00:04:49.320policy where they wanted Indians to merge with the general population.
00:04:54.020So Brian, how many Indians were affected by these policies back in 1876 when the policy was brought in?
00:05:03.240Well, the numbers are not known for sure, but let's remember that Rupert's Land
00:05:10.080only became, was given over to Canada in 1870, and Rupert's Line was just a vast territory.
00:05:21.420Basically, there were no government services there for anybody, but there might have been
00:05:27.04040,000 Indians on the prairie provinces, and there were, you know, a similar type of population
00:05:41.920in British Columbia. But the numbers were not great. It'd probably be 10 times that now,
00:05:49.200wouldn't it? Oh, yes. And absolutely, the population has ballooned.
00:05:54.400You were mentioning that if an indigenous person had been to university or perhaps had served in the military, that they would be considered a citizen right away.
00:06:07.400I mean, were there very many who were exempted from this process because they had already achieved those things?
00:06:14.140Yes, there were definitely quite a few.
00:06:19.600And this sounds very discriminatory. And after the Charter of Rice, it was ruled to be discrimination.
00:06:26.020But a woman who married an Indian man would lose her status.
00:06:31.020It's very odd. A woman who would marry an Indian man would lose her status.0.68
00:06:37.800But an Indian man who married a white woman, that white woman would gain status.0.56
00:06:46.520So this all made sense at the time to them. In other words, the government was always seeing status as something to get rid of, to gradually eliminate in time so that Indians could be assimilated.0.87
00:06:59.240That word assimilated has become a bad word in Canada when speaking with, because that is always conflated with forced assimilation.
00:07:09.200But the whole idea was a voluntary system where Indians would choose to be Canadian citizens.
00:07:21.740And then when the government tried to force enfranchisement, by that time, there were so many monetary benefits to being a status Indian that it was very, very difficult to break through that barrier.0.72
00:07:39.180So is this why so many conservatives want to see the end of the status system?0.92
00:07:47.860Boy, I think a conservative thinker wants a country where everybody has exactly the same rights, and that's what Canada was supposed to be.
00:07:57.400So what we have now is a person can come in from India or China or Africa or something, and they become a Canadian citizen with exactly the same rights as everybody else.0.83
00:08:11.320But we have this one group that is status Indians who, for historical reasons, have an entirely different set of rights.0.56
00:08:22.240So I think a conservative says, no, that's not the way it should be.
00:08:26.080And we see what's playing out in B.C. as pretty strong evidence that having one racial group with different rights is definitely not good for the country.0.99
00:08:41.320So, all right, it's pretty obvious then why conservatives are against the reserve system,
00:08:46.620but Mr. Canu, Premier of Manitoba, he is indigenous, and he has said within the last few days
00:08:53.340that it's time for the reserve system to be wound up, the Indian Act scrapped,
00:09:35.760trying to explain why the left might find this argument appealing, he's saying we should not
00:09:44.400have a system that discriminates against one racial group. All racial groups should be treated
00:09:53.360equally. And I agree with him completely on that, but I'm not sure he knew exactly what he was
00:10:00.020saying because it wasn't just the status cards that are race-based. The entire Indian system
00:10:06.240is race-based. So if he wants to make that point, I'm happy to vote for him. If he's going to say1.00
00:10:16.700we cannot have a race-based system in Canada, in other words, the entire Indian system,
00:10:22.100And that would include Section 35. That would include all of the special laws that Indians have and the special perks that Indians have that others don't. I would agree with him completely, but I don't think that's what he meant to say.0.94
00:10:37.940All right. Well, Mr. Carney obviously had to think it through as well, because when he was caught in a scrum and asked what he thought about this, he said, it's probably time to get rid of it and talk about reform and so on.
00:10:53.860And then he backpedaled a day later and said, no, I don't see the act disappearing, but I can picture reforms.
00:11:03.500So what do you think Mr. Carney thought about first
00:11:08.320when he was actually willing to consider what Wob Canew was saying?
00:11:14.380Well, I'm going to be a bit cynical here.
00:11:17.600I think if Mr. Carney thought they could simply modernize the act,
00:11:24.360rename it with other nicer names, more modern names,
00:11:28.860let's say call it the Indigenous Sovereignty Act,
00:11:31.540and formally rename reserves to First Nations and things like that
00:11:37.240and doctor it up a little bit, I think he would be all for it
00:11:41.800because that could be done with the consent of all of the Indian groups
00:11:47.560and that would be a political win for him.
00:11:52.760But to truly abolish the Indian Act and the Indian system
00:13:05.320and constitutional protection of property rights was.
00:13:12.380Now, this is where our Premiers made a very bad mistake, in my opinion.
00:13:20.320They turfed out, except for BC's Bennett. He was the only one who stood up for property rights. The other ones all sold it away. And at the same time, they were, I'm going to say, snuckered into accepting Section 35.
00:13:41.260They originally refused to accept it, but when the word existing was put in and they were assured that a Supreme Court would never add additional Aboriginal rights, only then did they sign.
00:13:57.620What they didn't understand is that the Supreme Court would go on to do exactly that and the Supreme Court would invent entirely new rights such as Aboriginal title and duty to consult.
00:14:09.840So I think our premiers, in retrospect, were not very careful.
