Frontier Centre for Public Policy
UNDRIP’s false promise of Indigenous Nationhood threatens individual Indigenous Canadians
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Peter Best
All societies need to make use of force, both to preserve internal order and to protect themselves from external enemies. A liberal society does this by creating a powerful state, but then constraining that power under a rule of law. The state’s power is based on a social contract between autonomous individuals who agree to give up their rights to do as they please in return for the state’s protection. It is legitimated both by the common acceptance of the law, and, if it is a liberal democracy, through popular elections. Liberal rights are meaningless if they cannot be enforced by a state, which, by Max Weber’s famous definition, is a legitimate monopoly of force over a defined territory…Ultimate power, in other words, continues to be the province of national states, which means that control of this power at this level remains critical.
-Francis Fukuyama – Liberalism and its Discontents
Our Canadian elites, led by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, continue to advance the idea that Canada should be a race-based nation. This is reflected in the Trudeau government’s enactment of the racist United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) laws and policies. (The UNDRIP Action Plan.)
These laws and policies are partly based on the premise that Indigenous peoples in Canada still have distinct cultures that give them the right to exist as separate groups within the Canadian nation, living parallel to the rest of Canadians, and only optionally being subject to the laws of Canada.
Under the heading “Cultural, religious and linguistic rights,” the UNDRIP Action Plan sets out the Trudeau government’s goal of creating a country where:
Indigenous peoples fully enjoy and exercise their distinct rights to maintain, control, develop, protect, and transmit their cultural heritage, indigenous knowledge, languages, food systems, sciences, and technologies, without discrimination…. Indigenous peoples are thriving, including through connection to culture and community, the use of their languages and the expression of their spiritual heritage.
Also, the UNDRIP Action Plan prescribes that these “distinct rights” are to be exercised and enhanced by treating “Indigenous peoples” as independent, self governing, “nations,” representing over 630 race-based nations existing within the boundaries of Canada.
The premise underlying the UNDRIP Action Plan is that authentic, pre-contact Indigenous cultures still exist, and that they have the right to be preserved at the expense of Canadian taxpayers. In other words, these nations will be dependent on other Canadians.
The last vestiges of authentic, distinct, pre-contact Indigenous cultures disappeared about 150 years ago. As Assembly of First Nations co-founder William Wuttunee wrote in 1971 in his book Ruffled Feathers: “Real Indian culture is just about dead on the reserves.” Now, over 50 years later, native traditional cultures have been replaced by re-imagined cultures, even if a declining few Indigenous people still speak their traditional languages.
There can be no going back to any part of Indigenous pre-contact cultures, nor would Indigenous peoples want to. In this respect, Iroquois writer Sachem Ely S. Parker says:
Do you know or can you believe that sometimes the idea obtrudes…whether it has been well that I have sought civilization with its bothersome concomitants and whether it would not be better even now…to return to the darkness and most sacred wilds (if any such can be found) of our country and there to vegetate and expire silently, happily and forgotten as do the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. The thought is a happy one but perhaps impracticable.
When trade with Europeans began in the early 1600’s, Indigenous peoples began the long, irreversible process of appropriating European goods and technologies, modern economic practices, Christianity, and Western norms and values, with the consequence that, by the late 19th century, their paleolithic, pre-contact cultures had become almost extinct.
All that remained was what William Wuttunee described as “touristy” and “museum pieces of buckskin and feathers,” the ceremonial remnants justly celebrated on special occasions but, less innocently, now used by their current leaders as symbolism in their endless political campaigns for more money and power.
Indigenous peoples cannot turn back from the modern, high-tech, globalist culture that is systematically enveloping all Canadians. In this respect, Yuval Noah Harari wrote in Sapiens:
Today almost all humans share the same geopolitical system (the entire planet is divided into internationally recognized states); the same economic system (capitalist market forces shape even the remotest corners of the globe); the same legal system (human rights and international law are valid everywhere, at least theoretically); and the same scientific system (experts in Iran, Israel, Australia, and Argentina have exactly the same views about the structure of atoms or the treatment of tuberculosis…. We still talk a lot about “authentic” cultures, but if by “authentic” we mean something that developed independently, and that consists of ancient local traditions free of external influences, then there are no authentic cultures left on earth. Over the last few centuries, all cultures were changed almost beyond recognition by a flood of global influences.
But ironically, the rise of globalism has counterintuitively led to the increase of parochial, tribalist feelings.
Historian Robert Kaplan, in his latest book The Loom of Time – Between Empire and Anarchy, From the Mediterranean to China, argues that the cultural shock caused by modernism and globalism–by their annihilation of traditional tribal life–has resulted in an emotionally compensating reaction on the part of those affected to “reinvent their primordial selves in more abstract and extreme forms in order to cope with impersonal settings,” and, in addition, to achieve worldly gains.
