prairiechickin

As a rule we do when it comes to white collar crimes.

There is no 'right' to own computers in Canada either, but I think the average Canadian would be pretty uncomfortable if there was a government ministry dedicated to evesdropping on their daily use, and if any rules were broken, the cops would come, guns drawn, to kick in your door and seize your property. I'm not against keeping guns out of the hands of crazy and violent people, and in principle I really have no problem with registering my guns. The problem started when the entire system was imposed by well-meaning (if somewhat hysterical) people in reaction to the Montreal Massacre. If Canadians wanted a complete legal gun registry, most gun owners I know would have been happy to comply provided they had assurances that they would not be subjected to unreasonable search and seizure, and quid pro quo, we would like a constitutional guarantee to own weapons. But that never happened, because Alan Rock and the Liberal Machine thought they had enough votes in Central Canada to impose this system without the consent of gun owners. You see law and order, I saw step one in eliminating gun ownership in Canada. That's why this issue refused to go away, we never accepted being bullied around, and the Conservatives were more than happy to oblige us. I'd never voted Conservative in my life until this issue, and I've been voting Conservative ever since. And judging by the opinions expressed here and on other chat boards, I think the average Canadian, whether they own guns or not, has come to see what a sham this has all been. Its only you and a few others who still think law-abiding gun owners need to be closely scrutinized. And here's the sad part. Canada could have had a gun registry with the cooperation of the legal gun owners, but not now. I think I speak for most of us when I say you will not get a second bite at the apple, at least not in my lifetime. The registry will be repealed, billions will have been wasted, and we'll go back to the same system we had in 1994. This clumsy attempt to target gun owners has us all a little paranoid, and it would be a brave and stupid politician that tried this stunt again in the near future.

My 'internet source' on the Gros Ventre is Olive Dickason's "A Historical Reconstruction for the Northwest Plains" in R.Douglas Francis and Howard Palmers's The Prairie West: Historical Readings". Your source seems to be your imagination. And yes, I know what the inside of an Archives looks like, but Native hisotory isn't my field. I rely on standard published works when working out of my field. You really must publish soon, since so much of what you are telling me contradicts the standard version of Canadian history that I was taught back in my undergrad. Oh, but wait, the Family Compact has reached its long dead fingers from the 19th century grave and forced modern historians to write false history. Who knew Bruce Trigger was on the take.

I did the same thing with my best friend back when we were 15. But get this, we took the bus to the armory, with our guns uncased. Nobody blinked. Today there'd be a SWAT team and you'd be on the six o'clock news. My my how times have changed. So what has changed in the last 30 years? Used to be two kids getting on a bus with rifles were probably going somewhere for target practice, and nobody looked twice. Today it requires immediate armed response.

Wrong, try again. Admit it, you'd never heard of these people before I brought them up. I know where they are, because I took the time to follow up their story. And the Huron were wiped out by disease, eh? So that whole massacre in the winter of 1648-49 by the Iroquios never happened? I guess whitey just made that up to make Indians look bad.

This posts demonstrates your utter ignorance of this topic. It takes "half a second" to register your guns, eh? Have you ever registered one? Of course not, or you wouldn't say something this stupid. As for the rest of your post, all your hypothetical nonsense is covered by the Possession and Acquisition License. Your significant other has to sign off on your application, and being crazy won't cut it either. Your simple-minded and erroneous attitude is what pisses off gun owners, they are forced to endure a mountain of red tape to satisfy ignorant people like who who pass the whole thing off as 'no big deal'.

"Originally, the British had hoped to turn Quebec into a normal British colony. A program of assimilation was announced accordingly in 1763 by Royal Proclamation. Official status was to be withdrawn from the Roman Catholic Church, French civil law and the seigneurial system of land distribution were both to be discouraged, and a massive influx of British settlers was expected by inviting British soldiers to retire in the colony on land being granted in freehold...Eventually the canadiens were supposed to become British colonists in their own right -- even their Roman Catholic Church would be incorporated into the Church of England." J.L. Finlay and D.N. Sprague, The Structure of Canadian History, pp, 70-71. So this was the original plan, but when revolution started percolating in the southern colonies, the British backtracked away from this position and passed the Quebec Act of 1774 that guaranteed language and religeous rights to the French as a way to forstall possible revolt. This is what I'm talking about when I point out the absurdity of using 250 year old proclamations as some sort of road map for modern Canada. These things were tossed out to deal with the exigencies of their time, not as the blueprint for a potential nation a hundred years down the line. I'm not opposed to recognizing The Royal Proclamation as part of our history, or even as carrying some legal weight within the context of its time, I think its absurd to impose this uniformly across what is now Canada. The British did not control all of what is now Canada in 1763, why should some unilateral declaration by some far off king 250 years ago tie Canada's hands in perpetuity.

