Canadian Human Rights - How Much is Enough - or Too Much?

There can be no doubt that the Canadian Government has not provided anywhere near adequate services to Indigenous people. From shoddy housing to poor medical care, from non-functioning or none existing water treatment systems to an education system that feels as if it is designed to encourage drop-outs, the government has consistently done far less than the bare minimum. Regardless of various governments promises to "fix" the problem, nothing seems to change. The result of a century and a half of poor decisions based on bad information and racial bias has profoundly damaged communities, families and individuals. In 2016, the Canadian Human Rights found that the government of Canada had discriminated against First Nations children by under-funding on-reserve child welfare services. On this past Friday, that Tribunal ordered the government to pay each child who had been affected by that system $40,000.00 as some sort of recompensation for the lack of support and care.

The debate should never be about whether or not it happened. Of course, the child welfare system on reserves was underfunded. Nor can one disagree about the fact that if children do not get the kinds of support they need - when they need it - irreparable harm can occur. However, I think there is legitimate place for us to discuss the amount of money awarded and of what benefit it will be.

I think one of the reasons why various courts and tribunals have the right to impose fines/financial punishments against people or organizations is so "teach" those organizations or people a lesson. If one fines a corporation for doing something that they should not have done - ideally the shareholders of that corporation lose money and therefore tell the executives to not do that again. In other words, people experience a direct consequence from the bad behaviour and at least theoretically, learn to not do it again. When a large corporation such as Ford or Volkswagen face substantial fines - they do change their behaviour or companies that produce Oxycontin or tobacco go out of business

Fining the Canadian government because it did not provide enough services will not teach anyone a lesson. Neither the politicians or any of the bureaucrats that were involved will ever face any sort of consequence for their decision. The taxpayers will pay the bill - and nothing will change. If the tribunal were fining the government to teach them a lesson - it is not going to work.

The other reason for the tribunal to award $40,000 to each individual (or in some cases their parents or grandparents) is to compensate them for the lost time and social dysfunction that the lack of services created. Giving a consistent amount makes almost no sense to me. It assumes that all children were affected equally, that all of the children had bad experiences and that all of the children were worse off than if nothing had happened and they had stayed with their caregivers. None of that is true. Some children, depending upon their age and how they were supported and by whom would have had different experiences. For example, some may have lost all contact with their natural families - perhaps others less so. I am not sure how one decides who deserves a higher form of compensation than others, but it strikes me that giving everyone the same amount is just lazy. It also suggests a strange bias in that it assumes that everyone is the same.

Finally, it is a lot of money (some reports suggest that the payout could be upwards of two billion dollars). Within First Nation communities there are many reasons why there can be such social dysfunction that a social service agency needs to become involved. Most of those reasons are a direct result of our government's inaction or action. If the social fabric of a community has broken down, it would seem to me that we collectively as a nation, must address the root concerns. To provide expensive band-aids to a percentage of the population does feel like something that will help a community. I fear that the problems will just continue to re-appear.

In a perfect world, there would be both sufficient money and the political will to address all of the problems. We do not live in a perfect world. If we did - these problems would not exist.

Synchronicity, Bananas and The Lost City of the Monkey God

I am not sure if one could call it synchronicity or not but I am always surprised as to how often what I read for pleasure somehow gets connected to what I am thinking about as I read bits and pieces from the various mainstream media outlets. Last week, of course, various media outlets were all commenting on the forest fires in the Amazon forest. A subtext to all of the concern was the fact that Brazil was doing very little, if anything, to fight the fires and that they seemed reluctant to allow other countries to tell them what they must do. As a side point, it is interesting to note that the world's attention span is so short that there is little news about the fires being posted this week. How can an event be the ecological disaster of the decade one week and not be newsworthy a few days later?

At the same time, I was reading the news about the fire, I was listening to Douglas Preston's The Lost City of the Monkey God as I did some spinning and weaving. It is not a great book and there were a number of times that I was glad that the audiobook app allows one to speed up the reading. Preston only spent ten or so days in the Honduran rainforest with the expedition that uncovered a massive city buried in the jungle and therefore had to "pad' the book with a lot of detail about both the various myths and expeditions to find the city and a lot of history both pre European contact and what has happened in the last hundred or so year.

