Canada's Ugly Secret

[Tuuvi]

I wish the article had mentioned exactly what these '94 recommendations, really pre-conditions to true reconciliation' were, if the Government is only willing to agree to one I cannot imagine they are as reasonable and rightous as the writer apparantly thinks they are.

Here they are.

No, not really.

Iirc It was long ago enough that a most of the main perpritrators are dead or close to and the sufferers are insignificant numerically; The natives being less than 5% of the Canadian population. The need to deal with this wont ever become significant enough to force Canada to do anything, it could easily go it's entire remaining existence without being forced to shed a tear.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission which the article talked about is part of a legal settlement reached in 2006. Canada has already been forced to do something.

Absolutely not - but if it's been half a century then the punishment you mete out in retribution falls on innocent shoulders. A good example of this is reparations for slavery, something the UK has always refused. The UK government COULD give Africans and Afro-Carribeans in the US and the Carribean individual cash payments as compensation, in a legal sense, but that money would come from UK tax payers. You're be stripping the UK budget and directly punishing the most vulnerable in the UK for an atrocity that was perpetrated before they were born.

You know this really isn't a very good comparison because some of the survivors of the Residential Schools are still alive.

The First Nations' collective poverty is self-inflicted. By remaining on the reservations and not fully integrating into Canadian society they limit their economic options and those of their children. What they SHOULD do is demand the reservations be legally integrated into Canada proper, then when they are audited in the next Census the Canadian government would be forced to allocate resources on the basis of need, and their extreme poverty would guarantee the lion's share of tax and welfare.

In fact, this was the point of the residential schools - as horrible as they were they were intended to integrate the First Nations people into Canadian society. The difference between then and now if that then "Canadian" society was seen as homogeneous and now it is seen as multi-cultural.

Of course, it won't happen because the elders of the First Nations are weak and over proud - they would rather condemn their people to continued suffering than acknowledge the world has changed.

Historically First Nations people have been treated as wards of the state and they were not allowed to manage their own affairs. They've also been subject to racism and discrimination which persists to this day and it's not as if they've been given equal access to economic opportunity. Never mind the fact that if they hadn't been displaced and forced to live in reserves they wouldn't be dealing with these problems in the first place.