Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the Canada's History Podcast, where we discuss the people, places, and events that have shaped this country. I'm Jacqueline Kovacs, your host and editorial director of Canada's History magazine.
Speaker: Joining us today is Bob Joseph, CEO and founder of Indigenous Corporate Training Inc, as well as best-selling and award-winning author, blogger, and trainer. A member of the Guawaneinuk First Nation, Bob is also in line for hereditary chieftainship.
Speaker: For decades, Bob has been a pivotal voice in advancing the dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. He is the author of the national bestseller, 21 Things You Might Not Know About the Indian Act, and more recently, 21 Things You Need to Know About Indigenous Self-Government.
Speaker: Bob, thank you for joining us. Thank you for the opportunity to be here and to be part of this. I'm excited. Thank you. So recently you and I talked about shaping our conversation around what Indigenous people wish you knew about Canadian history. And then you supplied me five myths or misconceptions related to that sort of overarching topic for us to examine and we can just jump right in, I think.
Speaker: Sounds good. The first one that you had in your list was discovery and the new world. So why was that your launching point? Well, I think you know part of our reconciliation journey as a country is to explore the stories we've been told as a society about how we come into being and into contact. And of course, 1492, when I do my workshops with my corporate clients and government clients, we talk about that whole peace, discovery, contact, the new world.
Speaker: And usually when I talk to them about it, I would ask the question, how many of you have heard that Christopher Columbus discovered the New World? I think we all did. It certainly was ah was actually a day in America, Columbus Day celebrations. And it was a necessary, important sort of Genesis story, but it didn't often include how the Indigenous peoples would view the event today.
Speaker: And their view would be different in the sense of looking at the mean population average. So discovery of a new world with that, you know, some of the so of the backdrop thinking is that it's vacant land, it's there for the taking, it's not very populated. But the recent work from archaeologists and anthropologists are painting a different picture, even LIDAR in Latin America, where they can look beyond the jungle canopy and see the outline of entire cities next to pyramids that seem to be popping up all over Latin America. And what we're seeing now is a much different story than a vacant land full of primitive peoples. Some of the numbers that I've seen more recently would paint a picture
Speaker: of somewhere in the 100 million people range living in what we call North and South America today. late 1492, 100 million people. And of course, from their perspective, they find it really hard to understand how you can discover something when there's already 100 million people living there.
Speaker: um But the the story is important, though, because in conquest, and and it would have been in Latin America, conquistadors, there's a reason they're called that, ah It has to be vacant land for a colonial government to claim it. If you're sailing around the world to get somewhere and there's no people, it's a new patch of land, then you can claim it because you were there first. And that's what the Spanish and the Portuguese and the English and you know all of those different societies were doing. Of course, the problem is when you already have 100 million people living there, how do you keep that process going and tie into that
Speaker: was this notion that Indigenous peoples weren't really people. And in fact, ah as a status Indian in Canada, the early definition of a status Indian in the 1870s was an Indian is anybody other than a person.
Speaker: So we weren't really persons in that sense. And that was important to the Columbus story, too, that they weren't really people, which meant you could claim the land. It was technically vacant because there were no people.
Speaker: And that was that was a determination of the people claiming the land, conquistadors. And so that becomes an important conversation, the whole doctrine of discovery, the vacant land, the...
Speaker: the right of the crown to claim something all of that has become important for indigenous peoples to talk about discovery and reframe it in a large sense you know it's hard to discover something when there's already a hundred million people there and and actually to us it's more of an arrival event he arrived and and if you really dive into the story you know that it's almost he was lost and found the new world right so for us it was like a lost guy on the shore claimed the land So how do you begin to reframe that? I mean, it's's it's like, it was a rhyme when I was a kid in 1492, Columbia, the ocean blue, and everybody's in America. So how do you begin to like repack or unpack and and repack all of that? Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, that's what we try to do in articles that we've written for you folks and blog articles and books. And it's just a ah constant process. And I think, though, in my lifetime, we've seen some pretty remarkable change around ah Columbus Day. It's not as celebrated as it once was.