Kaplan explains that the anonymity and the loss of pride and identity on the part of tribal societies resulting from urbanization and other globalist influences led to the psychological need for a compensating, “emotional grounding,” which now manifests itself in intense, albeit fictional, assertions of political, ethnic, religious, and racial exceptionalism, and opportunistic demands for favored treatment by the state.
Ironically, the more modern, urban, and globally integrated the former pre-contact tribe becomes, the greater its “primordial” racial sentiments become and the greater and more inherently baseless are its ethnic or race-based claims to be favored by the state.
Pre-contact tribal cultures were relatively static and fatalistic. There was little belief in “progress,” human rights, money, wealth, or job creation. There was no belief that people had a right to material things like housing, education, medical care, constitutions, courts, judges, welfare, policing, or clean water. These are all modern Western ideas and practices that were inconceivable to pre-contact tribal cultures.
Kaplan writes:
Cultural consciousness is enhanced rather than submerged by modernization, because of the ability of modern states and societies to offer jobs, status, and other spoils for which individuals of different ethnic, religious and sectarian identities compete. Through education, modernization also makes people more aware of their collective pasts and their differences with other peoples. Such phenomena have been the forerunners to the identity politics of the post-modern era.
This is what has happened to Canadian Indigenous tribes.
Modernity, urbanization, and globalism, as William Wuttunee confirmed, have destroyed their pre-contact cultures and, as an ironic consequence, have led to abstract and entirely fantasy-based claims of present Indigenous cultural authenticity and “difference.” The more obvious it is that authentic pre-contact Indigenous cultures have vanished, the more their current Indigenous leaders opportunistically claim that they are alive and thriving.
The unprecedented, radical Indigenous political and legal demands now being routinely made by Indigenous groups are, in ironic fact, completely rooted in Western political ideas and practices.
Their demands for quasi- separatist “nation-to-nation” status, for veto powers over federal and provincial laws possibly affecting their “aboriginal rights and territories,” for reparations, for ownership stakes in resource projects and for co-management with the Crown of public lands and natural resources, are all demands that would be inconceivable to pre-contact Indigenous tribal cultures.
The Western philosophical nature of these demands is proof positive of the extinguishment of pre-contact Indigenous cultures.
Canadian Indigenous groups cannot form viable nation-states, and the UNDRIP Action Plan’s attempts to do this impossible task threatens the civic well being of individual Indigenous Canadians.
In referring to the endless squabbling between the various ethnic tribes that make up the many failed states of the Middle East and Africa, Kaplan reminds us that legitimate nation-states are more than artificial communities created by politics, as were the First Nations reserves in Canada. Rather, they are natural, “practical communities…entities of geographic and historical association.”
Kaplan also says that legitimate nation-states have hierarchical, coherent governing structures, and rules-based laws developed organically over time. They are supported by “organized bureaucratic systems interacting with each other on an impersonal, secular basis.”
None of these basic requirements of nationhood are present to any sufficient degree on First Nations reserves, which, as organized groups, are mostly strangers to the civic values, practices, and traditions of modern liberal democracies.
First Nations reserves, like the “institutionally flimsy” Arab and African tribal groups referred to by Kaplan, “have imported the fruits of science without as societies ever producing them themselves… They have experienced the West only as “things.” … They have possessed the techniques of Europe without intuiting the centuries-long cultural processes that had made the West what it was…”.
In other words, Indigenous tribal groups are “modern” only in the culturally appropriated material sense, and because of the Indian Act and the reserve system, they tend to be illiberal in their political culture and governing practices. The proposed Indigenous nation-states that are envisioned by the UNDRIP Action Plan will be, in Kaplan’s words, just as institutionally-flimsy as other failed states are.
This reality is at the core of the threat posed by the UNDRIP Action Plan to the civic well-being of individual Indigenous Canadians. In this regard Kaplan reminds us that: “…where institutions are weak then personalities…who milk and misgovern…perforce dominate.”
On Canadian Indigenous reserves, governance is prone to family-based self-dealing. (Kaplan’s phrase is “republics of cousins.”) There is no reason to believe that such governments will be better under the UNDRIP Action Plan. In fact, governance will probably get worse because, as Kaplan shows, tribalism and illiberalism are worsened when politically unprepared people achieve self-rule.
Indigenous lawyer and businessman, Calvin Helin, in his seminal book Dances With Dependency: Out of Poverty Through Self- Reliance, compares illiberal First Nations reserve governance to “banana republics.” He referred to Chiefs and Band Councils as “colonizers of their own disempowered people.”
