This should be good for a few rounds of debate...
>If we made promises to First Nations people, honor them.
The problem is that we can't. Sure, we can correct some of our stonewalling on claims, but some aspects of the 'promises' are incompatible with a modern equal, free and just society.
There are two kinds of rights enjoyed by natives - treaty rights and aboriginal rights. Treaty rights are rights granted to a sovereign nation through a formal treaty and are enjoyed by members of the nation. Aboriginal rights are rights the courts have decided that natives have by virtue of simply being here first and living off the land - treaty or not. Unfortunately, these are usually considered collective rights as well (i.e., you have to belong to an aboriginal group to exercise these rights).
The end result is that all these rights are based on race and require a socialist system to maintain them. It should be obvious that some of these 'rights' (tax-freedom) are simply unjust and are artifacts of history that should not apply today. For the remaining rights (land entitlement, resource extraction, etc.), I would like to see them converted to transferable common-law individual rights. Then the holders of those rights can get some benefit from them.
So how do we convince sovereign entities (Indian bands) to give up their treaty-enshrined collective rights and replace them with individual rights? How do we convince them to give up tax-free status - or convince the feds to give the rest of us the same rights? ;) The rights are theirs and can't be extinguished without their consent. Unlike any of our common-law rights, they can't be expropriated by government.
Some background that complicates the issue:
1) When a particular right is recognized by the courts as being enshrined in a particular treaty, the courts extend that right to all other status natives (e.g., freedom from taxation).
2) Because of the fiduciary duty the feds have towards natives, the courts are forced to take a certain stance when interpreting treaties. The benefit of the doubt is given to natives (e.g., right to medicine and treatment by a doctor may have originally been understood to mean one yearly visit).
One quick cure would be to allow bands to establish their membership without restriction by birth. Then the rest of us could apply for native 'citizenship' (I pick Haida!) and begin to enjoy the same rights.
-g |
