“A government’s most basic function is the protection of its sovereignty.” – Simon Schama Internal attacks by our political and judicial elites against the sovereignty of our country’s federal, provincial, and territorial governments are placing the existence of...
Peter Best
1889 Book Provides a Way Forward for Aboriginal Policy in Canada Today
John McLean was a Christian missionary who lived for nine years with the Blood (Kainai) Indians in present-day Southern Alberta, learning their language, customs and traditions. Based on this, in 1889, at the request of the Smithsonian Institution, he wrote The...
A Distant Canadian Mirror–The Indians of Canada
Written in 1889 by John McLean: Christian Missionary, Philologist and Ethnologist The antagonism existing between the customs, intellects, and lives of the two races, and the despondency consequent upon the changed life of the Indians are important factors in...
A Lamentable Tale of Two Colonies
During the whole of recorded history, the empire has been the most constant and common form of political organization. A basic, self-evident feature of all empire-building has been the successful occupation of the lands of the local, Indigenous inhabitants by outside...
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Alberta Politics and Empty Promises of Health-care Solutions
The writ has been dropped and Albertans are off to the polls on May 29. That leaves just four weeks for political leaders and voters to sort out what is arguably the most divisive, yet significant, issue for this election - health care. On Day 2, NDP leader Rachel...
There’s Nothing Fair About Canadian Health Care
For the past 14 years, Vancouver surgeon Dr. Brian Day has led the charge for health-care reform, pushing for the right of patients to pay for private care if their health and well-being are threatened as a result of waiting in a stagnant and overburdened public...
Transformers: More than Meets the Eye
The path to net zero, based on the much disputed belief that carbon dioxide is a pollution, is more steep and impractical than most people realize. Replacing fossil fuels with clean electricity will require much more power generation and a greatly upgraded grid to...
The Never-Ending, Debilitating, Civic Childhood of Canada’s Aboriginal People
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. -Corinthians 1 It is the right of all capable, adult citizens of Canada to share the same civic rights and to shoulder the same...
Permanent Astonishment – Showing a Way Forward
After a press interview several years ago Tomson Highway, author of Permanent Astonishment (Doubleday Canada, 2021) found himself sidelined by Indigenous and media elites for his apostacy in saying that some good things came out of residential schools. He said: Nine...
Restoule v. Ontario and Canada: A Weak Court of Appeal Win Contains the Seeds of a Practical Loss (Part 2 of 2)
An Interpretation of this Case The Restoule case raises novel, contentious, and potentially destabilizing issues of national importance which the people of Canada deserve to have settled by the Supreme Court. The trial judge, upheld by a narrow majority of the Court...
Restoule v. Ontario and Canada: A Weak Court of Appeal Win Contains the Seeds of a Practical Loss (Part 1 of 2)
Background In 1850, the 21 Ontario Indian bands along the north shores of lakes Huron and Superior, by the terms of the Robinson Treaties, surrendered and ceded to the Crown all their claims to ownership of the treaties territories in exchange for monies paid and to...
Time to End Section 35?
Canada achieved it’s now-waning state of greatness through the application in its governance of over a century of classic liberal social, economic and political principles. Liberalism, (not to be confused with the illiberal dogmatism practised by the Liberal Party of...
The Myth of Indigenous Law in Canada
In a recent Globe and Mail article, two lawyers, one a Toronto law professor and the other an Indigenous member of the Indigenous Bar Association, advanced the benignly racist argument that Canada should appoint a Supreme Court Justice on the basis of his or her...
Canada’s Aboriginal Policies Constitute the Rejection of our Enlightenment Heritage
Richard Gwyn, author of Nation Maker—Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times, a biography of Canada’s first prime minister, reported that in the 1950s—the decade I grew up in—was a time “…when Canadians came to realize and believe that a ‘new nationality’ could be...
Lacking of Judicial Principles in Writing the TRC Report
It’s a mystery why some people suddenly eschew their past principles. This phenomenon is especially notable when people of power and fame forget principles they have sworn to uphold as responsible professionals. This mystery is evident in Senator Murray Sinclair’s...