There is a long history of companies - specifically fruit companies - clearing great swaths of forest to plant fruit like bananas in Latin America. The bananas, which is not a fruit native to the Americas, was being grown so that they could be shipped to the US market. There were huge profits to be made especially because the companies were so willing to manipulate and in many cases outright control the governments of those countries. Safe labour practices and environmental stewardship were not considerations for companies. They destroyed thousands and thousands of acres of forest so that we could eat fruit. They brought down, without shame, any government who tried to exercise any control over the rampant rape of the countryside. The companies subjugated the population to create a docile workforce - it was the worst type of colonialism.

The fact that the destruction of the rain forest is still occurring today should not surprise us. That does not mean that we should be complacent about it but rather that as with all things - eventually, we reap what we sow. Before we demand other countries to stop doing what we did for decades, we must demonstrate that we are prepared to change our behaviour. If a country has become fiscally dependent upon the income from harvesting such crops and therefore sees no choice but to expand the amount of agriculture land, we need to assist them in developing other ways of generating income that are less destructive to the environment. That may mean for example, that we will have to pay significantly more for items coming from those countries. We shaped those countries activities by our consumer behaviour. We need to change those behaviours.

Indigenous Membership - Who is eligible

For some Federal politicians or senior bureaucrats, it must feel as if they cannot do anything right. Take for example the government' Bill S-3 which received royal assent nine or so months ago. S-3 is a bill designed to correct an error. In determining who had First Nation status, it was the rule that any Indigenous woman who had married a non-indigenous man lost her status for all time as a member of a First Nation community. Indigenous men who married a non- indigenous woman had never lost their status. S-3 got rid of that discrimination. We should all cheer that the government has deleted this sex-based discrimination from its legislation. Really - who would complain?

It turns out that some First Nation communities have some concern about the number of individuals who have applied for status but who have never had any contact or involvement with what is now their home community. These concerns raise some valid issues that someone needs to resolve. I am just glad it is not me. Questions raised include:

- If the individual has never had any contact with the community or does not speak the language or has no cultural connection to the community- are they really part of the community?

- If the individual has never had any connection to a community but their grandmother or great-grandmother did - is that community obligated to provide supports and services to the individual? Does that individual get to vote on band issues?

- What percentage of Indigenous blood/DNA should a person have before they are eligible to be given status?

As almost all First Nations communities have limited resources, clearly these issues need to be resolved. And they are not new issues. Anytime a community has limited resources, the membership debate is always at least in part, about who gets access to the resources. Some First Nation communities are right in wondering how many of the 17,000 people who have applied for Indigenous status have done so, not because they want to right a wrong, but rather because they see some benefit in gaining access to a status card.

Politicians and senior bureaucrats need to accept that changing a law, while it may on the surface correct a wrong - may not be the only or the best solution. Clearly, it was sex-based discriminatory to disenfranchise some Indigenous women from their rights and status as members of a First Nation community. That wrong is not corrected because her great-grandchildren now get to call themselves Indigenous. I am not sure what the solution is - perhaps we cannot always correct the wrongs of the past. Perhaps there is no fixing the damage that was done. Perhaps the best that we can do is to ensure that the communities that are expected to welcome these new members into their family are strengthened and given time to decide for themselves what is best.

Empowering individuals or communities is not about letting people do what we allow them to do - empowerment is acknowledging that communities have the right to do what they decide to do.

A Litigious Society - or wasting our money

We live in a litigious society - so much so that I wonder if we as individuals still have the capacity to decide what is right or wrong on our own. As opposed to any sort of collective understanding of what is good and right for our society, we habitually go to a judge to decide those issues for us. The belief that a handful of individuals can interpret the law without bias is, or at least it should be, absurd. Unless one lives in a complete vacuum with no awareness of world events, it is inconceivable that anyone, including a judge, would not have some opinions based on his or her individual life experiences. Their bias may not be a factor when interpreting the written law. I am less sure if they can remain completely neutral when debating issues that have not been directly addressed by Parliament.

There may be, on occasion, circumstances or events that occur that could not have been predicted. It, therefore, may be necessary to seek an opinion from a neutral body. Developing a new understanding of First Nation's rights is a good example of the Supreme Court expanding our sense of what is fair. But I am not too sure if we need to keep on asking the same question to higher and higher courts until we get, hopefully, the answer we were hoping for. Take for example Mr. Ford, the premier of Ontario. He thinks that the federally imposed carbon tax is wrong and in fact unconstitutional. He decided that he needed to ask a judge's opinion. However, when the highest court in Ontario said that the federal government was within their rights to impose such a national tax, Mr. Ford has decided to present his case to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Unless there is a matter of law - that is the court in Ontario ignored something that they should not have - why do we need a second opinion? I do not know how much it will cost to pursue this issue. It almost doesn't matter because win or lose, the Canadian taxpayer will foot the bill. In the meantime, the deniers of climate change have even more time to screw the planet.

