Moonbox

Oh please. This is a couple posts after you call me a fraud and a criminal for disagreeing with you. Buddy, you have no idea what you're talking about and you don't understand anything about how politics or the law work. I'd listen to the opinion of an American with a brain and an education way before I'll listen to your moronic natterings any day. You telling him to stay off the forums because he's an American shows just how badly you're flailing around. It's funny to watch. He, and about 98% of the rest of this board, have more insight than you do. I'd call you out of touch, but that would be kind of generous. I'm not sure what you'd call someone whose understanding of the legal system obviously starts and ends at being able to spell legal system. You're breaking totally new ground. Out to lunch might be a start.

You don't know anything about any law, so learn your place and stop talking. Your lack of punctuation, poor spelling and obviously complete lack of understanding of how the legal system works puts you in no position to criticize anyone. Like I said pages ago, it's clear the education system failed you, and it's equally clear that you didn't go to post-secondary. You're the worst kind of person to have running around frothing and raving about politics. You have passion, but no education and clearly no clue what you're talking about.

and the only reason the natives don't is because they live in a broken reserve system, often in the middle of BF nowhere, and even when there is work available they have neither the education nor the skills to do it. What's worse is that the rules against owning property remove the incentive most communities have to pursue wealth building activity (ie education and work), which leads them directly into the situation they find themselves in today. Basic human nature asserts itself here on the reserves.

Not belong to us, or subordinate to us. It's more like belong with us and are part of us. The original goals and purposes of the treaties are so far removed from the warped interpretations of today that they're next to meaningless. As for the First Nations defending our asses, give me a break. They were allies and they saw what happened to the aboriginals in the United States. They allied with us, preferring to live with British colonials rather than take their chances on the Americans, who had a nasty habit of systematically wiping out the indigenous in their territories.

Your issue here is that you seem to think a treaty or the Constitution are somehow sacrosanct...that somehow they are the very essence of Canada and being Canadian and that we can't exist without them in their current form. The simple fact is that the treaties were written many generations ago under very different circumstances, for very different purposes and by ancestors with whom neither side has virtually anything in common. The government will negotiate with the First Nations on how to deal with these treaties within reason, but no further. The within reason part is the foundation of any just society and you'd do well to remember that considering how much you emphasize the law.

Your logic is criminal. Your understanding of the law and the Constitution is also rather sad. A view can't be criminal. The Constitution is subject to limitations clauses and, believe it or not, can be amended. Nice try at the analogy, except it was moronic. Wow...I forget how much I missed chartered.rights. until I read this. Clearly the education system let you down. I don't even know where to start. First, wtf is that link for? Linking a PDF essay without any commentary is pretty stupid. Second, you don't even know what fraud is, or how it's prosecuted. You're not even close. I can only mirror Argus' sentiments and wonder where things went wrong for you.

Ancestral land means absolutely jack all. The Treaties are the only thing that matter, and they have expiration dates believe it or not. Perhaps the treaties themselves don't but their relevance and moral authority certainly do. Eventually, the ancestors of the aboriginals who signed the Treaties will be so far removed in terms of time, culture, lifestyle and even genes that it'll be hard to really distinguish who they are. Disputed lands will have been occupied for so long by real Canadians that ancestrally, it will be more their land than the aboriginals' who claim it. You can also rest assured that immigrants moving to the country (our main source of population growth) really don't give a rat shit about aboriginal land claims.

Everyone panders in politics. The Harper government clearly panders to the Jews, considering his fanatical and somewhat irresponsible/unreasonable and uncompromising support for Israel, and Trudeau has clearly seen this as an opportunity to court the Islamic vote. This is normal. Too bad he couldn't come up with anything interesting to say. As usual, he blathered about a bunch of nothing, staked out no positions and all sorts of ironic and contradicting statements further proved he's just a an empty-headed blowhard.

What's Trudeau the leader of, exactly? Meeting with a representative of the government doesn't preclude the possibility of meeting with its leader, but for the Chief of a small armpit reserve in the middle of nowhere to petulantly refuse to meet with the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs but then go ahead to meet with technical nobodies like Trudeau makes it pretty clear that she's not interested in anything but bullying/embarrassing Harper. Someone like that does not have the resolve to be a martyr. I'll bet good money right now that this goes on for awhile longer, and she eventually gets called on her bluff. To save face, she'll have some of her backers take her to the hospital for food deprivation and call it a "medical emergency", and then she'll come out raving about how heartless the PM is for being perfectly happy with her starving to death. Bluff called here. This will, however, escalate.

I'd vote for her, and I bet a lot of centre-right people would bail on the Tories as well if she was at the helm. Trudeau, if anything, would galvanize Tory support. I'm honestly even considering donating to her campaign...I just don't want to if she's going nowhere. I REALLY want her to succeed because the way she talks about politics is exactly how I feel. I don't really know much about Garneau and maybe he'd be similar, but I think this woman could definitely shake up Canadian politics and end the moronic left vs right shit flinging fight that we've had for the last 6 years. I think that Trudeau would be disastrous in this regard and would set the west vs the east and the right vs the left for the next 10-15 years single-handedly. He's already made it very clear he's every bit the obnoxious and combative asshole that his father was, or Stephen Harper is, and we need something different.

Hahaha well said.

Nope. I don't seriously believe it acts any more as a deterrent than life in prison does. I also think they get it wrong enough that the scales of justice just don't balance out to make it valid.

That link...I don't trust it. I almost clicked it...but I'm too suspicious!

I think we have a record here for how quickly someone's invoked Hitler's name. See "Godwin's Law". Between Hitler references, bad spelling, made up words (urk???), and spazz statements like the one above, I think we can set our expectations pretty low on what you're going to be able to contribute to this board. I wonder if you can see the humor/irony in responding to my criticism of cybercoma's hyperbole by taking it far beyond into the realm of idiocy.

