′s so they had moved to a more temperate area. They also might have thought the lakes Ontario and Erie would give them some safety from their more violent cousins, the Iroquois Confederacy.

The Iroquois Confederacy initially consisted of 5 tribes – from east to west,
the Mohawks and the Oneidas in the valley of the Mohawk River, then the Onandagas, the Cayugas and the Senecas among the Finger Lakes – all in the very fertile lands in the middle of upstate New York. Sources aren’t agreed, but most point to sometime in the middle to end of the fifteenth century – about 150 years before contact with the French in the north and the Dutch in the south – leaders of the five tribes negotiated an agreement among themselves not to rob, kill, enslave or eat each other. Sort of a voluntarily imposed 10 commandments. Each tribe, even any clan or family or individual within a tribe, could elect not to follow an edict of the Confederacy or tribal elders. (Most sources consider “Hiawatha” to have been a legendary figure created by the Iroquois to pander to the gullibility of the White Man.) The Onandagas, in the centre, were the largest tribe and were considered the lead tribe. All told, the Iroquois totalled about 20,000 people.

The French labelled all the tribes in the northeast that they encountered “Les Sauvages”. The Dutch and English did likewise, because of the conditions in which they lived.

To the south, in the fertile piedmont country of the Carolinas and Georgia, lived the third group of Iroquoian language people the English called “The Civilized Tribes”. They were also a confederacy of five tribes – the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Catawba. In the early 1700′s, the Catawbas moved north to escape the English and live with their Iroquois cousins, gave their name to a grape, and changed their name to the Tuscaroras. Thus the “Five Nations” became the “Six”. The remaining tribes in the southern confederacy tried to enlist the Florida Seminoles to replace the Catawbas, but were too late. They also tried to learn English ways and for all their neighbourliness were driven out of their fertile lands to the barren wastes of Oklahoma along the “Trail of Tears”.

The central Iroquois Confederacy tried hard for a century, from the early 1600′s to the early 1700′s, to wipe out the french Canadiens. They were armed by first the Dutch and then the English and for most of that century they outmanned and outgunned Les Canadiens. In the same period they were also killing, dispersing, enslaving or eating the other tribes west of the Adirondacks, ie; the Mohicans to the east, and the Hurons, Neutrals and Eries to the west and northwest. All this violence cost lives and by the early 1700′s, the Iroquois Confederacy was exhausted and settled into an uneasy half-century of acceptance of English seepage into their territory south of Lake Ontario and Canadien settlement of the western Great Lakes’ lands and the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys.

The treatment accorded to first Canadians by, first the French for 150 years and then the British after that, was completely opposite to that accorded aboriginal inhabitants by the Dutch and English in the US and by the Spanish and Portugese in Caribbean, Central and South America. In Canada, the Highland Scots and Orkney Islanders who manned the Hudson’s Bay Company posts were all alone and developed legendary ties to the people who came to trade for what they had. They married and stayed in Canada and raised their Metis families. Similarly, the French tavern sweepings and ne’er-do-wells who first came to Canada became the explorers and traders who opened up the continent from the Atlantic to the Rockies to the Gulf of Mexico while the English colonists were clinging like clams to their towns and villages on the east coast. After the Conquest, the Scottish nor’westers spread out from Montreal all over the continent, spurred the Bay Men to do likewise and took our name Canada to the shores of the Pacific. All these heroic ventures were made by men who worked WITH the aboriginal people they encountered, who cooperated as partners and/or guides.

Canadians were traders in a land that was mostly hostile to agriculture. South of us many more millions of people came to farm not trade and thought they had to clear the land of people as well as trees and rocks. Too many Canadians get the history of our relations with first Canadians from Hollywood movies about how the Yankees treated their aboriginals. It was a different story here.

But then the brand new Canadian Parliament, under the pressures of misguided Christian charity, elitist arrogance and bureaucratic convenience passed the despicable Indian Act in 1867 and it all went in the crapper.
The Caledonia situation is typical of what happens when vandals meet ignorance and appeasement.

In 1784, for their services in fighting the “Long Knives”, and in order to forestall their annihilation by same, the British bought all the land six miles on either side of the whole length of the Grand River from the Mississauga Indians and gave it to (some members of) the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida and Seneca tribes of the Iroquois confederacy, and some Delawares. The move was a joint effort of Col. John Johnson (William Johnson’s nephew) and Joseph Brant, a Mohawk chief. Other members of the Iroquoian tribes were enabled to move to lands given them by the British crown near Belleville, Cornwall and St. Regis.

