Empathize – To understand and share the feelings of another. – Oxford Dictionary
The Government of Canada is committed to achieving reconciliation with Indigenous peoples through a renewed, nation-to-nation, government-to-government, and Inuit-Crown relationship based on recognition of rights, respect, co-operation, and partnership as the foundation for transformative change. – Official “UNDRIP” statement of the Government of Canada
Lost was Lord Selbourne’s early insight that a race society as a way of life was unprecedented. – Hannah Arendt – The Origins of Totalitarianism
Aloof power without civic function or responsibility is felt to be parasitical because such a condition cuts the threads which tie men together. – Hannah Arendt
Parasitical – of plants or persons; living off another – Dictionary
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Why do Canadian Aboriginal elites act so negatively towards Canada and ordinary Canadians?
Why do they so falsely, recklessly, readily and rudely insult Canada as being “systemically racist”, and so hurtfully misdescribe non-Aboriginal Canadians and our ancestors as “systemically racist settlers”, as “genocidal”, and suggest that we have inferior “bloodlines”?
While being totally dependent on Canada and Canadian taxpayers for their financial and physical well-being, why do they insist on financially and psychologically further burdening Canada and non-Aboriginal Canadians (referred to herein as “ordinary Canadians”) with constant, selfish, unreasonable and divisive demands, (which are usually granted), for additional, costly, special, race-based rights that no other Canadians have or should want to have? – like rights to in-effect veto resource projects by way of threats of legal coercion, rights to their own parallel child welfare system, rights to be exempt from the Charter of Rights, rights to be preferentially dealt with by the laws and the courts, rights to impair the property rights of other Canadians, rights to reparations for slings and arrows that all humans throughout history have been prey to, rights to be consulted before duly elected legislatures pass laws, license to engage in bad faith business practices, to name only a few.
There are countless instances of this unreasonable and selfish Aboriginal conduct happening at the local neighbourhood level. The following examples are typical ones.
In the Sudbury, Ontario area a local First Nations band refused to consider transferring a tiny strip of its reserve land adjacent to Highway 69 so that the two-lane highway could be four-laned unless the province satisfied its questionable land claim first, thereby preferring its own gain over the safety of motorists.
In Manitoba a First Nations band suddenly ordered Manitoba Hydro to remove a section of a longstanding gas main from where it harmlessly crossed reserve property for many years without incident and threatened to blockade and treat Hydro maintenance and repair workers as trespassers, unless it was paid money or given some other form of coerced compensation. The gas main provides natural gas to hundreds of dependent, neighbouring non-Aboriginal residents.
In Geraldton, Ontario a local First Nations band, using expensive Toronto lawyers, sued an elderly neighbour- a man of modest means- and won an injunction shutting down his plans to explore his mining claims, thereby squelching any hope or prospects of him bringing his life’s work to fruition, alleging that his lawful claims were on “sacred lands”. After dragging him through the courts for over two years, where he had to act as his own lawyer, the band abruptly, without explanation, dropped the case against him, and since then, has treated him like an unworthy stranger instead of treating him like the good neighbour he always was. They have ghosted him and meanly refused to pay him the extremely modest amount of legal costs- $3500 – the court awarded him for the two years of stress-filled troubles they caused him to have to endure.
B.C. bands endorse the DRIPA- driven B.C. Government depriving non-Aboriginals of exercising their rights to use provincial public parks for weeks so that Aboriginals can “connect with the land” without the presumably sullying and disconnecting presence of non-Aboriginals.
B.C. Aboriginal leader/elder Charlene Belleau told Professor Frances Widdowson, who has consistently challenged the Aboriginal assertion that there are the remains of 215 children secretly buried on the grounds of the Kamloops residential school, that she wishes to see her “people” beat and rape her.
The “reconciliation” Aboriginal leaders claim to want, which should lead to fellow feeling, healing, unity and finality, instead is characterized solely by endless divisiveness, insults, blame, local acts of unchristian pettiness such as above, and demands for more programs, power and money, while offering nothing in return.
All this shows a complete lack of respect for and gratitude towards Canada and ordinary Canadians. The huge financial and psychological burdens these unrelenting demands place on ordinary Canadians show a complete lack of regard for the damage to national prosperity and social unity they create, and overall, they show a total lack of empathy towards Canada and ordinary Canadians, past and present.