Indigenous scholar Rob Louis adds:
What realistic chance do band members have against chief and council who control their money and resources? For many band members in Canada, the battle is not just with the Crown, it is also with their own leadership… Perhaps reconciliation within Indigenous communities needs to take place before reconciliation can happen with Canada.
Until recently, vulnerable, and powerless Indigenous Canadians had the federal and provincial governments, the courts, and human rights commissions to protect them. But that is no longer true. All these state institutions have shamefully abandoned their role of protectors of weak and vulnerable Indigenous Canadians.
The Supreme Court of Canada is just as much of a threat to the civic well-being of Indigenous Canadians as is the UNDRIP Action Plan.
In its Vuntut Gwitchin decision, purportedly to preserve Indigenous “difference,” the Court ruled that in the event of an irreconcilable conflict, a First Nations Band’s “collective rights,” resting on its right to protect “Indigenous difference,” will now prevail over an individual Indigenous Canadian’s rights as guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As such, the Charter can now be effectively ignored by Band Councils, depriving countless Indigenous Canadians of Charter protection on their home reserves and territories.
The Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation (VGFN) is described by the Supreme Court as a “self-governing nation” in the Yukon comprising of about 560 “citizens,” only about 260 of whom live in the “main community” of Old Crow, which is the so-called “seat of government.” The other 300 odd “citizens” live mostly in Whitehorse, 800 kilometres south. There are no roads into Old Crow. Students cannot graduate from high school in that community, and there no adequate medical facilities in Old Crow.
Cindy Dickson, a VGFN citizen living in Whitehorse, claimed that a VGFN law that said that a “citizen” had to live in Old Crow to qualify to run for VGFN Council violated her Canadian Charter rights not to be discriminated against based on her residency.
She lost her case.
The Supreme Court asserted the existence of “Indigenous legal orders” that prevailed over Canadian law. There was an anti-discrimination provision in the 1993 VGFN Constitution. The Court told her to rely on that and “pursue a similar claim under the VGFN Constitution.”
The problem with this is that there is no VGFN court and no VGFN judge or lawyers. In fact, there is no VGFN institutional justice system whatsoever through which Cindy Dickson could pursue her claim. How could there be? VGFN, like most First Nations, is a mere tribal village, with a population so tiny that the creation of any such state institutions is impossible.
The Supreme Court knew this, and, to its discredit, preferred giving Ms. Dickson empty words over telling her the harsh truth that while she may have rights in the abstract, in VGFN because of its lack of institutions, she could not pursue those rights. A right without institutional support is, in fact, no right at all.
Another harsh truth that the Court avoided telling Ms. Dickson is that now, VGFN, like all Canadian First Nations, have been shamefully declared Charter-free zones by the Supreme Court of Canada. The Vuntut Gwitchin decision, along with the UNDRIP Action Plan, means that victims of corrupt or discriminatory First Nations reserve leadership practices will now have no one to turn to for protection and relief.
In fact, the Vuntut Gwitchin decision illustrates the absurdity of the Indigenous nation-state pretensions of the Canadian UNDRIP Action Plan.
The joint efforts of the Supreme Court and the federal government’s UNDRIP Action Plan have made individual Indigenous Canadians, in terms of having the guaranteed protection of the rule of law, effectively unprotected on their new, UNDRIP “nation-state” reserves.
Robert Kaplan writes a great deal about the multi-ethnic, multi-racial empires, the most generic form of governance in world history, where the strong hand of the emperor kept order and protected vulnerable minorities from the depredations of majorities. He cites the example of the Ottoman empire, where, with its breakup, the strong power of the sovereign in those territories was lost. Power was then transferred to tribalistic ethnic and religious groups that have little regard for the rights of minorities. This has resulted in over a century of anarchic tribal, ethnic and religious persecution and warfare in the Middle East.
Since Confederation, Canada has protected powerless and vulnerable Indigenous people from the mainly illiberal governance systems that are typical of First Nations reserves. Now, the Canadian state is abandoning this protective role. By doing so Canada is betraying the vast majority of powerless and vulnerable Indigenous Canadians, leaving them defenceless against the power and potential injustice of their tribal leaders.
What has happened echoes Frances Fukuyama’s warning that rights are meaningless unless they are created and can be enforced by a powerful state. The UNDRIP Action Plan and the Supreme Court’s rulings like Vuntut Gwitchin will not create viable and strong Indigenous nation-states. All they will do is weaken the Canadian state, causing harm to all Canadians and depriving the vast majority of vulnerable, powerless Indigenous Canadians of the protective rule of Canadian law.