The Amazon Forest is Burning - Who cares?

If one only read some of the mainstream media and selected Facebook posts - one could easily believe that all of a sudden the Amazon forest is in imminent danger of disappearing. Quite clearly from all of the information available and from the comments of such world leaders such as our own Justin Trudeau, Brazil needs to do something immediately before the world's environment is destroyed. While I do not disagree with the sentiment, I do wish folks would get their facts right. Even better, I wish that they actually did something as opposed to wringing their hands at the foolishness of others while refusing to make significant changes in their lifestyle - that same lifestyle that is leading to so many of the world's environmental problems. The sad fact is that that forest and others like it have been under constant pressure since (at least) the 1950s.

The total number of rain forest acres around the world has, on a yearly basis, been getting smaller and smaller. This is frequently done by burning the forest. Some of the fires are set intentionally either to drive out the indigenous populations, to clear the land for agriculture or to gain access to valuable timber or minerals. Other fires occur - as they do in Canada through lightning strikes or human carelessness. On a yearly basis, there are fires within the Amazon basin. This year, compared to last year is much worse. This year compared to the number of fires is worse than in 2013, but it is not the worse year on record. There are numerous sites available if one wants to have all of the facts (see the end of blog for a shortlist of sites). While it would be nice if someone could figure out how to put out the fires, it would be better to figure out how to stop the forests' continuous planned destruction.

It is so easy for the western world to demand that someone do something to stop the destruction of the forest. As we sit in our nice homes, some (many) of them single dwelling units perched on some of the best agriculture land in Canada, it is easy for us to ignore the pollution in our rivers and lakes that we have created. We demand that other countries stop using their natural resources or cutting down their forest when we do it every day in our own country. As we wear our pretty jewellery or use our high tech toys containing rare earth minerals, we forget where those substances come from. We expect others to deal with the destruction of our atmosphere while we continue to cruise along our roads, frequently alone in our five-passenger SUV or pick-up truck.

Some of the postings I have seen on Facebook, have suggested that we all need to stop eating meat as some of the rain forests are being cut down to make room for corn and other silage to feed beef cattle. Not much has changed from when I first stopped eating meat some 40 years ago - one of the bits of logic (I use that word loosely) was that the forest in Argentina was being destroyed so that fast food outlets could get cheap beef. In fact, the western world's lifestyle and constant demand for cheap products has ensured that forest all over the world have been cut down to produce pineapple or palm oil or etc etc. If we do not agree that Brazilians should use their forests to expand their economy, perhaps we should both stop doing it ourselves and stop demanding the exotic woods and precious metals that their forest provides to us.

In the short term, Canada could offer the skills and expertise of its forest firefighters to assist - except that I am not all that convinced that we are that skilled at putting out fires. It seems to take us long enough. We could offer to donate money so that they could hire and train their own firefighters or if we had them - we could send down some Martin Mars water bombers. But then someone would complain about how we are sending money to another country rather than helping people here.

Maybe we should just quit talking about what others should do - and do something ourselves.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/23/amazon-fire-history-since-2003/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/amazon-rainforest-on-fire-2019/
https://www.science20.com/robert_walker/nasa_say_the_amazon_is_burning_at_below_average_rates_yet_many_news_stories_say_record_rates-240959

Being a Canadian - What's in a Name

I may have pondered this question before - but if I have, I am clearly no closer to understanding it than I was the last time. Quite simply, I don't understand dual citizenship. Most of us (or our families) came from somewhere else. Whether our ancestral roots lie in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, the lower Americas or Africa - if we live in Canada - we are Canadians. I am really glad that so many people from so many parts of the world have chosen to live here. The fact that all of us are here is what makes Canada so great. I can appreciate that those who have moved here have pride and an interest in the country of their origins. I can understand those people wanting to visit that country and even doing business with that country. But I am unclear why so many people have two citizenships. Either one is Canadian or one is not. One can't be Syrian and Canadian at the same time. It feels as if people can't really decide who to be and therefore they are hedging their bets.

I suspect that at least one of the reason why people maintain citizenship in their country of origin is that is economically advantageous to do so. It is easier to enter and do business in one' s birth country if one still is a citizen of the country. I would guess that for most purposes, no one knows who has dual citizenship. No one at least until that person gets into trouble with the state and then asks for help from Canada to rescue them.