These lands were given as collectives as the Indians did not recognize private property in land, at that time. However, they caught on really quickly as by 1847 they had sold off most of it to private farmers settling in the surrounding areas. In 1847, the 200,000 acres that remained unsold were returned to the Crown in exchange for the “Six Nations” Treaty #40 lands forming the main part of the current reservation on the south bank of the Grand River. Also in 1847, the “New Credit” Treaty #40A lands for some Mississauga Indians were added to the southeast corner of #40 to create the square formation that now exists. All these transactions were conducted by the duly acknowledged chiefs of the tribes at the time and were intended by both parties to be final transactions.

In the subsequent 170 years, minor transactions extended a tongue out to highway #6, south of the area in dispute.

The area in dispute was one of the parcels that had been sold off prior to 1847 and was privately owned farmland until 1992 when Henco bought it for development. They had totally clear title. The developer put in the infrastructure, divided the land into lots, started building and had increased the value of the land many times. Then the thieves struck! Their claim is that the chiefs of years ago were not competent to decide for the collective! It is completely bogus and without foundation.
___________________________________________________

August 7, 2006 by C.W. Conn

First Canadian or Original Native Affairs: The damage done to Canada and her original natives by the Indian Industry should never have been allowed to get started, and, has to be stopped, reversed and repaired at the earliest possible date.

It is completely inaccurate to use the term “first nations” when referring to Canada’s first or original native people. At most, 150,000 to 175,000 people were living in what is now Canada at the beginning of the 17th century after about 11,500 years of being here. They lived in hundreds of clans and bands loosely grouped in several dozen tribes that were loosely linked in twelve different language families. The original natives considered themselves to be subjects of the Crown, and their local self governance was totally typical of pre and proto civilized communities throughout history all over the world.

From a witches’ brew of misguided Christian charity, arrogant elitist paternalism, and bureaucratic convenience, our forefathers created the bigoted Indian Status concept and built the segregated ghetto collectives called reservations.

Here’s what Mr. Frank Howard, NDP M.P. (Skeena) said in the House of Commons on March 6, 1969. “The Indian Act gave birth in 1867 to a system of paternalism which has been like a fungus growth that unfortunately is still with us today and still growing. As long as we have an Indian Act, a special law relating to people with a different cultural inheritance from everybody else, and as long as we have a separate department, we will have discrimination and denials of fundamental human rights.”

In the early days of the Trudeau regime, a profoundly sensible proposal to totally renovate the condition of Canada’s original natives was introduced. On June 25, 1969, Mr. Jean Chretien, then minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, delivered a White Paper on Indian policy in the Commons. The following is some of the rationale for renovation in that White Paper:

“Canadians, Indians and non Indians alike, stand at the crossroads. For Canadian society the issue is whether a growing element of its population will become full participants contributing in a positive way to the general well being or whether, conversely, the present social and economic gap will lead to their increasing frustration and isolation, a threat to the general well being of society. For many Indian people, one road does exist, the only road that has existed since Confederation and before, the road of different status, a road which has led to a blind alley of deprivation and frustration. This road, because it is a separate road, cannot lead to full participation to equality in practice as well as in theory…the government has outlined…a road that would lead gradually away from different status to full social, economic and political participation in Canadian life.”
and “…the separate legal status of Indians has kept the Indian people apart from and behind other Canadians. The Indian people have not been full citizens of the communities…in which they live and have not enjoyed the equality and benefits that such participation offers. The treatment resulting from their different status has been often worse, sometimes equal, and occasionally better than that accorded to their fellow citizens. What matters is that it has been different.”

Speaking in support of the White Paper on August 8, 1969, Prime Minister Trudeau said:
“We have set the Indians apart as a race. We’ve set them apart in the ways governments will deal with them. They’re not citizens…..as the rest of us are. They are wards of the federal government…They have been set apart in law…and they’ve been set apart socially too. …..We can go on treating the Indians as having a special status. We can go on adding bricks of discrimination around the ghetto in which they live…..or we can say the time is now to decide whether Indians will be a race apart in Canada or whether they will be Canadians of full status.” On another occasion Trudeau said: “It’s inconceivable, I think…for one section of a society to have a treaty with another section of the society. We must all be equal under the law and we must not sign treaties amongst ourselves….I don’t think that we should encourage Indians to feel these treaties should last forever within Canada…. They should become Canadians as all other Canadian.”

The White Paper specifically proposed six major renovations:

1. The legislative and constitutional bases which set Indians apart from other
Canadians must be removed.
In other words, the Indian Act would simply have been repealed and Canadians of
Indian ancestry would have become entitled to all the same rights, privileges,
obligations and programs as other Canadians.

2. There must be positive recognition by everyone of the unique contribution of
Indian culture to Canadian life.

3. Government services must come through the same channels and from the
same government agencies for all Canadians.

4. The title to Indian reserves (now held by the federal government) would be
transferred to the Indian people of each reserve.
The intention was to transfer title to individuals and/or families, not to any type or kind of collectivity.