By way of all the ameliorative actions Canadians have undertaken in the past, as only partially evidenced by the granting to Aboriginals of the special rights and powers listed above, past and present Canadians have shown great care for and empathy towards Aboriginals.
Yet Canadians get no care or empathy back from Aboriginals.
Canadians have consistently shown empathic New Testament Christian-like behaviour towards Aboriginals yet, as stated, in return, since the passage of section 35 of the Constitution Act, have received only Old Testament-like anger, insults and demands for more.
This level of animus, given Canada’s relatively peaceful and prosperous circumstances, defies reason.
Why?
Why are Aboriginal leaders so negative towards – so not nice to – Canada and ordinary Canadians?
The answer does not lie in the idea that Aboriginal Canadians, as individuals, are worse human beings than the rest of us. All human beings, regardless of race or anything else, are the same – a mixture of good and bad.
The answer does not lie in the persistent Aboriginal leaders’ blood libel that ordinary Canadians, past and present, were/are bad and inferior human beings who did and are still doing bad things to Aboriginals. Canadians are decent and nice to a fault, and our ancestors were, by all historical standards, conscientious in their dealings with Aboriginals.
I believe that the answer is structural, based on Canadian history and on Canada’s present “separate but equal” Aboriginal preferential laws that enable and encourage such selfish and non-empathic behaviour- laws which encourage Aboriginals to feel that they are not an organic part of Canada – laws which discourage the nurturing of the excellences and generosity in social behaviour which all humans can display – including Aboriginals- and on which the healthy, empathic functioning of a strong and organically united Canada depends.
There is an empathy deficit coming from Aboriginal leaders and thus from Aboriginals generally, who follow them, and Canada and all ordinary Canadians are suffering because of it.
Why does this empathy deficit exist?
Author Jeremy Rifkin suggests an answer in his book The Empathic Civilization – The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, which proffers the idea that humanity is an innately “fundamentally empathic species” whose success in creating and maintaining modern, complex and sustainable nations and civilizations depends upon “heightened empathic sensitivity” leading to New Testament-like, love-thy-neighbour, group survival-oriented thinking, feeling and behaviour.
Rifkin argues that:
“…empathy is the means by which we become part of each other’s lives and share meaningful experiences…human beings have a genetic predisposition – an innate hankering- to seek empathic affiliation and companionship with other creatures and the wild, and that increasing isolation from the rest of nature, (including the rest of humanity), results in psychological and even physical deprivation, with profound consequences for our species”.
He points out that for most of humanity’s existence our remotely distant ancestors lived an archaic cultural lifestyle- as nomadic foragers and hunters who lived in small, communal, static, oral culture-based, tribal groups, where ties were based on blood and kin. In these small tribal groups, there was “minimal role differentiation and thus little to differentiate the individual as a unique self.” The focus was on the “we”- the collective- rather than on the “I”- the individual.
Well-describing the Canadian situation, where Aboriginal elites profess that Aboriginals are still living in that archaic, collective “we” lifestyle, and implicitly regard and treat non-Aboriginal Canadians as “the other”, Rifkin writes:
“Village life is traditionally more closed and xenophobic. Its tight knit communities are far more likely to view strangers as alien and other”.
The ancestors of ordinary Canadians changed with the times, unlike our allegedly still-archaic, tribal Canadian Aboriginals.
Around 4000 B.C, with the rise of large-scale, hydraulic (dikes, canals and irrigation) agricultural civilizations- some central features of which were cities, political, economic and social hierarchies, monotheism, bureaucracies, material surpluses, geographically expanded trade, writing and a writing culture – there was a requirement for “greater differentiation and individuation in the form of specialized talents, roles, responsibilities in ever more independent social milieus.”
Rifkin:
“The differentiation process pulls individuals away from the collective tribal “we” to an ever more individual “I”. Role differentiation, in turn, becomes the path to selfhood… and the awakening sense of selfhood, brought on by the differentiation process, is crucial to the development and extension of empathy”.
Writing and the writing culture – literacy and reading- permit humans to imaginatively enlarge our experience of the world, to go beyond what our daily horizons make available to us. Literacy and reading infuse new significance into our own habits, thoughts feelings and relations with others.