Speaker: Most of the big cities that were suffering protests on Columbus Day by the indigenous peoples of the United States and the Americas were largely protesting because they didn't like that narrative and really wanted to change it and did have an effect. you know It cost a lot of money to arrest people and incarcerate them and push them through a criminal system. And and so a lot of the yeah major cities in the U.S. have gone to celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day on what used to be Columbus Day. And even looking into the Columbus Day celebrations and story, it was the Knights of Columbus that were looking to do something like Coca-Cola did.
Speaker: How do we become part of the Columbus Day celebrations? So there's there's some really neat history there. The second area you want us to look at this sort of myth, misconception is this whole idea of ah primitive cultures.
Speaker: Where is this coming from? Yeah, back to the ah the primitive cultures. You know, from from a land question in British Columbia, I come from BC, and we are looking for recognition of rights and title to land and in British Columbia. But one of the actual arguments from the 1800s and 1900s was, yeah, but how could you have owned it, Bob? Pretty primitive culture. You didn't even understand land ownership like we did. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And so there it was actually ah an argument to sort of push off this idea that they could have legal interests in the land.
Speaker: And the interesting thing about primitive cultures and discovery and persons and all of that stuff, when we think about Canada's history, the Royal Proclamation actually recognized us as nations or tribes of Indians. So it's that recognition, whether we understood land ownership or not, but those are all red herring debates. That's what they are. They're really red herring debates. and And at the time, maybe it made sense because if we push it off long enough, the Indian Act will work and they'll assimilate and there won't be any Indians. And so you can see maybe that's what they were holding on for. But yeah, this primitive culture piece.
Speaker: And I would say in our workshops to people, when you look at Latin America, there's engineering stuff that's happened there that we still don't understand how they did it. They were building superstructures. You you look back into some of the historical records from Cortez and some of those Spanish explorers.
Speaker: Cortez is famous for ordering people off the big boat into the little boat so they could burn the big boat and then they would have to go ashore. That's his leadership style, always celebrated. But he he was still keeping a ship's log. And in some of his posts, he said, you know, I just came from a city that's as big or bigger than any in the old world that I've ever seen.
Speaker: More people, bigger, quite incredible. and then years later, 10 years later, going back and saying, Well, they were here, but now they're not. i They must have left.
Speaker: What he didn't realize, you know, and this would be from a book like Stolen Continents from Ronald Wright or somebody like that. What he didn't realize was that he probably brought disease, the smallpox, the influenza.
Speaker: that they just didn't have immunity to. And shortly after his visit, their populations would crash through the floor. If I think about British Columbia in the 1840s, people working at Fort Victoria see the First Nations around them. And in a two year stretch, there's you know some comments there where One of the people working for the fork just realized they just weren't faring well because of that early contact disease and the no immunity piece that they had. and
Speaker: Losing over 90% of your population in the first round. I can't remember what the order was, but it was smallpox influenza in around 1846 two year period.
Speaker: And they realized they lost over 90% of their population. And those are epic pandemics that die off is happening really, really fast. You know, and then two years later, seeing another epidemic come through, take over 90% of what was left from the first one. So you saw this very rapid depopulation, as opposed to maybe they moved somewhere else or left this place, you know, trying to understand what they were witnessing. And it was, you know, some of the really neat stuff today around the rapidness of the die-off was that it actually impacted the global climate because so much of that biomass was just on the ground and like just some really interesting stuff that the scientists are getting but all of that's to say you know they were building superstructures that were still trying to figure out how understand how they built them they had cities with waste management and tens of thousands of people doing trade and governance and, you know, some quite sophisticated advanced people, the Haudenosaunee in Canada, obviously, Ontario, very sophisticated advanced form of government. i think even Franklin sat in on it one time, watching a Haudenosaunee governance piece and lamented that it wouldn't it be ironic that we borrowed some of the principles from this relatively primitive group of people to put into the thing we're contemplating. There's some argument and some evidence to support that actually happened. He borrowed heavily from Pognesoni governance for the US Constitution.