Wow. I'd hoped at least you could acknowledge your hyperbole. The fact that you're still insisting on this is just sad. Calling the Harper government a dictatorship is every bit as dumb as an American calling us communists for having universal health care. If you can't make the distinction then there's no hope for you. Hopefully g_bambino's points make an impression on you, but I doubt it. It seems pretty clear that your intent is to participate in the idiotic rhetoric. You're more interested in the promoting the zealous and frothy-mouthed ideology than you are in any sort of rational debate. For the record, here's a democracy index ranking Canada against the rest of the nations of the world. We were ranked 9th in the world and we're by far the largest and most complex nation (both in terms of population and geography) out of the top 10. Where did we lose most of our marks? Participation by the electorate. When they have to listen to the kind of stupid crap you're peddling here, they tune out. It has nothing to do with where you stand on the political spectrum either. Harper muzzles his party because it's full of morons who make the same sort of irrational and ignorant comments that you do. http://www.sida.se/Global/About%20Sida/S%C3%A5%20arbetar%20vi/EIU_Democracy_Index_Dec2011.pdf

No, what you said was: which is exactly what I'm talking about. Sorry if I put you in with the 'hidden-agenda' crowd. Well, I'm sorry that you took exception to it. I was lumping you in the general category of people who, both here and in the United States (probably around the world), are regularly pulling out their hair, freaking out and giving us these bullshit slippery-slope arguments that have the intellectual merit of a steaming pile on the sidewalk. I'm sorry, but when you start making dictatorship references to Harper, it's no longer possible to take you seriously. Anyone with with a lick of sense will tune you out and/or roll their eyes at you. Unfortunately, there's enough mouth-breathers out there who will either echo those sentiments and start chanting it themselves, or who will retaliate against such claims with their own equally stupid counter attacks. What we end up with are childish elections where you have one side screaming, "Waah Dictatorship!" and the other side declaring them "Pinko Commies!". You don't have to look any further than that to see what's wrong with our democracy. How is an overly emotional and/or generally uninformed electorate going to hold Harper accountable?

A destructive precedent? Excuse me while I yawn. It's people like you, with your exaggerated rhetoric, fear-mongering and slippery-slope arguments that dumb down the debate to the point where nobody's listening. People like you handed Harper his majority. The more you rant and rave about his 'hidden agenda' and label him as Darth-Vader-in-a-Sweater, and the less this turns out to be true, the more people tune you out and head the other way. Criticize his budget. Criticize his foreign policy. That's all fair. Label him a dictator and the harbinger of the end of democracy, however, and people will see you as the clown that you are.

Vancouver is sitting on leased land? Does that mean that in 2040 or 2060 or whatever, people/businesses are going to hand their property all back to the First Nations? Or are you just talking about disputed land, where the First Nations claim the land and are going back to hundreds year old treaties, but it won't actually happen? The fact that it's 2012 DOES have a bearing on the whole situation, whatever you want to think.

Another in a long list of completely inane, brainless Topaz topics.

I guess that means that, as a whole, they like what he's done and is doing for the party. If enough of them didn't like what he's doing, they'd band together and abandon him. This is not the case, and so your pathetic/ridiculous claims have about as much merit as dog crap on a sidewalk.

This is less worrying than the Senate appointments, as far as I'm concerned. Why? Because I have a fair bit of faith in Canada's judicial system and a lot of respect for most judges, especially senior ones. These people are not beholden to their appointers and can, and often do, overrule government positions. They'll follow the Law, not Harper's agenda.

It means that the First Nations weren't prosperous before the residential schools. They were poor and uneducated before, and that's part of the reason the program was enacted. The schools are not responsible for poverty on the reserve. The reserve system itself is.

Not really, but there are limitations to how the Treaties are interpreted. That's all I'm saying. Yeah...that's why...I mean, everything was just perfect for them BEFORE that.... ANYWHERE ELSE in Canada, the diamond mine would employ the locals and the community would lift ITSELF out of dependence. The broken nature of the Reserves, however, makes sure that doesn't happen.

Perhaps, but there's a certain irony in demanding that respect and then at the same time pleading for/demanding money from the government because the communities they're living in can't support themselves and continue to grow far faster than populations in the RoC. True, and this can't be forgiven easily. This does not, however, mean that communities with 60% unemployment, rapidly expanding populations and unnaffordable living expenses should be supported to the extent that they continue to grow, continue to be unsustainable and become more and more expensive for the government to maintain. Anywhere else in the world, communities grow where there is work to do. Communities like Attawapiskat are fairly unique in that there is no work, no real chance for an improvement of the economic situation because of the lack of work and the lack of property rights (incentive to work), yet they continue to grow, and only because of misdirected public funding. At this point it's more a question about why we continue to do/support something that we know isn't working and isn't going to work at any point in the future, and hasn't worked anywhere else in the past.

Maybe not, but the Constitution is subject to limitations and reasonable limits clauses, which protects Canadians from unreasonable decisions despite what written Law or Treaties might say. Are you denying the culture of dependency on the remote reserves? Call it racism if you want, but when I read the complaints about places like Attawapiskat, how can you call it anything but dependency? It's dependence on the band, which depends on the government. Throwing money at it isn't going to fix things either. With fertility rates at 2-3 times higher than the national average, and where buying a bag of apples is going to cost $15-20 because of how remote the place is, it's easy to see these are failed communities and won't be saved by more money. That's good money chasing after bad. Not having basic property rights breeds a culture of defeatism. That's not unique to the First Nations. That's true everywhere. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/my-four-months-on-a-james-bay-reserve/article2294458/page2/