INDEX
https://fcpp.org/2021/01/09/the-unintentional-racism-underlying-the-indigenous-rights-movement/
- Barbara Kay article endorsing There Is No Difference.
- Essay- In Defence of Senator Lynn Beyak.
- Journalist and former Judge Brian Giesbrecht’s positive review of There Is No Difference.
- Peter Best Essay- The Trudeau Crown Sovereignty Surrender Directive, Trudeau’s disastrous policy of appeasing Indian Industry demands regardless of the short-term and long-term costs
- Article- It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way, by Brian Giesbrecht, comparing unfavourably the situation of Indigenous peoples in reserve-burdened Canada to the much better situation of Indigenous peoples in “no-reserves” Mexico.
- Article- Essential, winning conservative principles which the Conservative Party should adopt.
- Peter Best May 20, 2017 Letter to the Editor of the Manitoulin Expositor re “cultural appropriation”.
- Peter Best 2019 letter to the Editor of the Sudbury Star re tax-free status of Wahnapitei band marijuana business.
- Unpublished December 2019 Peter Best letter to the Editor of the Espanola and North Shore Mid-North Monitor defending the residential school at Spanish.
- Peter Best January 4th, 2019 letter to the Sudbury Star decrying UNDRIP, which the Trudeau government made the law of Canada on June 21, 2021.
- Peter Best article October 30th, 2020 on why it is a bad idea for the federal Liberal government to amend Canada’s citizenship oath to include the recognition of “aboriginal rights” as one of the things newcomers to Canada will have to swear to as a condition of being allowed to become a citizen. This article has been read by retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice Jack Major who said to me in an email about it: “The proposed amendment to the Citizenship Act has been thoroughly and properly dissected by you and I agree with it.” On June 21st, 2021 the Trudeau government enacted a law amending the Citizenship Act accordingly, thus making all new citizens of Canada having to swear to recognize “aboriginal rights”, something they would have no clue about.
- Short form version of citizenship oath article published in Epoch Times.
- The first time I had to sit through an Indigenous Land Acknowledgment one of the things I thought was: “This is legally stupid! Our federal and provincial governments are getting sued left and right by Indigenous groups, and here is our government (or government financed body) making a legal statement against their own interest, and the interest of their taxpayers! They’re making a merely feel-good statement which will be used against them in Court!” See my article below on why Indigenous Land Acknowledgments should not be made.
- Our law enforcement officials continuously sit back passively and do essentially nothing in the face of Indigenous lawbreaking, such as illegally occupying private property and blockading roads and rail lines. My article below describes the social and civic harm caused by this police and government endless toleration of this kind of behaviour.
- Similar to 22. immediately above, this article focuses on the specific case of the Ontario Provincial Police, and the purportedly “official”, highfalutin reason-rationale- why they always sit on their hands and do essentially nothing in the face of active aboriginal lawbreaking behaviour, such as blockading public roads and highways and illegally occupying private property. Their specious rationale is contained in their Framework document, which I parse and criticize negatively. In the article I cite a 2012 article by former OPP Commissioner Chris Lewis, published on an OPP friendly website- Blue Line. I came across it when researching for the article, and downloaded it from the internet about 7 days ago. To me this article, which “explained” the OPP’s social justice, “respect and negotiation above-all” view of the Framework, showed the impropriety and danger of the police inappropriately entering the area of politics and public policy and applying the law differently according to the race of the alleged wrongdoer. The Blue Line article was online from 2012 until just this last Saturday or Sunday. I had circulated this Framework article to a few colleagues and to a couple of others late Friday or early Saturday morning (November 21st). This article was forwarded to others. I believe, but have no proof, that my Framework article came to the attention of the OPP and that as a result they quickly took down the Blue Line article from the internet. On Sunday afternoon my tech assistant tried to embed a live copy of the Blue Line article into the Framework article, but he couldn’t do it. He said he got a “Code 500- Gateway Error” indicating that the article, which had been up and live online since 2012, was now, suddenly, taken down. Luckily I had made a photocopy of it, and my tech assistant was able to create a live link to it within the article. To me, it exhibits specious, harmful and very misguided Crown-surrender-of-sovereignty reasoning and I believe, (without proof- but if its a coincidence it’s an amazing one), that the OPP, because of my Framework article, realized that it was embarrassing to them and so they took it down. So read the Blue Line article carefully. (Excuse my handwritten margin notes in it.)