Speaker: Right. And so anyways, some of my thoughts on vacant land, primitive cultures, and there was a reason for telling those stories. And it fit the narrative. But the science, the history, that you deal the whole history just proves this. So how how do we how do we change that narrative and and make that the widely held knowledge?
Speaker: We're doing that. Since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its 94 calls to action, our country has committed to broad reconciliation objectives.
Speaker: And the 94 Calls to Action cover every sort of walk of Canadian society and life. There's calls for businesses and governments and healthcare care providers. And, you know, there's just so much guidance there that they're really asking us to explore some of the things that we believe that they've really given a different perspective today, a reconciliation, a reconciling of what we learned or didn't learn to what was actually there.
Speaker: So that that became important for the survivors to to do that. And I think about what's happened. You know, but right now we're seeing pockets of denialism, residential school denialism. They want bodies. So we'rere we're seeing a little bit of policy whiplash. Somebody called it the other day, which is OK, but we've been at it now for a decade, 11 years since the calls to action.
Speaker: You know, when I think about schools, like our our kids are so much more equipped with information to deal with us, to to do reconciliation. The stuff I talk to adults about and and what they know, they're they're almost ahead of me. Yeah. And I can remember doing a a book tour in the fall for the self-government book. And I had 700 students in front of me and an audience, you know, Calgary high school kids.
Speaker: You know, I gave it just a brief intro of the book, started to talk a little bit. in the And I said, but you know what? This book is supposed to be a conversation about self-government. I don't want to do all the talking here. I want you guys. What do you want to know?
Speaker: And the first kid to stand up in front of all of his colleagues stood up, put his hand on his hip and said, what do you want us to do?
Speaker: There's no pushback. You know, i don't know if I can believe this guy on whether there was 100 million people. Gosh, they sure looked primitive, you know, like there was just no pushback. Yeah. what do you want us to do? And yeah.
Speaker: I said, thank you, first of all, that you're that you're doing this and you're willing to do that. I said, you know, if you want to be safe, I think you have to pick and choose who you talk about this.
Speaker: But, you know, one thing that would really help me, i said to this kid, I said, it would really help me and and everybody for that matter. is we all have that one relative, that one relative that just has beliefs and ideas. And, you know in my generation, it was Archie Bunker, but there's always somebody in the family. They've been able to talk about this their whole lives and never be challenged on it.
Speaker: And so if you could do something for your fellow Canadians, just challenge them. And I don't mean them in an aggressive way. You still love your uncle or your auntie or whoever it is. Just say, you know what, auntie, that's not what I've heard.
Speaker: And you don't have to defend or get into a big fight with them, but just to challenge them because they've just been able to go their whole lives, talk about stuff and never be challenged. I said, if you could do that, that would be amazing. And as you say, yeah and I've heard this, not necessarily within my family group, but I've certainly heard One of the the next one that you that you've raised, it's so common. And it's such a knee jerk reaction from a lot of people when times are tough, that indigenous people do not pay taxes.
Speaker: Where does this way of thinking come from? It's like any other myth. There's a kernel of truth to it. and The kernel of truth is you have to be a status Indian, first of all, to be eligible for an income tax exemption.
Speaker: And remember, this this starts in the 1860s, 1870s, when we're first becoming a country. And the idea was that We're going to assimilate them, but we need to protect their property from the erosion of taxes while they're assimilating. So there's this good notion behind protection for the words of the crown that they were creating.
Speaker: And so they said, if you're a status Indian, you're not going to be subject to seizure under legal process that would protect you from land developers everything. that you'd be eligible for an income tax exemption. As long as you earned your income on the reserve and you were being paid on the reserve, we could do that. And so it starts off quite nice. But then, you know, in Alberta where the farms are quite big and First Nations were into farming, signed treaties that often called oxen plough treaties. And they're doing pretty good, but they're competing against farmers who have to pay taxes. And so there's a lobby to do away with the Indians who aren't paying taxes. And it's like this whole...