Peter Best is a retired Sudbury lawyer. He is the author of There Is No Difference – An Argument for the Abolition of the Indian Reserve System and Special Race-based Laws and Entitlements for Canada’s Indians.
Economy
One Solution to Canada’s Housing Crisis: Move. Toronto loses nearly half million people to more affordable locations
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Wendell Cox
The largest CMA, Toronto, had by far the most significant net internal migration loss at 402,600, Montreal lost 162,700, and Vancouver lost 49,700.
Canadians are fleeing overpriced cities to find more affordable housing. And restrictive urban planning policies are to blame.
Canadians may be solving the housing crisis on their own by moving away from more expensive areas to areas where housing is much more affordable. This trend is highlighted in the latest internal migration data from Statistics Canada.
The data covers 167 areas comprising the entire nation, including Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs), which have populations from 100,000 to seven million. It also includes the smaller Census Agglomerations (CAs), which have a core population of at least 10,000, as well as areas outside CMAs and CAs in each province and territory, which are referred to as “largely rural areas.”
Long-standing migration trends have been virtually reversed. Larger cities (CMAs) now see the highest loss of net internal migrants, while smaller cities (CAs) are experiencing solid gains. Between 2019 and 2023, Canada’s CMAs lost 273,800 net internal migrants to smaller areas, including CAs and largely rural areas. This contrasts sharply with the previous five-year period (2014 to 2018) when CMAs saw only a 1,000-person loss.
So, where did these people go? A significant portion – 108,100 – moved to CAs, which captured 39 per cent of the CMA losses. This is triple that of the previous five years (2014 through 2018).
However, the most notable shift occurred in largely rural areas, which gained 165,700 net internal migrants, representing 61 per cent of CMA losses. This is a dramatic increase compared to the 33,700 net loss in the previous five years.
Among the 167 areas, the migration data is stunning.
The areas experiencing the greatest net internal migration are outside CMAs and CAs. The largely rural area of Ontario saw the biggest gain, with a net increase of 78,300 people – nearly 40 times the number from the previous five years. Meanwhile, rural Quebec placed second, with a net gain of 76,200 people, more than 10 times the increase in the prior five years. The Calgary CMA ranked third (and first among CMAs) at 42,600, followed by the Ottawa Gatineau CMA (Ontario and Quebec) at 36,700 and the Oshawa CMA at 34,900.
The largest CMA, Toronto, had by far the most significant net internal migration loss at 402,600, Montreal lost 162,700, and Vancouver lost 49,700. Outside these CMAs, nearly all areas posted net gains.
People have also started moving to the Maritimes. The Halifax CMA tripled its previous gain (21,300). In New Brunswick, Moncton nearly quadrupled its gain (7,000). Modest gains were also made in Fredericton and Saint John as well as in Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island.
Meanwhile, housing affordability in Canada’s largest CMAs has become grim. Toronto’s median house price to median household income has doubled in less than two decades. Vancouver’s prices have tripled relative to incomes in five decades. Montreal’s house prices nearly doubled relative to incomes over two decades.
These CMAs (and others) have housing policies typical of the international planning orthodoxy, which seeks to make cities denser. In effect, they have declared war against “urban sprawl,” trying to stop any material expansion of urbanization. These urban containment policies, which include greenbelts, agricultural reserves, urban growth boundaries and compact city strategies, are associated with the worst housing affordability. Land prices are skewed upward throughout the market. Demand continues to increase ahead of incomes, but the supply of low-cost suburban land, so crucial to controlling costs, is frozen.
Regrettably, some areas where people have fled are also subject to urban containment and housing affordability has deteriorated rapidly. Between 2015 and 2022, prices in Ontario CMAs London, Guelph, Brantford and St. Catharines have about doubled. BC’s Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island have seen similar increases. Those moving to these areas are ahead financially, but the rapidly rising house prices are closing opportunities.
There are proposals to restore housing affordability, though none tackle the urban containment policies associated with the price increases. Indeed, we have not found a single metropolitan area where housing affordability has been restored with the market distortions of the intensity that have developed in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal (not in our Demographia International Housing Affordability report or elsewhere). Such markets have become unsustainable for most new entrant households because they cannot afford to live there.
Housing is not a commodity. Households have varying preferences, from ground-oriented housing (detached and townhomes) to high-rise condos. Indeed, a growing body of literature associates detached housing with higher total fertility rates. According to Statistics Canada, Canadians have favoured lower densities for decades, a trend that continued through the 2021 Census, a trend that continued through the 2021 Census, according to Statistics Canada.