In contrast to pre-literate, archaic, tribal culture, writing and the writing and reading culture further develops and extends man’s capacity for empathy.
The rise of cities, and thus “civilization”, according to Rifkin, brought about “the detribalization of blood ties and the resocialization of distinct individuals based on associational ties.”
As urban-based civilization advanced through the ages the concept of the nation state came into being, with the primary associational tie amongst the members of it – their “ancestral tribal bonds” having been much diminished – being citizenship, with citizens of the nation being, according to Rifkin, “those who share a common lived experience and are bound together by a collective past and future destiny.”
A part of that common lived experience, in the modern age, is existing in a state of legal equality with all other citizens of the nation, with a primary focus on the “I”, and with “the social glue of constant empathic feedback” holding the citizenry together.
Rifkin:
“Society requires being social and being social requires empathic extension”.
Tragically for all, Aboriginal elites, consistent with their professed archaic, tribal culture, reject the idea that Canadian citizenship is the primary associational bond that exists between them and non-Aboriginal Canadians.
Rather, because, according to them, their archaic, tribal cultures and nations are still alive and well, they assert in effect that they have no significant/primary, empathic associational bond with Canada or ordinary Canadians. For them, ordinary Canadians are the “other”.
Consistent with that, they demonstrate a kind of wary, arms-length, “partnership/joint venture”, business/economic, “nation to nation” approach to Canada– an approach devoid of empathic fellow feeling and showing no desire or need for it – like a guarded, suspicious relationship between separate countries not bound together by any sense of a collective future destiny.
Aboriginal elites and their non-Aboriginal supporters assert in effect that the highest loyalty Aboriginals have is to their respective tribes or “nations”, and that their primary associational bond is racial – comprised of blood ties with their fellow tribe, band or nation members, with whom, they say, they share an innate, collective personality – one nurtured by “the land”, and based on that shared blood.
The only empathic bond they would acknowledge is one that is solely with other members of their own particular tribe, band or nation – their “blood and belonging” tribe, band or nation.
Outsiders – non-Aboriginal Canadians – are in effect the “alien strangers” – as stated, the “other”.
An example of this Aboriginal blood fixation is the Daniels case, where the Metis, who are included in the Constitution as an “Aboriginal people”, persuaded the Supreme Court of Canada, based partly on the idea of “Indian blood” being racially unique and determinative, that they were legally entitled to be considered for Indian Act benefits.
The Assembly of First Nations asserts, (without evidence), that Aboriginal peoples, and, by implication, only Aboriginal peoples):
… “have a special relationship with the earth and all living things in it. This relationship is based on a profound spiritual connection and inherent responsibility to Mother Earth that guides First Nations Peoples to practice reverence, humility, and reciprocity”. (italics added)
(But “reciprocity” only with each other. Not apparently with Canada or ordinary Canadians.)
Similar blood and soil views of First Nation Chiefs across Canada are reflected in Osoyoos Band Chief Clarence Louis’ book, Rez Rules, which is racialist in tone and which, by using such terms as “blood”, “bloodlines” and “blood connection to the land”, unknowingly adopts Aryan race tropes.
Anishinaabe writer, Tanya Talaga, in her book, The Knowing, writes racially exceptionalist things about eggs, animals and soil thinking like Aboriginal humans, and “spiritual, magical” Aboriginal forest places where rivers “make a choice” about which direction to flow.
According to Ms. Talaga, a prominent Globe & Mail columnist, reflecting the professed archaic tribal view of the innate “we”, land-nurtured, collective Aboriginal personality, the “knowing” is knowing that:
“Our eggs hold our secrets. Passed down through our mothers. Through the womb, regenerating, carrying forward the lines of our families, whichever corner of the earth they come from. They also carry our lived experiences, our love and pain. Eggs travelling like beavers swimming in the rivers, moving gently but purposefully before stopping and deciding that this is where they should make their homes…”
A final example of the professed Aboriginal “we” collective, innate, racial personality is provided by the Vuntut Gwitchin case, where virtually the entire Aboriginal political and academic establishments, explicitly or implicitly supported by the Canadian non-Aboriginal establishment, persuaded the Supreme Court of Canada to rule that in order to protect professed Aboriginal innate, collective, “we” racial/cultural difference (presumably different from the culture of ordinary Canadians), Aboriginals leaders should be able to legally deprive individual Aboriginals of the protections otherwise given to them by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The result? Aboriginal reserves and self-governing territories are now Charter-free zones within Canada.
