Canada’s Indigenous Model is Not Sustainable Canada’s parliamentary budget officer, Yves Giroux has spoken out about the alarming rise in Canada’s contingent liabilities related to indigenous claims. Todays estimated 76 billion dollars is many times the 15 billion...
Aboriginal Futures
Should Canada Hold an Indigenous Referendum?
Canada, United States, Australia and New Zealand all share one important historical feature. Indigenous people were already present when the Europeans arrived. The histories are all similar, in that the indigenous populations had to be accommodated before large scale...
Maybe the Residential Schools Should Just Have Been Better?
Most of the attention on the subject of indigenous education in the last three decades has been on residential schools. But other aspects of this important topic have been ignored. Quite simply, the real tragedy of indigenous education is not that some indigenous...
A Brief and Selective Summary of The Arguments to The Supreme Court of Canada in The Restoule Case
Ontario’s appeal of the Restoule Court of Appeal decision was argued before a full panel of the Supreme Court of Canada on November 7th and 8th, 2023. The writer was present in the courtroom. Ontario was the only appellant. Canada supported the position of the treaty...
Featured News
Leon Fontaine – A Passionate Canadian Thought Leader – RIP
This past weekend, we learned of the tragic and unexpected passing of Pastor Leon Fontaine at 59 years of age. Leon was a gifted leader playing many roles both nationally and internationally. He was, with his wife Sally, the senior Pastors at Springs Church with...
Public Inquiries and Public Trust
Testimony before the Public Order Emergency Commission reveals the case for government invoking the Emergencies Act is either weak or very weak. The Prime Minister was, in fact, opposed to members of his cabinet or senior public health officials meeting with protest...
Happy Canada Day!
Canada Day is recognized in our calendars, but some organizers have been spooked by last summer’s hysteria about 215 Indigenous children murdered and secretly buried at Kamloops. Following that news, churches were set on fire, statues were toppled, and a panicked...
One Year Later Still no Evidence of Unmarked Graves
Brian Giesbrecht is a retired judge of the Provincial Court of Manitoba, Nina Green is an independent researcher, and Tom Flanagan is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary. May 27, 2022 marked the one year anniversary of a...
Yes, it is Indeed Time to Move on
The overwhelming majority of Canadians regret the history of European contact with Indigenous peoples, and the injustices and hardships that followed over the hundreds of years since. At the same time, they celebrate Canada’s accomplishments, which have created a...
Indigenous Communities Should Take Lesson from Alberta
Manitoba’s Indigenous communities should learn a lesson from an Alberta First Nation that is establishing a private health clinic to provide services that will reduce the pressure on the provincial public system. Specifically, the Alberta government has recently...
It Is Time to Move On
I wrote an opinion column immediately following the May 27, 2021 announcement of the “shocking discovery of 215 bodies found in a mass grave at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.” In that column, I correctly stressed the need to wait for real...
A Narrative Reversal Like No Other
Punching Holes In A Story That Doesn’t Hold Water Although many Canadians are finally beginning to doubt the narrative fed to them over the course of a year of grim media reportage of “unmarked graves” and missing and murdered Indigenous children, there are still...
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...
Aboriginal Justice Inquiry – Reflections of a Former Justice Minister
The March 9, 1988 police shooting of J.J. Harper on the streets of Winnipeg and the much earlier murder of Helen Betty Osborne in The Pas in 1971 led Howard Pawley’s government to commission the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry (AJI) on April 13, 1988 in the middle of the...
Dr. Rodney Clifton shares his thoughts on Truth and Reconciliation – Grey Matter Podcast
https://rumble.com/embed/v1lezvc/?pub=1u06to In this episode Constitutional Lawyer Leighton Grey and Dr. Rodney Clifton, both Senior Fellows at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, have a conversation about Canada's indigenous history, how the truth...