No, but neither am I in favor of the industry that has grown up around mining historic documents for alleged misdeeds with the hope of cashing in on the backs of hard-working Canadian taxpayers. At its best, history should be used a tool to foster a better understanding of how we, as Canadians, got to this point in our development, and should provide a useful caution as to how to proceed in the future. Most Canadian historians spend their lives devoted to this ideal, and none of them get rich doing it. At its worst, the historical record is abused and distorted by those seeking to cash in on the misdeeds of our forefathers. This is the preserve of the parasitic lawyers who are not interested in the truth, but rather in distorting the truth to extract the largest sum of money from the government, because as we all know, there's nothing like a nice whack of cash to redress an historic wrong.

So tell me, what happened to the Gros Ventre?

You're fucking killing me with this detail, I'm not a Constitutional Historian, but I'm pretty sure we cut the ties with England back some 70 years ago, whatever year it was. All I know is I'm not convinced that I, as a Canadian whose grandparents never showed up in this country until the 1920s, am responsible for all this convoluted crap a couple of hundred years before we ever got here. I do know my Grandfather was swindled out of his original homestead because he was an illiterate Norwegian, and ended up on a sad pile of rocks near Macoun, Saskatchewan. After being promised a homestead in Canada in the land of milk and honey he ended up on that pile of rocks in the middle of the worst Depression and drought this nation has ever seen. After too many years of that he went out to the machinery shed in October 1937 and shot himself, and I can't say I blame him. So who am I supposed to blame for this tragedy? Am I supposed to go after the Department of Immigration for luring him here, or the rotten bastard that swindled him off the land near Milestone, or the Dirty Department of Weather that eventually wiped him out? Since there was no Proclamation for the Norwegians, I guess I get nothing. And I don't want anything. I'm proud that man came here and tried to make a go of it, even though it eventually beat him. He didn't make it, but his tougher-than-nails Norwegian wife did, and she was still around when I was a kid. And so did her kids, and one of them was my Mom. So cry me a river over how tough your life was, I have my own tragedies. Difference is, I'm not looking to cash in on the tragedies of my ancestors. They are a private affair, and I'm pretty sure Grandpa Halik would haunt me if I ever tried such a stunt.

J.L. Findlaay/D.N.Sprague, Structure of Canadian History, Third Edition, pp, 70-72.

Tell you what, I'll let the people on this site decide which one of us has a better grasp of Canadian history. Or better yet, I'd invite them to go read any real Canadian history books to see which ones better reflect what I'm saying, and the nonsense you spout daily. I'd invite you to read these books, but you're too busy posting nonsense every day to actually read anything that disrupted your set-in-stone version of Native history. You sound like a parrot, you've got six things firmly implanted in your head and that's all there's room for. SQUAWAAAAK, Procalmation of 1763, SQUAAAAAAK, COVEWNANT of SILVER CHAINS, SQUAAAAAK Seventy Trilliion Dollars, SQUAAAAK Supreme Court of Canada -- for someone who claims to not be Canadian you sure seem to like the institutions of Canada when they rule in your favor.

I agree with a lot of what you say Wild Bill, but I'll argue with you on this one. I've seen examples of where provincial governments have picked winners, and where that has led to big savings on behalf of provinces in particular. Look at Hydro Quebec, giant corporation, exploited big hydro resources for big cash while providing big cash jobs for Francophones yatta yatta to fuel the French fact in Quebec. Big winner. Alberta's big investment in oil sands for the last 30 years, now paying big dividends even as the world hates them. That's a nationalist strategy, and a right wing one, but we can also consider a left wing one. The CCF in Saskatchewan sought investment in sodium sulfate, forestry, and steel, and all pissed dividends until sold by dogmatic right-wing politicians trying to balance the books. Good politicians can pick winners, and that's what seperates the winners from New Brunswick.