The non-Aboriginal elites of Canada have almost unanimously agreed with, supported and reflected back to Aboriginals the culturally archaic, collectivist, tribal, racial “we” view of Aboriginal peoples professed by Aboriginal leaders and spokespersons.
This reflection back is epitomized by the federal government’s commitment to a “partnership…nation to nation, government to government relationship”, to be achieved by the workings of the unanimously- passed, federal UNDRIP law which declares that Aboriginal peoples have separate and distinct political, economic and social structures and cultures, and have the legal right to exist within the nation state of Canada, (mainly at Canada and Canadian taxpayers’ expense), as separate legal, societal and race-based entities, largely governed by their own allegedly long-existing laws.
There was once a theory that Aboriginals should be regarded as “Citizens Plus” of Canada, where they would have the regular rights and duties of citizens with additional rights derived from being an Aboriginal person. But now, the legal and political situation having evolved to the point where Aboriginal leaders only claim rights that they assert Canada owes them, but recognize no duties owed by Aboriginals to Canada, they must be regarded – if regarded as citizens at all – as “Citizens Minus”.
So, it’s unanimous amongst all Canadian elites: they instruct us that Aboriginals and ordinary Canadians are different in human nature, different in race and culture, different in what nation they primarily belong to and are loyal to, different in what laws apply to them, and different in associational ties, the former being blood and the latter being citizenship.
By their words and actions Canada’s elites in effect tell ordinary Canadians that Aboriginals live in what Hannah Arendt referred to above as separate, fundamentally and irreconcilably different “race societies”, alongside and in “partnership” with Canada, the latter a purportedly non-racialized, multicultural, liberal democracy.
The logical conclusion that Aboriginals leaders have drawn from this is that Aboriginal nations, as stated, have only an arms-length, transactional relationship with the nation of Canada, where selfish interests mainly govern, rather than neighbourly friendship feelings and interests, somewhat how Quebec views its relationship with the rest of Canada, with the result that Canada is now arguably comprised of Three Solitudes, not the traditional Two, and Trois Nations, not the traditional Deux Nations.
Thus it follows that it is unreasonable for Canada and ordinary Canadians to expect empathy and fellow feeling from Aboriginal leaders and their people.
And, given our elites’ logic, it’s perfectly reasonable for Aboriginal leaders to cooly squeeze out of the nation of Canada as many transactional rights and benefits they can get, and, like the United States’ present indifference to the injured economic interests and injured feelings of Canadians caused by its callous behaviour towards us, the harm to Canada caused by Aboriginal leaders’ regard for and treatment of us, and the resulting anger and hurt feelings of ordinary Canadians in the face of this – well, we ordinary Canadians can all be damned.
This is the generally cool and self-interested way that all unneighbourly, independent nations deal with one another!
Why should the relations between the separate and different Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal nations within Canada be any different?
It is irrelevant that the fact that this purportedly separate and distinct Aboriginal race society paradigm is intellectually bogus – is a fraudulent, fantastical fiction.
The fact that there is no difference between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals, individually or in societies, culturally or in any other way, is of no matter to them.
This is the false, grossly illiberal, racial, Aboriginal paradigm that Canada’s Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal elites have chosen and foisted on the country, whether the Canadian citizenry likes it or not – a paradigm that defines Canada, as stated, as a liberal democracy that purposely houses within it purportedly “sovereign” Aboriginal race societies – race “nations”.
Most human behaviour happens “on the far side of the law”, at the local neighbourhood level, without written laws, and where symbiotic and empathic qualities and behaviours govern, such as trust, mutual aid, loyalty, affection, honour, looking out for one’s neighbour, honesty, self-sacrifice, acts of gratitude, reciprocity, acting reasonably, and all other such manifestations of devotion to the common good, mutual connectedness, altruism and cultural empathy.
These symbiotic and empathic behaviours and instincts, on which a complex, healthy, community/nation/civilization depends upon to hold together, are instinctively based on ancient group survival considerations.