Speaker: history of taxation, but you do have to be a status Indian working on a reserve. You don't have today, you don't have to live on the reserve where you work and being paid on a reserve. So there's three connecting factors that Revenue Canada wants to see it. Those are them.
Speaker: So if you can do two of the three, they will exempt your income from tax. And then when we think about Indigenous peoples in Canada, there are actually three broad, distinct groups. One of them is Indians or First Nations. Another one is Inuit in the north. And another one is Métis people. So when we look at taxation, taxation applies to Indians on reserve, their status Indians,
Speaker: obviously an a meti person isn't a status indian nor is an inuit person so none of those folks are eligible actually never have been never will be eligible for an income tax exemption because it lives in the indian act applies only to status indians if you're a non-status indian you're not able to get a tax exemption And the tax exemptions can be personal income tax and transactional taxes, GST, PST, those kinds of things. So those are the connecting factors, how you would actually get the exemption. And if you really want it to deep dive, you say, well, what's the employment rate on reserves versus unemployment? and
Speaker: And what you realize is the unemployment rate is actually pretty high. They're unemployed and have to leave often to go get a job off the reserve. As soon as they leave, they're not eligible for an exemption they gotta pay the taxes and so there's lots of status indians who pay gst pst because to get a let's say i want to buy a tank of gas i can get the transactional taxes taken out of my purchase at the pump as long as the pump is on a reserve.
Speaker: The other thing people don't realize, so let's say I i buy a car, I'm status say Indian, i buy a car. I tell the salesperson or the finance manager, a status Indian, don't have to pay the tax on this car if you deliver it to the local reserve. So like I just need you or your salesperson to come with me. we We'll take it there and I'll sign the transfer papers.
Speaker: on the reserve so that would count as a status indian purchasing a car on a reserve which would make it exempt now the what most people don't realize and why they're so hung up on the tax stuff they feel like there's a real benefit there and i'm not going to say there isn't but the problem is as soon as you declare the exemption The money people know that you're not subject to seizure under legal process.
Speaker: So that means I've got to get a cosigner to buy that automobile, even though I'm ah i'm an adult, I've got a post-secondary education, I'm married with kids. I work for, you know, in those days, the first time this happened to me, i was working for a utility, DC Hydro. one of the strongest company types in the economy.
Speaker: As soon as they found out I was looking for a tax exemption on the transactional taxes, I had to get a cosigner. So we often think that there's this great big pool of benefits. And I think the restrictions way outweigh the benefits. And that's why I wrote the book, You Should Know About Self-Government, because some of the stuff that you think is happening,
Speaker: There's always that little kernel of truth, but, you know, there's there's much more that we can add to it and say, hey. And I've always told people where you look at reserves, the unemployment rates are typically pretty high unless they're really situated in an urban center. But even then it can still be challenging.
Speaker: I've often just said, yeah, just go live in the general population. You'll you'll do better. Even houses. you know like like When I was at Hydro, people would come to me and say, Bob, I'm thinking about buying a house. What do you think? I want to buy one on the reserve. i would say, well, why do you want to be on the reserve? and They'd say, well, want to be close to my family.
Speaker: And I'd say, okay, that's a good noble objective. Could you buy a house just outside of the reserve and be close to your family? Well, yeah. I said, well, why don't you buy a house just outside the reserve? And here's why. If you buy a house just outside of the reserve, it's going to appreciate in value. And this was in the 90s. You can see it would creep up 6%, 7% year.
Speaker: I said, you know, 10 years, it'll be worth more than you paid for it. and And it'll be yours because the houses on reserve aren't owned by people. They're set aside under the Indian Act. They're set aside for the use and benefit of status Indians. So,
Speaker: You could ask status Indians living in houses on reserves, do you own that house? Oh yeah, it's mine. But the legal technical reality is it's banned property. It's not owned. it's ah It's like a rental unit almost, you know.
