I was watching a news segment about yesterdays day of action this morning and heard the following statement out of a guy being interviewed that shows just exactly how much work the Aboriginal community has in front of them.
“Why should we follow their treaties if they don’t follow our laws”
The dude has it not only backwards, but he’s got it completely wrong as well.
Their treaties? The treaties are contractual agreements between a people and a government, some of these contractual agreements predate the vast majority of “Canadian law”.
The real question is, why should the Aboriginal people bother honouring Canadian government laws if the Canadian government is not going to honour the agreements it has with the Aboriginal people.
I was heartened to hear comments from other travelers who had their schedule interrupted saying that the Aboriginal people had “good reasons” for doing what they did.
Some people obviously get it, others, like our friend discussed above, either don’t seem to have much of a clue, or aren’t interested in looking for one.
The choices for Canada and Canadians seem pretty clear to me. Either get used to this sort of thing as more and more Aboriginal people and groups get just plain tired of the Canadian government not living up to its’ end of a multitude of treaty and land claims obligations - or Canadians can start pressuring their government to get off its’ ass and start living up to its’ legal contractual obligations.
Regardless of what the feds would like it ain’t gonna go away, as a matter of fact I would be very (very) surprised if it didn’t get a whole hell of a lot worse; then again, the feds could surprise me and actually do something…………. I’m not gonna be holding my breath though.
As I said over my way, it was nice to see the day went by relatively peacefully, and thankfully we didn’t have the police taking the advice of some of the wingnuts we have blogging on the conservative side of the spectrum.. or else we’d have had several Oka’s going on right now.