Two examples - Some of the citizens of Hong Kong have, for the past eleven weeks, have held massive demonstrations against the Chinese government in Beijing. Some of the protests have turned violent with the Chinese authorities using aggressive crowd control techniques to discourage the protests. The protesters have even closed down the international airport. The Canadian government has announced that it is working on plans to ensure that Canadian citizens living in Hong Kong can get out if the situation worsens. My question is why are Canadian citizens living in Hong Kong. The answer would appear to be obvious - they can live in Hong Kong making money and living in a culture they are comfortable with while at the same time have all of the advantages of being a Canadian. I'm sorry - but this just feels wrong. If someone wants to live in China - great. If they want to live in Canada -that is equally as great. But they need to decide which. They cannot be the Canadian's government responsibility if they chose to live elsewhere.

The other example regards a young man who is a holder of both a British passport and a Canadian passport. Or at least that was true until Britain stripped Jack Letts of his citizenship - leaving the Canadian government to figure out what to do. Letts who had gone to Syria to be part of the ISIS "movement" and who has been branded as a terrorist. He is presently incarcerated in a Kurdish prison. He has never lived in Canada but because his dad is a Canadian he gets a Canadian passport. By what stretch of the imagination (never mind logic) is Letts a Canadian? There is no way that Canada should assume any responsibility for his release. It is simply not our problem.


In both of the above examples, a few Canadians are using their passports as alternatives of last resort. They are/were quite content to be citizens of another country until that country either fails them or life becomes dangerous. Then they will expect the Canadian government to rescue or protect them. Quite frankly - they should have thought about which country was their true home before deciding that they had the right to have the best of both worlds.

Greta Thunberg - A Prophet or a Pawn?

One of the more interesting stories this summer is about Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate activist from Sweden and her decision to travel to the United Nations Climate Action Summit in September on a 60-foot, carbon-neutral sailboat to avoid flying. The story is interesting in part because it highlights the success one individual can have in attracting world attention to a specific issue. Thunberg rose to fame as the young person who was the catalyst behind young people's, particularly in the west, the decision to demand their governments take aggressive action to stop climate change. In my mind, it does not particularly matter whether or not she is the real reason why high school students started talking more about climate change. It is not even that useful to debate how she got to be that person. What is important is that a new approach was created to potentially attract the attention of those in powerful positions in industry and government who chose to ignore the reality of our climate changing. Anytime and anyway we can keep this issue in the news - it is a good thing.

However, in spite of the success of this movement that attracted the attention and action of thousands of high school-aged students, in spite of the newsworthy charms of a young woman who speaks with such passion and conviction, we should not be taken in by the manipulations of the media to make this story more than it is. The media always manipulates information. Someone always decides what is important to report, what can be ignored, what should be focused on - over-reported on and what can safely be placed, if at all, in the back pages. It is in the media's own self-interest to report - some would say create - news that will attract readers/viewers so that income can be generated. I am delighted that the media took hold of this story and made Thunberg a celebrity. Maybe someone will listen to her - they are not listening to the experts. She has been designated by the media as a spokesperson for all young people and she appears to be good at that job.

Unfortunately, she is not a scientist, she only knows what she has read or been told, and she probably has little understanding of the industrial complex that controls our lives. In fact, one cannot help but wonder if she has been set up as some sort of straw dog that can be easily attacked and her beliefs taken apart or ignored. For example, while the press and her supporters have made much about the fact that she chose not to fly to New York because of the carbon footprint of such travel, she is sailing in a very expensive boat made of some composite materials, a boat that uses solar power and other complex technologies to cross the ocean. The boat may use no carbon generating device to move, but I have no doubt it is full of rare earth minerals and other materials whose extraction and manufacture have had an impact upon the planet. The boat itself cost millions to build and probably an extraordinary amount of money to be maintained. It is the product of a culture that supports the unequal distribution of wealth. I am sure that the boat trip will be uncomfortable at times - but it sounds like an adventure to me - not some sort of noble sacrifice.

Greta Thunberg may be a remarkable young lady who might change the world. Equally as possible, she might be someone who is being manipulated into being a celebrity - giving false promise to all who have been tricked into believing that the solution to changing the world is just to ask nicely but with passion. I really want the former to be true - I suspect that the latter is the reality we live in.

Change will happen when we as individuals make the changes in our lifestyle. Asking others to make those changes first will not work.