- Essay on the continuing unwillingness of our governments to enforce existing laws against Indigenous lawbreakers The Nova Scotia Lobster Fishing Dispute is an Affront to Canadian Law.
- The Judicial And Senatorial Ethical Principles Lost Sight Of By Senator Murray Sinclair
- Frontier Centre for Public Policy edited version of Senator Sinclair article.
- Article by Professor Tom Flanagan completely debunking the myth that residential schools caused “intergenerational trauma.
- Solomon’s Story- The story of a refugee’s journey to Canada. -Migration- an eternal historical reality- illustrated through the experiences of one man.
- Article by Retired Judge Brian Giesbrecht bunking the Chanie Wenjack fraudulent, mythical story, and defending residential schools.
1. Link immediately below to Barbara Kay’s September 3rd, 2019 article endorsing There Is No Difference and summarizing the events surrounding Chapter’s Book Store cancelling my book event at their Sudbury Store because of the book’s theme of eventual absolute legal equality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.
2. Senator Lynn Beyak- The Unjust Scarlet Letter “R” Branding of a “Heretic”
Senator Beyak, from Dryden, Ontario, a ground zero for Indigenous-non-Indigenous issues, with plenty of life experience of same, over her lifetime has developed a great shared-humanity belief and approach to these issues. Inside Canada’s metropolitan bubbles Indigenous issues and the Indigenous reality are more abstract than real. Senator Beyak possesses first-hand based, authoritative, cant-free, shared-humanity ideas about how to better the tragic social conditions that so burden and hold back Indigenous Canadians. She publicly shared these ideas with Canadians, thereby clearly showing that the Senate can be useful for something! For her pains she was taken down by cowardly elites in the government and the media, and after taking all the “cultural training” mandated, and apologizing, the Senator Murray Sinclair-dominated discipline committee recommended that she be further suspended because, despite the training, she had failed to learn the supposed “historical truth” of the cultural genocide caused by residential schools, the supposed racism on the part of Canadians underpinning the Indian Act, and the supposed presence of racism generally on the part of Canadians, past and present, against Indigenous peoples. Ridiculous, cruel and mean-spirited, but worse, ominously Orwellian and free speech suppressing behaviour on the part of our Canadian Senate.
Lynn Beyak Essay- November 1, 2020
3. Retired Judge and journalist Brian Giesbrecht’s January 14th, 2019 article in the Calgary-based c2cjournal, https:www.c2cjournal.ca, A Plea to End Canadian Apartheid, his review of There Is No Difference.
A Plea to End Canadian Apartheid
4. As stated above, here is my article on Canada’s crisis of weakened Crown sovereignty- The Trudeau Crown Sovereignty Surrender Directive, essentially arguing that the Trudeau government-( with Assembly of First Nations- biased, former Minister of Justice Judy Wilson-Raybould, when she held that office, in the enthusiastic lead)- is recklessly, and with little or no legal basis, handing over too much Crown sovereignty and power- and too much of Canadian taxpayer monies- to Indigenous groups and interests with only weak legal claims against Canada at best, to the long-term harm of us all, including our Indigenous peoples, AS DEMONSTRATED BY THE RESTOULE DECISON. On March 6th, 2019, at the conclusion of his remarks to the Justice Committee regarding the Wilson-Raybould resignation “affair” (https://www.c2cjournal.ca/2019/03/who-pressured-whom/) Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick suggested that the Committee hold hearings on it, and said ominously that it “marks a profound change in Canada’s legal landscape” and that “all parties need to be clear with Canadians on the future of this Directive.”
The Trudeau Crown Sovereignty Surrender Directive
5. Canada is one of the very few civilized countries in the world which still legally divides its citizens on the basis of race. And its myopic elites celebrate this! Read Brian Giesbrecht’s seminal and inspiring article below on Mexico, which had a much worse colonial past than Canada, but never fell into the trap of setting up reserves. Most of the civilized countries in the world, at least in relation to race, like Mexico, are countries of the future. Canada, in this crucial area of our civic life, is backward and living- mired- in the past. And oh the difference to our Indigenous peoples!
