Who Are We?

The federal Canadian government is refusing to adopt the UN’s Indigenous Rights ruling. Also refusing to improve housing and provide clean water to all the indigenous people while buying a pipeline that cost a billion more upfront (and upwards of another $10 billion to get it running and deal with legal challenges) that they plan to build on unceded land without consent.

Canada knows how to look better to outsiders, and being next to the US makes it all the easier. People pay attention to a dozen cops pulling guns on a black man walking on the street which is filmed. They don’t pay attention to serial killers targeting indigenous women, forced sterilization with infants being taken away, the suicide outbreaks, the thousands of missing and murdered women, starlight tours, and so much more.

Despite efforts from all levels of government to support production and distribution of Canadian media including Aboriginal content, most settler Canadians (non-First Nations born here and immigrants) consume an inordinate amount of American news and entertainment.

The result is a large number of Canadians who have bought into a sort of North American Manifest Destiny, a bootstrap mentality predicated on the false belief that Canada and the US are meritocratic societies - a notion that is in itself built on white supremacy.

We have just as many temporarily embarrassed, white supremacist millionaires as in the US who have figured out how to seize and maintain control of government at all levels. A pertinent example is Ontario’s election of Doug Ford (brother of Toronto’s infamous Rob Ford) as Premier (equivalent to state governor) whose government is taking a sledgehammer to public education, health care and environmental protections.

This is not an Ontario aberration. Current polls show Canadian voters favouring Andrew Scheer for our next Prime Minister - the Andrew Scheer who publicly supports Canada’s newest home-grown white supremacist terrorist organization, the Yellow Vests.

Anyone who says “at least we’re not the US” is simply absolving themselves of culpability and boosting their ego while covering for six centuries of Aboriginal genocide and marginalization of people of colour, women, the working class, the poor, disabled people, LGBTQ+ and immigrants.

Nothing more, nothing less.