We left off our saga of Justin and the Beanstalk with the young wunderkind’s triumph over the giant ogre (Prime Minister Harper), as he swept away the broken democratic shards littering his kingdom in the sky, to the cries of joy from the Canadian peasants. Justin began energetically fulfilling at least some of his many promises. He rejoined the Paris Agreement on Climate.
It was the summer of 1876. The great white father was demanding that we sell our land to them – land that was not ours to sell – and then move to the reservation – where only hardships and starvation awaited us. The buffalo was dying fast as white hunters shot them on the plain, taking only their skins and leaving their carcasses to rot on the plains.
1. The Supreme Court of Canada in Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, 2014 S.C.C. 44, [2014] 2 S.C.R. 256 erred as a matter of law by interpreting section 35(1):— in breach of the maxim1 interpretatio cessat in claris [interpretation stops when a text is clear]; since, as held in R. v. Nicholas, 232 A.P.R. 248, ¶9 (1988), by Justice Dickson of the New Brunswick Court of Queen’s Bench, the “use of the expression existing aboriginal and treaty rights in s.
One of the most powerful and effective tools in the hands of capitalist economists is the suggestion that economics in general and capitalism in particular is some sort of science. This illusion – and illusion it is – is strongly assisted by the fact that modern economics is taught with the aid of impressive-looking mathematical equations and “proofs”. Economic textbooks are cluttered with tables, statistics, and graphs which make the books look like physics textbooks, or maths books even. Therefore economics must also be a science, right?
America’s power elite are a tiny but very mighty fraction of America’s total population. The power elite belongs to America’s corpocracy, the “Devil’s” marriage between corporate America and government America, with the former firmly in the driver’s seat.1
On January 7, the Canadian settler-colonial state sent its federal police force, the RCMP, to enforce an injunction against the Wet’suwet’en nation. Members of the Gidimt’en and Unis’tot’en clans have been defending their lands – which have never been ceded to the Canadian state – from an incursion from members of the extractive industry who are seeking to push through the multi-billion dollar CoastalGasLink pipeline, which aims transport fracked gas across their territories to refineries in Kitimat and ultimately to export markets in Asia.
Disproportionate numbers of First Peoples are in Canadian prisons. Society arranges this fact to not seem that extraordinary. It could be argued that aboriginal peoples are political prisoners in North America, in or out of prison. Or that this is true for all minorities. Or that as the war on terror proceeds all Canadians may find themselves in a political prison.
It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples, one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations in Canada are not an inconvenience but rather a sacred obligation.
— Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau speaking to First Nation leaders, 8 December 2015
Canada’s fealty to the rule of law is much spoken of nowadays by Liberal politicians in regards to a current pending extradition request made by the United States to Canada. Canada became embroiled in the international trade spat between the US and China when it arrested Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of telecommunications giant Huawei at the behest of the US government.
When TransCanada attempts to deliver a Canadian court injunction against a decade-old Wet’suwet’en checkpoint, they run into a second checkpoint instead. The Wet’suwet’en people have never signed treaties with Canada or sold their lands, a fact confirmed by Canada’s Supreme Court in 1997 in a landmark case known as Delgamuukw.