Oaxaca, Mexico – A Template for Every Town and City in Canada
6. The Conservative Party of Canada is ideologically lost, and the weak public persona and “stand for nothingness” of Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole, nice gentlemen that they are, ensured that in the last two elections it was not found. Now Pierre Poilievre is the leader, who projects a lot of disquieting anger and offers only small potatoes economic reforms. If the Liberals get rid of Trudeau before the next election there is a good chance Mr. Poilievre will not be Prime Minister. He offers no positive vision, which Canadians are desperate for. There are certain bedrock conservative principles that are “conservative”, or “classically liberal” if you will, which are ideologically unassailable by the Liberals, the NDP or anyone else who fancies himself “progressive”, which are good for all Canadians, and which are, in my opinion, with the right leader to espouse them- a leader, like Pierre Trudeau, with a philosophy, intellectual confidence and cojones, and a defiantly pro-Enlightenment attitude– political winners. Four years ago the National Post sought essays from readers on how the Conservative Party might be truly and distinctly “conservative” while at the same time not losing Toronto and the 905 area in the next election. I sent this in. They didn’t publish it, so the continued failure of the Canadian Conservative Party to come up with any reasonable distinction between it and the other political parties in Canada must be laid at the door of the National Post, not me!
Essential conservative principles – March 28, 2020
7. In May of 2017 the Manitoulin Expositor, one of Canada’s best small-town newspapers, published an article by a very good Indigenous journalist warning ordinary Canadians not to dare “appropriate” any aspect of Indigenous culture, or else! (I’m paraphrasing and being “unserious”.) He said words to the effect that “mainstream society” (as if he wasn’t part of it!) is unequipped to deal with the “nuances” of Indigenous cultural appropriation. I wrote a letter to the editor saying in effect- “No!- You Indigenous folks appropriated non-Indigenous culture, not the other way around! But that’s okay. It’s open season on cultures. No group owns its culture. It’s free for the taking. That’s how the world works.” This is one of the messages of There Is No Difference, and in particular chapter 4, Assimilation and Cultural Loss, where I say, amongst many other things, “assimilation is not a dirty word.” In fact I argue that it’s a natural, good thing! Here is that letter.
Letter to the Editor of the Manitoulin Expositor re “cultural appropriation”.
8. Chapter 35 of There Is No Difference is entitled Indian Reserves as Tax Havens. This tax-haven status is being cynically used by wealthy and powerful non-Indigenous business interests in cahoots with Indian bands as a tax-reducing mechanism, to the detriment of the public treasury and thus the public interest. In 2019 the Sudbury area Wahnapitei band, which has very few members, announced with great fanfare that they were going into the marijuana business and of course would be paying no tax on its income. My letter to the Editor of the Sudbury Star on this suggests that if they are not paying tax because they are a “separate nation”, then it might logically follow that the equally-separate nation of Canada has fewer duties, in particular financial, to them.
Wahnapitei band marijuana business- 2019 letter to the editor of the Sudbury Star
9. In chapter 40 of There Is No Difference I heavily criticize the Truth and Reconciliation Report’s analysis and conclusions relating to residential schools. I focus there a reasonable amount on the residential school at Spanish, just west of Espanola, of which I have some light, personal connections. Espanola’s most successful alumnus, in terms of success in the greater, wider world, Jack Major, who became a Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, had personal connections with students there in the late 1940’s, in particular, Basil Johnston, author of Indian School Days. A good friend of mine, now passed away, a champion figure skater, put on a skating exhibition there. My father delivered a commencement address there (I think). The father of an excellent former secretary of mine was a teacher at the school for years, and lived in Spanish all that time. I never met him, but I met his wife, and my impression of the fineness and excellence of her character, which had to have been a reflection of her husband’s, (my secretary’s father), has stayed with me still. No one has ever publicly said that they were abused there. Many Indigenous graduates of the school had positive things to say about it. So it was with this mental background that I read an article about the residential school in the Monitor by “Backroads Bill”, which repeated just about every horror trope in the book about residential schools, but giving no particulars or specifics. I thought of all those decent, caring people being cheaply and carelessly maligned by this kind of “drive by” journalism, and so I wrote the below letter to the editor to defend them and uphold their memory and legacy. They didn’t publish it.