Speaker: You could build a house, but you don't own the land. So if you want to keep the house, you got to move it somewhere. yeah I would love it if Canadians could go away from this and say benefits and restrictions. I mean, that would be a total victory. And I do argue in the self-government book,
Speaker: be better if we just didn't do this. you know, and I've told the community since I wrote that book, why don't you just start buying houses outside of the reserve? You're waiting for Indian Affairs to come up with enough money. They just cut $2.8 billion dollars from their budget. You got 100, 200 people on your waiting list. So if you're doing If you're reading the room, you know that's probably not going to happen. So why not buy a house, rent it to one of your people. It'll appreciate. You can take the equity out, go buy another house. and You know, if you did that, and they have this really long-term thinking, hey?
Speaker: Their view is it's called the seventh generation principle. So they think about their kids kids kids kids, kids, kids, kids. I said, if you did that, look at what Warren Buffett did in one lifetime by himself. Now you add to it this crazy notion that I'm worried about my kids, kids, kids, kids. kids kids kids If you were investing in real estate,
Speaker: to solve your housing crisis instead of waiting for Indian Affairs to come up with more cash. you know In 50 years, you don't have the valley. You'd have political power and economic power and your people would be safe and we'd just do all of that kind of stuff. So on the status Indian side, it's trying to trying to say you know that you're in a dependency trap. It just doesn't help. And Calvin Helena,
Speaker: a very prominent indigenous author as well, wrote a book called Dances with Dependencies. He talks all about this where, you know, got to get out of this the system that everybody thinks is Shangri-La. They get free houses. They don't pay for their education. They don't pay taxes.
Speaker: But then, you know, you point a camera at at any reserve and you' like it doesn't match. Like what you think is happening and what you see on some of these reserves, like no clean drinking water for 20 years and moldy houses and some mys and misconceptions. We like talking about those. yeah yeah You also, ah in your list, ah you had land acknowledgement and the Cowlickan decisions.
Speaker: What misconceptions or myths are there surrounding that? So there's this court case called the Cowichan decision. It's here in British Columbia. ah British Columbia is different from Ontario and Manitoba and other places where we were supposed to do treaties like everybody else, but our province decided not to.
Speaker: There's a prominent professor, Dr. Paul Tanada, professor out of UBC, said, we didn't do it because we felt they were going to assimilate. And if they assimilate, we don't have to do treaties or land claims or have special fishing rights or special hunting rights because they're going to assimilate.
Speaker: So we sort of pushed off treaty making. in favor of waiting for assimilation, even though the rest of the country had already been negotiating treaties and, you know, striking new relationships and doing all that kind of stuff. And so we've got this situation in British Columbia where we have a ah land question. Who actually owns the land that people are using and occupying?
Speaker: Legally, technically speaking, the Royal Proclamation said they're nations of people. They own the lands that they use and occupy, and we have to purchase it from them. And that's what drove treaty making in this country throughout its history.
Speaker: You know, treaty, the Robson-Huron treaties and all of those were done on that basis. They owned it. We got to buy it in from them. And so we get to British Columbia, they own it, we got to buy it from them, but we're not going to buy it because they're going to assimilate and we won't have to buy it.
Speaker: That's the logic chain that gets us into the mess. We are. First Nations were consistently fighting to get that recognition. You owe us a treaty. We're trying to get treaties like everybody else. and um The province just steadfastly refused. We sent petitions to England, to New Westminster, to Victoria, even to Ottawa to say, hey, can you talk to these BC people, get them to do what they were supposed to do? Because we'd already started the process. James Douglas negotiated the first treaty in 1846 in BC.
Speaker: And so that's your precedent. He set the stage for, yep, they own it. We're buying it from them. And so that's sort of this backdrop of land claims. And they're sending petitions. They're not having any forward movement at all. Nobody wants to talk about it. Everybody's waiting for assimilation now.