But because of the state of our laws, which physically, psychologically, emotionally and legally untie and separate Aboriginals from Canada and from ordinary Canadians – which bind us apart – which give no reason for Aboriginal leaders to be reasonable in their demands against Canada and ordinary Canadians – which create no adverse consequences for their unreasonableness – which causes Aboriginals not to be or feel like our neighbours- which prevent Aboriginals and ordinary Canadians from ever being neighbours with one another- then symbiotic and empathic behaviours and instincts on the part of Aboriginal leaders and their people toward Canada and ordinary Canadians are not to be expected and are actively discouraged to the point of being rendered near impossible.
One can’t feel neighbourly towards or feel compelled to be reasonable towards people one never meets and mixes with- to people who aren’t one’s neighbours in any way.
Only regular personal contact fosters a sense of common humanity and a sense of belief, understanding and trust in one another.
When people are artificially separated the power of imagined differences grows, which is happening in Canada, and the Aboriginal empathy deficit in our country grows along with it.
If Aboriginals and ordinary Canadians don’t feel that we are “one” in the most basic respects, (a product of living symbiotically together in a state of equality under the law), then the not nice behaviours like the ones listed above on the part of Aboriginal leaders towards Canada and ordinary Canadians will naturally flow from that and will only persist.
There can never be “reconciliation” between Aboriginals and ordinary Canadians so long as we permanently live, at all levels, separate and apart.
Another harmful consequence of Canada’s elites-imposed paradigm of Aboriginal “sovereign “race societies existing within a liberal democracy, relates to Hannah Arendt’s observation about the social and political dangers of great power existing without any corresponding civic function or responsibility.
The great, often-coercive wealth-accumulating powers and privileges possessed by Aboriginal “nations”, some of which are listed above, are all derived from the “other” nation of Canada, which these separately treated Aboriginal, collective race nations exercise only for their own benefit. These are indeed aloof powers devoid of any positive Canadian civic function – Aboriginal nations don’t even pay taxes on this accumulated wealth – and as far as Canadians are concerned, are powers exercised without any regard, feeling or sense of responsibility towards Canada or ordinary Canadians.
These powers and the selfish way they are exercised fully illustrate and exacerbate the Aboriginal empathy deficit.
For now, Canadians have to live with this “race societies living within a liberal democracy” paradigm choice undemocratically made by our Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal elites. And Canadians, against our will, must accept the inevitable harmful consequences of this choice, one of which, as stated, is the total indifference shown by Aboriginal elites and their peoples to the best interests of Canada and to the interests and feelings of ordinary Canadians.
In other words, for the foreseeable future, Canadians must live with and accept the Aboriginal empathy deficit forced upon ordinary Canadians by our Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal leaders.
Thus, considering the elites-caused, structural elimination of empathic “threads” tying Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal Canadians together, these powers are fairly regarded by ordinary Canadians as parasitical powers, the exercise of which, in combination with external American and other foreign threats, is seriously disabling and weakening the host, Canada.
This is socially, politically and economically destabilizing, and thus dangerous, and this negative situation, only showing signs of getting worse, heralds further and greater damage to the host – Canada – and further social, political and economic troubles and dangers ahead.
It’s human nature.
Canada and ordinary Canadians will endure racial falsehoods, being treated in a disrespectful, unchristian, unfriendly and unreasonable manner by those it is subsidizing, only for so long.
Canada and ordinary Canadians will endure feeling taken advantage of for only so long.
Someday, sooner rather than later, the bubble of Canada’s and ordinary Canadians’ admirable tolerance and persistent niceness in the face of… seemingly nothing in return except negativity… is going to burst.
An empathy deficit on the part of ordinary Canadians towards Aboriginals may arise and ripen into some form of negative manifestation, possibly greater than the Aboriginal empathy deficit ordinary Canadians must now endure every day.
The structurally based Aboriginal empathy deficit must quickly start to be erased. The first step in this regard is to quickly start to phase out the Aboriginal race society/race nation paradigm.
It’s in the national interest of all Canadians, especially Aboriginal Canadians, that Aboriginals reject blood ties in favour of the associational ties of Canadian citizenship.
Two Solitudes and Deux Nations have been hard enough for Canada to endure. A situation of Three Solitudes and Trois Nations may finally break us.
Peter Best
May 8, 2026
Sudbury