Yes, and they love it, I throw cookies and Loonies at them when they get it right, I throw wickedly accurate chalk at their heads when they're wrong. They learn fast in my class. And Canada was free of all British ties in the 1930s when we severed our diplomatic missions. Canada has been its own nation since 1927.

So the Canada Crown was indivisible from the British Crown, a 104 years before Canada actually existed, eh? This is wonderful evidence, and I'd like to take this to Judge Judy. She'd yell in your face that you can't sue a country 100 years before it existed, and you'd look sad and remorseful, then sputter out some feeble excuses at the end of the show about how Canada did you wrong, then the show would be over and you'd look stupid. I'd love to run the Proclamation of 1763 through Judge Judy. Let's see what she thinks.

Good for Lord Denning and his lofty historical aspirations. Now explain to me why some ruling in a Brtish Court in 1982 should have any impact in Canada. We are a sovereign nation, if Britain wants to pay reparations for some alleged historic misdeeds, they can fill their boots, but I don't see how that has any legal standing in Canada. One of the reasons I was shocked to see the Proclamation of 1763 mentioned in the Constitution of 1982 was its implications for Quebec. Most of the Proclamation in the northern colonies was aimed at the French, not the Natives. Under the Proclamation the newly-conquered French subjects were to be anglicized to the point that the Catholic church was to be incorporated into the Anglican church. All of this was abandoned following the Quebec Act of 1774, but by your logic, the Proclamation should hold sway and all Qubecois should be forced to speak English. That's not going to happen, which is why I was surprised that anyone would dare breathe this antiquated document into a Canadian-made constitution. But you see why I can't imagine anyone would hold this ill-thought-out document as having any legal substance in Canada? It was a product of its time, hastily constructed to deal with the immdiate problems of subjugating newly conquered French territories while trying to hem in the rebellious colonies to the south. The Indians were an afterthought in all of this, and I can't see how any judge in their right mind could construe all this to interpret the Proclamation to be the Magna Carta of British-Native relations, and I sure don't see how any of this applies to modern Canada.

Ok, no rum, but give me an address and I'll send you a bottle of something more interesting and culturally appropriate. I have a long-standing rule with my students that if they can prove me wrong, they get a special treat. It keeps me on my toes, and they'll work twice as hard to show me up.

Considering they themselves constantly trumpet thier roles as moral guardians of society, I think we can hold them to a higher standard. Not to mention that they hold positions of great trust in society, especially among their own congregations. Wasn't this clown the Bishop of Antigonish, and wasn't that region recently awash in allegations of clergy abusing children?

There are no new laws, the long-gun registry goes, the Possession and Acquisition License stays. I can live with that.

What gave the Cree the right to come to what is now Saskatchewan armed with Brtish guns and wipe out the Gros Ventre in the early 18th century? The Cree stole that land from the Gros Ventre, then ceded it to Canada via treaty. At least we didn't subject them to genocide. That's just how it worked back then, might made right, and I don't see you crying any tears for the Gros Ventre. As I mentioned in an earlier post that nobody made a peep about, the only examples of genocide that I could recall in what is now Canada were Natives wiping out other Natives. But that is never mentioned by the pro-Native posters here -- All Indians Were Good, All White People Were Evil, right?

Treat Four is not a lease, like all the numbered treaties it was a one time sale for all time. And last year when some Native students started telling me about only ceding the land "to the depth of the plow, I challenged them to go read Treaty Four and show me where that clause existed anywhere in that document. Quite simply, it doesn't, and they got a valuable lesson about not believing everything their leadership tells them.

All of this is a lot of double-speak that implies Indians are free to enjoy all the benefits of being Canadian without any of the responsibility. You don't want to be Canadian? Fine, then go back to your reservation and refuse anymore government handouts. I'd be fine with that. You get your five dollars per year treaty money, and nothing more. Then we'll see how many of you want to really be sovereign. You remind me of the twenty-somethings that live in their parent's basement yet claim all the rights and priviledges of adults. Grow up and get a life.

In the area where it originally held sway. The British did not control the Yukon Territory in 1763 so why would a pronoucement from the King Of England have any impact there?

Well I'llbe damned, you are right. What kind of rum do you drink?