Speaker: The tribes start looking to do court cases. Okay, we're going to go to court and we're going to prove that we own this. So the Indian Act from 1927 to 1951 says it's against the lot of raised money for the purposes of hiring legal counsel to pursue land claim activity. Okay.
Speaker: so you can't and And it applied to the troublesome lawyers who were maybe wanting to shake it up for their own personal gain. you know Yeah, yeah, we can't we can't have that.
Speaker: And so we see a period where there's no political movement and there's no legal recourse. But then by 1951, we're softening our stance on Indigenous peoples and issues and bands and Indians and And so we repeal large parts of the Indian Act, including raising money for legal counsel. and So what we see happen immediately is the NISCA start to raise money to hire a lawyer to go pursue land claims and in a BC court.
Speaker: And they raise money. They managed to get a decision all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1973. 1973, the Supreme Court of Canada dismisses the case on a technicality. The NISCA, as wards of the crown, were supposed to get what was called a fiat. And a fiat is a permission slip saying you could sue the crown. And they didn't think they would get that from the crown because they were you they've been fighting it for 100 years already. And So they just went ahead and launched their case. It's all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada that SCC dismisses it on technicality, no fiat.
Speaker: But it says it's dismissed. But you should know that we believe that they had rights and titles to this land before Canada became a country. And three of the justices said they still have it. Three said no.
Speaker: When BC joined Confederation, it it somehow extinguished it. And the chief justice dismissed it on the technicality. It was such a close decision that the federal government resurrected its comprehensive claims policy and began negotiating the Nisca Treaty, which took another 27 years to get royal assent to Canadian parliament to come BC's first modern day treaty.
Speaker: And so there's actually, you know, people, you know, some of the myths, but Bob, weren't you sleeping on your rights? First of all, you're too primitive. How did you have title when you didn't even know what it is? And, you know, so now we're, now we can take all of these little tidbits and,
Speaker: put them into a frame where we can see the thinking that's going to drive the assimilation policies, the denial or no recognition of rights and title in the hopes that maybe someday it'll be resolved because they'll assimilate and become like everybody else.
Speaker: What the policymakers didn't factor into their calculations, for lack of a better way of saying it, is that First of all, if we want people to assimilate, we set up community dinners where they all go and eat together and we do community events and, you know, we we find ways. That's what we do. we celebrate Canada Day and that's our whole country and how we do things. so What they did with Indians was put them on separate lands.
Speaker: And then they put them under separate laws. And then they didn't let them get into the economy because they weren't subject to seizure. And, you know, it's just... So everything that they did actually had the opposite effect.
Speaker: Kept them separate as opposed to assimilating them. And assimilation is a natural... It's a natural process. Happens whenever cultures come together. We start talking.
Speaker: i like you. We start maybe talking about food. If you've got good food, we talk more. Yeah.
Speaker: communicate. And so it's it's a very natural process. But as soon as you try to force somebody to assimilate, then I can tell you. And I think Canadians would agree, especially in light of the 51st state conversation.
Speaker: Donald Trump thinks we're the 51st state. He's calling Carney, Governor Carney. So if you want to know what it's like to be forcibly culturally assimilated, you're looking at the outer edge. Okay. The last one.
Speaker: Let's talk about stakeholders versus rights holders. And why did you add this one to the mix? As Canadians, most of us has come come here from somewhere, right? If I think about immigration and we don't have an Ellis Island, but people came here for all kinds of reasons, fleeing economic persecution, political persecution, war, a land of opportunity better than where they had it. And throughout our history, we've had people coming here for that.
Speaker: And when they came here, they knew that coming to Canada, it would be different than the old country. But there's enough benefits here, but I don't mind making some changes and trying to fit in with the fellow Canadians, as it were.
