In his policy paper “Learning from the Nordic Sami Model”, Joseph Quesnel asks whether the current approach to solving the serious problems faced by Canadian Aboriginals is the right one. For the last half-century, courts and governments in this country …
A Proposal for Ending the Indian Act and Canadian Reserve System
Joseph Quesnel’s “‘Zero-in-10’ Plan for Ending the Indian Act and Reserve System” is a policy paper aimed at providing Canadian decision-makers with a way to bring to an end a failed 150-year old system of dealing with our Aboriginal population …
Five Proposals for Three Indigenous Populations
In his paper “Successful Integration Experiences From Around the World”, Joseph Quesnel examines the response of three diverse countries to the economic and social challenges facing their Indigenous populations: Mexico with its Meso-American peoples, the Japanese with the Ainu, and …
Canada Was No Stranger to Epidemics
They called it the Spanish Lady and it was a killer. In March 1918, in the fourth year of a war in which the Allies were in retreat from a German onslaught, a new and horrible disease landed on the …
Civil Disobedience and Its Discontents
In 1849 the philosopher Henry David Thoreau was angry at his government’s actions in the Mexican-American War and at the continued legality of slavery in the U.S. In response he published an essay entitled “Civil Disobedience” in which he stated …
The Value of Life
I was watching a very moving piece of cinema the other day. It concerned a beautiful young woman, happily married to a successful doctor, who suddenly falls victim to a debilitating and incurable disease. She is horrified to think what …
Whose Side Are You On?
“The red coats we know, but who are those little black devils?” This was the question posed by a Métis prisoner after the Battle of Fish Creek. Thus was born the nickname of the military unit that would later be …
Cancelling Our Culture
The Cancel Culture has claimed another victim. Renowned poet George Elliott Clarke has backed out of giving the University of Regina’s Woodrow Lloyd Lecture over accusations from Indigenous activists that he associates with another poet who once did a bad …
Have we Forgotten Martin Luther King’s Lesson?
Our neighbours to the south celebrate a national holiday on Monday, January 20. It is a day to remember and honour Martin Luther King Jr., the United States’ most famous civil-rights leader, and, arguably, the world’s most influential social activist. …