With governments (virtually around the world) failing to maintain stable and affordable housing markets, it’s not surprising people are taking matters into their own hands. Until fundamental reforms can be implemented in the most expensive markets, those seeking a better quality of life will have no choice but to leave.
First published in the Financial Post.
Wendell Cox is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and the author of Demographia International Housing Affordability.
Frontier Centre for Public Policy
The Destructive Legacy of Gender Theory’s Popular Pioneer
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Lee Harding
The idea that gender is disconnected from sex was popularized by psychologist John Money. Perverted minds produce perverted ideas. Unfortunately, Money’s legacy of destruction continues.
The idea that sex drives come out of nowhere and have nothing to do with biology should be dismissed out of hand, given the countless generations of procreated human and even animal species. Yet, in 1961, Money claimed that “erotic outlook and orientation is an autonomous psychological phenomenon independent of genes and hormones.”
Money later said that “like hermaphrodites, all the human race follow the same pattern, namely, of psychological undifferentiation at birth.”
In other words, no one is born heterosexual, and there are no biology-based differences in how men and women act. By 1973, even Money had to acknowledge a wide body of research that showed “fetal gonadal hormones . . . have an influence on neural pathways in the brain.” Still, he emphasized nurture over nature.
Money had a chance to test his theories after the birth of Winnipeg twin brothers Bruce and Ron Reimer, born in 1965. A botched circumcision left Bruce’s penis almost severed, seemingly damaged beyond function. Their parents saw Money on TV in 1967 and went to his gender clinic at Johns Hopkins University.
The clinic was the first of its kind and specialized in cross-sex surgeries. Money convinced the parents to have Bruce’s penis and testes removed, rename him Brenda, and raise him as a girl. Both twins visited Money annually, and Money used their example on a lecture circuit to insist that gender roles were instilled and not innate.
This was complete fiction, but the truth didn’t come out until it was exposed by psychologist H. Keith Sigmundson and biologist Milton Diamond in a medical journal in 1997.
The twins’ mother Janet recalled how Brenda hated dresses, sewing, and dolls. Instead, the child preferred to play soldier, dress in men’s clothes, tinker with tools and gadgets, and even stand up to pee. When Brenda told doctors “she” felt she wasn’t a girl, they discounted it.
It turns out Money made the twins inspect each other’s genitals. His therapy involved forcing the twins into a simulation of sexual positions and motions, something Money justified as healthy childhood sexual exploration. Money photographed this while as many as six colleagues looked in person. If either child resisted orders, the doctor responded with anger and verbal abuse.
This disturbing account is not entirely surprising. Money participated in nudism and group sex as part of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. He advocated open marriages and even compiled a pornographic presentation for students at Johns Hopkins Medical School called “Pornography in the Home.”
In his 1975 book Sexual Signatures, Money wrote, “[E]xplicit sexual pictures can and should be used as part of a child’s sex education…. [to] reinforce his or her own gender identity/role,” Money explained.
By the age of 13, Brenda so dreaded the annual visit to Money that she threatened suicide. Her parents sent her anyway. Consultants at the Baltimore clinic recruited male-to-female transsexuals to convince Reimer it was better to be female and have a vagina. This so disturbed Reimer, that she ran away from the hospital and hid on the roof of a nearby building.
In 1980, Reimer begged her father to know the truth and he finally admitted her birth as a male. The family moved and the child took the name David. Next, endocrinologists, psychologists, and surgeons did their best to reconstruct Reimer’s manliness. Money stopped talking about the twins on the lecture circuit but did not confess how woefully wrong he was.
In 1979, Dr. Paul McHugh, chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, investigated whether their sex reassignment surgeries helped the psycho-social problems of patients. The answer was so clearly “no” that the clinic stopped doing them.
In 2004, McHugh recalled that those operated on “had much the same problems with relationships, work, and emotions as before.” He added, “I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.”
When the gender clinic was shut down in 1980, Money started another clinic at Johns Hopkins for gender “paraphilias,” a polite term for deviancies. That year, he told Time magazine, “A childhood sexual experience, such as being the partner of a relative or of an older person, need not necessarily affect the child adversely.”
In 1991, Money told Paidika, a pro-pedophilia journal in the Netherlands that a mutually acceptable sexual relationship between a ten-year-old boy and a man in his 30s was not “pathological in any way.” He said efforts to keep children from sexual activity, including sexual consent laws, was “really a diabolically clever ploy to establish anti-sexualism on a big scale.”
David Reimer killed himself in 2004, while Money died in 2006. Too bad the psychologist’s warped ideas didn’t die with him. In practice, they lead to futility and failure.
Lee Harding is a Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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