Monitor letter re Spanish Residential School
10. In December 2019 former Sudbury Green Party candidate Mr. Steve May had a full opinion piece published in the Sudbury Star, in which Mr. May extolled the virtues of The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, (UNDRIP), and urged that it be made the law of Ontario and Canada. It is official Green Party and NDP policy that this should occur. The Trudeau Minority Government is committed in principle to adopting UNDRIP but clearly, because UNDRIP is simply idealism and abstraction gone mad, they never will. The B.C. Government has indicated that they will be adopting it. As if B.C. doesn’t have enough barriers to resource development already! I deal extensively with the disastrous implications of UNDRIP in chapter 50 of There Is No Difference. Immediately below is my letter. (CORRECTION ON JUNE 24, 2021: BOTH GOVERNMENTS, GONE MAD AND COMMITTING ECONOMIC SUICIDE, HAVE LEGALLY ADOPTED UNDRIP!
Sudbury letter: UNDRIP economic suicide for Canada
Re: ‘Implementing UNDRIP will change Canada for the Better,’ Dec. 28
Everything Steve May says about Indigenous law and the effect of UNDRIP is correct. A third constitutional order of government will be created, and our federal and provincial governments will no longer be sovereign. Sovereignty will be shared with more than 600 First Nations bands.
But just because a law exists doesn’t mean that it’s right or beneficial. The present “consult and accommodate” law, by inserting massive “Aboriginal title” legal uncertainties into resource development, has already killed the Mackenzie Valley, Enbridge and Energy East pipelines.
It fatally delayed the Ring of Fire mining project and has delayed the Kinder Morgan pipeline to the extent that Canadian taxpayers had to buy it to keep it alive.
Foreign investment is leaving Canada because of it.
There will be even more flight of capital, economic devastation and tragic job losses under UNDRIP.
Renowned Indigenous leader, the late Arthur Manuel, correctly wrote in his Reconciliation Manifesto that “aboriginal title means that the province never had the capacity to give full title to anyone who holds provincial property, (which would include title to all of our homes, including Mr. May’s), and because that uncertainty exists, it is a financial risk for resource companies to come on to our land. They can never know if they are one court judgment away from having their multi-million and even billion dollar investments seized by the legitimate title holders.”
A government that legally adopts UNDRIP commits economic suicide.
Peter Best
Sudbury
11. In October 2020 the federal Liberal government announced that it intended to amend Canada’s Citizenship Oath to include the recognition of “aboriginal rights” as something that new citizens of Canada will have to swear to do. This will wrongly politicize Canada’s Citizenship Oath. On June 21, 2021 they carried out their threat, and this is now the law.
“Peter…the proposed amendment to the Citizenship Act has been properly and thoroughly vetted by you and I agree with you.”– Jack Major, retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (email November 2, 2020)
Click immediately below to read my article in this regard.
12. Short form of citizenship oath article published in Epoch Times, November 3, 2020
13. Article- Why Indigenous Land Acknowledgments should not be made. The article provides the example of the Indigenous Land Acknowledgment declared by the Town Council of the Town of Espanola, Ontario, before the start of their meetings. Espanola is my home town and the home town of Jack Major.
“I agree with your position and if it was not so serious Espanola’s declaration or whatever it is would be laughable, but it is not alone…So few realize if this myth continues some years from now it will be used in some claim.”– Jack Major, retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.
In Not Stolen-The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, historian Jeff Fynn-Paul aptly wrote about Land Acknowledgments:
“Why should we fetishize the moment of transfer of land to European hands while ignoring the often violent transfer of this land from tribe to tribe? Land Acknowledgments teach people that their country and society are fundamentally illegitimate, along with all of Western civilization and modern society itself. It teaches them that their family home and school sit on stolen ground…Land Acknowledgments are public performances that are nothing more than a power play designed to showcase the politics of an ascendant group, even as they attempt to shut down debate on the topic at hand.”
Firstly, the article as published by Frontier Centre for Public Policy on November, 19, 2020.
https://fcpp.org/2020/11/19/why-indigenous-land-acknowledgments-are-harmful-to-the-public-interest/
Indigenous Land Acknowledgements Article
14. Article- The harm caused to the rule of law and to our social fabric as the result of police and government inaction in the face of Indigenous lawbreaking.
16.
https://fcpp.org/2020/12/11/the-nova-scotia-lobster-fishing-dispute-is-an-affront-to-canadian-law/
17. The Judicial and Senatorial Ethical Principles Lost Sight of by Senator Murray Sinclair.
Murray Sinclair is wrongly treated by politicians, certain academics and all of the mainstream media like a God who can do no wrong. His Truth and Reconciliation Report is treated by them like Holy Writ- The Ten Commandments. To disagree with it is apostasy.
