The Critical Compass Podcast - July 05, 2025


Should an Independent Alberta Revoke Indigenous Special Status？ w⧸ Bruce Pardy


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

157.5933

Word count

798

Sentence count

1


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the long-standing question of whether or not Indigenous people should be given the same rights as non-Indigenous people in Canada as their non-indigenous brothers and sisters. Is this a non-starter?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 you had recently um been in a debate with jeff rath and and we know jeff and you know we we
00:00:08.340 appreciate his uh his uh gumption uh for alberta independence and you know he's he's doing some
00:00:13.780 good things but when watching that debate something became very clear in that he didn't
00:00:18.480 really approach your argument as charitably as as i would have liked he repeated a line several
00:00:24.200 times if you recall where he said that essentially he tried to boil down your argument into you
00:00:29.520 wanting to remove the rights of 300 000 albertans obviously the the indigenous population in
00:00:35.160 alberta obviously i don't think you mean that because i don't think you were given the opportunity
00:00:39.420 to really expand on that can you sort of explain jeff's main main problem with this with this point
00:00:46.480 was that he believed it to be a non-starter as far as alberta independence goes so do you think it's
00:00:53.540 a non-starter or do you think that there's a way around this right okay so those are two very
00:00:58.920 different questions so let me do the first one first yeah thanks right so so am i trying to
00:01:05.460 remove the rights of 300 000 people the answer is it depends what you mean if you mean would i like to
00:01:15.800 see removing the special status of 300 000 people then the answer is yes but that doesn't mean removing
00:01:24.820 the rights of those people that the point is that the the rights held by those people have got to be
00:01:31.820 the same as for everybody else we're not taking those rights away everybody must be treated the same way
00:01:39.240 in the law and to that end you're equalizing you're equalizing so just a clarification at the moment
00:01:46.040 indigenous people who belong to uh bands who have reserves do not own plots on reserves they do not
00:01:57.900 own they do not have title to that land it's a group right it's a group possession so what i've
00:02:04.540 suggested is you take those reserve lands and you you make them into lots and you give title to those
00:02:11.100 lots to individual indigenous people so that they can do with that land what everybody else can do
00:02:16.980 with their land which is to improve it or sell it or lease it or bequeath it mortgage it whatever they
00:02:26.280 want because that's what everybody else gets to do at the moment in individual indigenous people are
00:02:31.660 subject to the tyranny of the group and subject to the tyranny of the group's leaders you're you're you're
00:02:37.720 caught you're stuck within the concept of the group right you cannot make decisions for yourself
00:02:43.140 now you can leave the reserve and go and live in the city and do what everybody else can do the fact
00:02:48.580 of the matter is that off reserve individual indigenous people have the same rights as everybody
00:02:54.660 else in canada and that's the way it ought to be but it ought to be that way everywhere so that that's
00:03:00.820 my answer to that 300 000 uh people question it's it's not quite the way it was framed but there is
00:03:07.200 some truth to it in the sense that it is it is trying to uh make put everybody on the same level
00:03:14.980 and and have them being treated the same way there's a there's a saying i think comes from thomas soul
00:03:20.840 he said when you're used to special treatment equal treatment seems like discrimination
00:03:31.980 and what i'm suggesting is to get rid of the discrimination to get rid of the practice of
00:03:38.900 seeing people in different ways in other words as far as the law is concerned there should be no such
00:03:45.600 thing as different peoples the law should simply apply to people
00:03:50.080 now to your second question about you know how practical this is in a political sense
00:03:57.380 well you know you guys might know better than me because i'm not on the ground in alberta
00:04:03.080 now on the other hand i've been in contact with a lot of albertans people have communicated with me
00:04:08.280 in various ways and an awful lot of people have said yes we agree with the aboriginal point this has got
00:04:16.500 to finish now this is a bad system it was bad system from the beginning and look at the results the
00:04:22.980 results are terrible they do they do not help the people that pretending to help so why would you
00:04:30.400 want to retain it uh so both in principle and in effect where we have it is a terrible idea
00:04:39.640 and so if we stick to the idea that alberta wants to be a free country then to me it's a
00:04:45.140 it's kind of a no-brainer
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