5. Lawful obligations must be recognized.
The White Paper was referring to the few existing treaties and foresaw negotiated closure of historic commitments like providing twine, tools and ammunition. It was not referring to the scandalously immoral and illegal land claims pillaging that followed.

6. Those who are furthest behind must be helped the most.
Transitional bridging funds were to be provided to ease the change.

These righteous renovations had been thought through, and were proposed, more than 30 years ago. They are still exactly what should be done by a renovated Canadian government.

One would have thought there would have been great joy among First Canadians and there was except among those band chiefs and their chums who saw that the White Paper’s proposals would end their petty dictatorships. The disaffected band bosses, along with many in the liberal socialist intellectual establishment, Indian band lawyers/consultants/advisors all the usual suspects and parasites screamed bloody murder at the idea that their favourite victims were going to be freed from a century of controlled disadvantage, discrimination and dependency. Stop the gravy train? Never! And the minority triumphed. By the spring of 1970, the Trudeau quarterbacked Liberal Party government had caved in and the Indian Industry kicked its 30 year rampage of outrageous vandalism into high gear.

The 1995 Canadian Global Almanac stated that 1,002,675 Canadians reported their ancestry as Indian, Inuit or Metis – ie: exclusively or in combination with European ancestors. (That’s about 3.3% of Canadians. The real number is probably higher given that for about 150 years 80% of the immigrants from France, and all the Hudson’s Bay Company factors, were bachelors who were only too happy to marry and start families with aboriginal native women.) Of these million reportees, only 626,000 identified themselves as belonging to any particular clan, band or tribe, only 553,316 identified themselves as Status Indians as defined by the Indian Act, and only 305,247 lived on reservations or “native settlements”. Thus, 70% of those Canadians who identified themselves as having any aboriginal ancestry have rejected apartheid and have chosen not to be locked away out of sight and mind or contact on reservations. 45% have even resisted calling themselves “Status Indians” despite the incredible financial bribes, or, alternatively, the threats of physical violence to themselves and/or their families by the band bosses’ enforcers trying to recruit them into band membership.

Over $7Billion ($7,000,000,000) a year is paid directly to 630 or so band chiefs by a variety of government ministries. The chiefs skim off a royal amount for themselves, pay their enforcers, then distribute what’s left according to their own personal kissed me lately lists.

A careful and complete exposé of the wicked venality of the entire Indian Industry is contained in “Our Home Or Native Land” by Melvin Smith, Q.C. Fresh reports of abuses by new and different band bosses all over the country appear in the media with appalling regularity. The whole rotten thing can’t be demolished too quickly.

Part of Essay 4, completed March 2000, in “Personalism v. Socialism”.

Cherry-picked extracts from Chairman Keith Spicer's Foreword to The Citizens' Forum On Canada's Future, published in June 1991.

"The idea of Canada as a model for mankind is a grand one, worth defending far more passionately than many of us, or our leaders, do.

This country is dying of ignorance and of our stubborn refusal to learn. Lazy, cynical official minds have too long dismissed the obvious practical answers to these problems as 'simplistic' and 'naïve'. Broad travel and exchange opportunities, for example, and better teaching of shared history.

The eternal challenge and measure of Canada is a dream in perspective. Too often an archipelago of envies and anxieties, we forget in our obsession with petty quarrels how consoling the vision of a harmonious Canada remains to the world. Consoling and inspiring.

Now, if we keep our heads and seek an eclipsing perspective of our problems, we can make the 21st century ours by growing into a model civilization – a mature and welcoming homeland for mankind.

But first we must stay true to who we really are. And to how much we share. Our hearts beat in closer harmony than we dare to hear.

Freedom and dignity in diversity, with openness to all cultures and races; a sensitive democracy; social solidarity; an orderly, safe society; a clean environment; an often unspoken idea of North; a peace-supporting, more independent role in an increasingly interdependent world; a yearning to love this country in any way each individual chooses – without apology.

Citizens want leaders to listen to their electors, but then to lead them with vision and courage, not govern by polls or play sterile partisan games. Therein lies a contradiction good politicians are paid to resolve.

On the environment, I favour a much stronger environmental priority for Canada, in reasonable balance with Canadians' legitimate economic needs. Policies and controls should protect such essentials, among others, as clean air and water; renewable resources such as forests; historic lands; and endangered species.

On constitutional reform, I would urge the government to reconsider its dismissal of some kind of constituent assembly or similar process allowing citizens to feel directly involved in constitution-making."

Surveys continue to reveal the same feelings more than 700,000 Canadians expressed to the Commissioners in 1991.