Speaker: And so they signed the Canadian contract and became Canadian citizens and in exchange for what that offered to Canadians. And um that is a little bit different for first nations though because they didn't come here from anywhere they were already here so the niska people are niska in the nas valley it's nowhere else on earth and it's not like an italian person coming to canada we can give up a few things but i don't have to worry about italian culture and government and land and that's all there that's still there it's not going anywhere
Speaker: And so there's a big difference. And Canada has also set itself up as a champion of human rights around the globe. We we see ourselves that way and other people see us that way too. So in our cultural mosaic society, as Carney said in a recent speech, we value diversity and recognize the differences and that's what makes us stronger. and And so as opposed to the melting pot theory,
Speaker: We're more of a cultural fruitcake and we're okay with that. And so when we get down into things like ah stakeholder versus rights holder, I can think about an issue like fishing, for example.
Speaker: Some fishermen feel like they have a right to fish. And I'm talking specifically about non-Indigenous people. i have a right to fish. We've to protect my right to fish. When actually they fish at the pleasure of the crown.
Speaker: Crown DFO, Department Fisheries and Oceans, or Manitoba, they decide whether we get to or don't. It's an actual privilege. It's not a right. Where First Nations people have a right to fish because we negotiated a treaty that said they could hunt as formerly, they could fish as formerly. And those are constitutional commitments that we've made to people. So when I say stakeholder versus rights holder,
Speaker: That's what we're really starting to get into. We have constitutionally protected rights. If you don't like them and you want to get rid of them, that's going to be really hard for you to do. You've got to open up the Constitution, take it out, put the Constitution back together. We have two provinces that are already talking in separation. So, you know, there's no appetite to open up the Constitution to talk about somebody's fishing right.
Speaker: So when I think about rights holders, somebody with constitutionally protected rights, that that's different than i than a stakeholder who maybe has ah an interest or fishes at the pleasure or hunts at the pleasure of the crowd and doesn't actually have right. And you know if a DFO wants to take away the fly fisher person's opportunity to go fly fish on the Bow River and Alberta, they can't. They just will say, yep they're struggling, we're going to close it for now.
Speaker: Where with First Nations, because they're constitutionally protected rights, they've got to justify why they're closing it. The courts have said conservation is a good reason for closing down a fishery, for example, in a case like the Sparrow decision, but they have to justify it They don't have to justify it to a stakeholder who's telling you, they were closing the fishery.
Speaker: You didn't vote for us, the other party lost and we won, and now this is what we're doing. So welcome to the Democracy Club. So let's, does does that help? That was the question. That actually clarifies it very well. Yes. okay How important is it to to to question assumptions and then ask questions that maybe you're uncomfortable asking, but need to be asked?
Speaker: I think it's important, you know, the theme of the country hangs in the balance, how well we deal with this stuff. If we go back into more of a denialism, you know, we don't believe that residential schools were as bad and we don't think we should do land acknowledgments. That's all denialist stuff.
Speaker: What it does is create economic uncertainty. You know, the outside investors to Canada, even insider investors. Boy, I just don't know if we want to put our money in this right now.
Speaker: We yin and yang on equality versus not equality and equity and equality. I would tell people, you know if you're talking to an Indigenous person, don't say, I can't do that for you. I got to treat you equally to everybody else. They would be upset that you would say that because they're not really equal to everybody else. So all I have to do is give up my constitutionally protected rights to you know to be able to do this. That's what they hear, right? And then people wonder why they're...
Speaker: they're in a big emotional conversation and don't really understand what's going on and that's where the survivors of residential schools said we want people to learn about the history and the UN declaration they want all of that because it'll help with empathy and understanding and realizing that the changes that are being sought by indigenous peoples are actually good for the nation good for the economy good for the kids and the right thing to do and And to not pursue that is very, has the opposite effect. So I think Canadians just have a choice. you want to be a cultural fruitcake or do you want to take all the nuts and raisins and everything out of it, which is going to be impossible by the way, we're saying. Yes. Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. Bob, I cannot thank you enough. I really hope we can actually do this again sometime. I feel like for so much more we could be unpacking. For sure. Thank you again. Thank you. Canada's History Podcast is produced by Canada's History Society with assistance from Kate Cochran.
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