This is wrong.
The Truth and Reconciliation Report is highly flawed and unreliable. One reason for this is that former Judge Sinclair failed to follow the most basic fairness rule in a factual enquiry: Hear both sides.
This is evidenced by this extract from an April, 2024 letter written by Robert MacBain, author of The Lonely Death of an Ojibway Boy, to the Quesnel City Council, defending the book Grave Error – How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools), which Council had foolishly just passed a resolution denouncing and attacking anyone who would read it:
The extract:
“It might interest you to know that, in Lonely Death of an Ojibway Boy, I document the fact that the TRC knowingly suppressed positive information about some of the schools.
In the case of Charlie (a.k.a. “Chanie”) Wenjack, for example, a researcher from the TRC spent two days in Kenora, Ontario, interviewing former staff of the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School.
The former staff recounted many positive stories about the school, provided her with photos of happy, well-clothed, Indigenous children and gave her copies of some of the more than 300 positive letters students and parents wrote around the time Charlie Wenjack was at the school.
A significant number of the students called Principal Stephen T. Robinson and his wife Agnes, who was the school matron, “Mom” and “Dad”. Several signed their letters “Love”. Many thanked them for being such good parents to them while they were living hundreds of kilometres away from their homes and family. (see Lonely Death letters)
However, not one word of that appeared in the TRC reports.
I found an explanation for that on Page 230 of historian J. R. Miller’s Residential Schools and Reconciliation which was published by University of Toronto Press in 2017.
“Although the commissioners frequently said they wanted to hear from school staff and other non-Native peoples as well as former students,” Mr. Miller wrote, “the oral record that the commission collected was composed overwhelmingly of survivors’ statements.
“Indeed, the professional historian on the TRC staff [who spent two days in Kenora with former staff of Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School] said that the commissioners’ actions “were not consistent with its claims to wish to include non-Aboriginal voices on the record.“
“Indeed, her budget for the project on school staff was cut from $100,000 to $10,000 and she was told that the Commission would not transcribe the interviews she had conducted. Thus, very few former staff came forward to speak publicly.”
It was efforts like that on the part of the TRC to suppress positive information that gave rise to the essays in Grave Error about the schools.
The authors knew from their extensive research that thousands of Indigenous children were given a better chance of success in life by having attended the schools.
Their principal, and commendable, purpose in writing the essays was to offer the public another side of the complex and multi-faceted story.
In my reading of the book, I did not find any attempt on the part of the authors to challenge or dismiss first-hand accounts of abuse students said that they had suffered at the schools.
Instead, they present – much of it for the first time – well-documented evidence of students benefiting from their residential experience.
Evidence, it would appear, that the TRC decided to keep from the public. -Robert MacBain (italics added)
The Judicial and Senatorial Ethical Principles Lost Sight of by Senator Murray Sinclair
18. Frontier Centre for Public Policy edited version of Senator Sinclair article.
https://fcpp.org/2021/01/17/lacking-of-judicial-principles-in-writing-the-trc-report/
19.
20.
“Migration is a force of nature, rooted in human biology and history.”-Sonia Shaw
“Migration is a colossal process that has been happening in all directions for thousands of years.“- Mohsin Hamid, 2017
A theme of There Is No Difference is that migration, the phenomenon which caused Europeans to come to Canada, and, before and after that, Aboriginals to move permanently in pursuit of economic opportunities and adventure, is a universal, essentially blameless phenomenon. I try to humanize this universal phenomenon in Solomon’s Story, the true story of a recent migrator to Canada.
Solomon’s Story- The story of a refugee’s journey to Canada
21.
Immediately below is a link to retired Manitoba Judge Brian Giesbrecht’s excellent, empathic article debunking the Chanie Wenjack story, being so cynically and wrongfully used by Establishment elites to raise money for themselves and divide Canadians with false propaganda. Also is a link here to Robert MacBain’s excellent 2023 book exposing the Wenjack falsehoods around this boy’s tragic death: Lonely Death of an Ojibwa Boy.
Judge Giesbrecht article:
Link to Robert MacBain’s book:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/lonely-death-of-an-ojibway-boy-robert-w-macbain/20649143