00:14:18.060They were too hasty in doing what they did.
00:14:20.960So Mr. Canute said that he despised the act because it was race-based,
00:14:26.800but so much of the advancement of indigenous peoples in the last 40 years, 50 years,
00:14:34.680has been because of a race-based approach to their politics.
00:14:39.840of the very fact that we have land transfers happening on the scale that they're happening
00:14:48.720in British Columbia and that the federal government is working hand in hand
00:14:55.760with indigenous peoples on things such as the Musqueam agreement in which they agree that
00:15:03.040certain territory is certain territory in this case being the larger part of Greater Vancouver
00:15:35.320so maybe he knew exactly what he was talking about.
00:15:38.020But the fact is that Canada was supposed to be a country of individual rights.
00:15:45.520When the treaties had to be signed, obviously they had to, those are collective rights,
00:15:51.640and the treaties gave Indians those collective rights.
00:15:56.720But as of 1982, the actual collective rights owned by Aboriginal people were very, very limited.
00:16:08.020And the treaties gave Indians the right to hunt and fish on unoccupied crown lands surrounding their reserves until it was needed, until land was needed by the government for other purposes.
00:16:21.840But that's really all, plus the $5 a year that they got as compensation.
00:16:26.820But our Supreme Court has, for reasons which I do not understand, particularly beginning in the Delgamacchio case in 1997, chosen to just massively expand the collective, another word for collective is tribal rights of people.
00:16:47.960They invented, literally invented, Aboriginal title, and they invented duty to consult.
00:16:54.100So it is the Supreme Court that is responsible for really creating the situation we see now playing out in B.C., where you can actually have race-based chunks of the province given over to a particular tribe.0.72
00:17:19.100tribe. This should never have happened, but it is happening today. So exactly how Mr. Canoe,
00:17:27.180what he thinks of that from his past statements, I think he's just fine with it.
00:17:33.260I certainly am not. And there are many others like me who thinks that we are definitely going
00:17:39.860in the wrong direction and we have to get back to being a country of equals where collective
00:17:46.820rights are basically very, very limited. Well, I suppose we gave up the idea of being
00:17:53.620a country of equals when we established this back in 1876. I mean, the goals as you explained them
00:18:00.820were commendable, but clearly as long as somebody is in tutelage, they're not the equal of the
00:18:07.380person, the student is not the equal of the teacher. Well, I agree with you, but I'd say
00:18:14.580that that was very clearly meant to be a temporary situation whether the Canada's founders did the
00:18:22.580right thing or not I'm not you know I'm not in a position to say my personal view is that they
00:18:28.980should not have put Indians in a separate legal category right from the beginning they should have
00:18:34.420given them help in various ways but they should not have put them in a different legal category
00:18:40.420But they did, and they meant that it would be temporary. They tried after that in 1920, 1933, and 1969 to undo what they had done and to take away the rights.
00:18:58.880But once you give people special privileges, especially expensive ones, it's very difficult to take it back.
00:19:09.280Well, that, of course, is the thing, isn't it?
00:19:10.820If there are going to be, I mean, sometimes the complaint is that the Indian Act is restrictive,0.97
00:19:16.560but it also delivers benefits, so much so, in fact, that there's now such a thing as a pretendian,0.85
00:19:23.240somebody who wants status because of those benefits.
00:19:25.800And some interesting people have put their names forward and been exposed as frauds.
00:19:30.520But seriously, once you give benefits, it's colossally difficult to remove them.0.60
00:19:37.560So, if there are benefits to being an Indigenous person, there has to be a way to determine who qualifies.0.90
00:19:48.760So, does that not mean that the Indian Act is with us for good?
00:20:02.600The plan was to gradually eliminate the number of status Indians, and now there are court fights to try to increase the number of status Indians.0.95
00:20:18.080Like everybody who is even partly related to a person of indigenous ancestry sort of wants to get on.0.99
00:20:31.380And I'm going to use a crude term here, but the gravy train.1.00
00:20:35.980So we have Métis groups. We have the second generation cutoff people.1.00
00:20:40.980We've got a lot of Indians now aren't really Indians.0.82
00:20:45.700within any country people intermarry and the average status Indian most status Indians
00:20:55.120have non-Indian people in their bloodlines and in many cases they can be like one-sixth or one-eighth
00:21:08.440or even one-twentieth Indian and now want to call themselves Indigenous.
00:21:13.780And it's not just to get the special health benefits or education benefits,
00:21:20.120that sort of thing, which don't come from the Indian Act, by the way.
00:21:23.280That's basically well-meaning politicians and judges granting those special privileges.
00:21:30.500But there are special, at some universities, if you could say you're Indigenous,
00:21:36.160Then you get to the head of the line to get these very nice jobs, etc.
00:21:40.420So, yes, we have now a number of people who have been sort of outed because they're not Indians at all.1.00
00:21:50.480And they're in there just to get the benefits.1.00
00:21:56.760But if you notice, when you look at the spokespeople for Indian people, most of them are awfully white looking.0.99
00:22:06.960Some of them are not very Indian at all.
00:22:09.880And so we're getting to this point where we're what a person who calls himself an Indian might not have much indigenous ancestry at all.0.95
00:22:20.980Well, maybe that's why Wob Canoo is not.