In the News July 1

Canada Day 2022

Our Home on Native Land

Canada Day 2022 marks the 155th anniversary of Confederation established by the proclamation of the British North America Act by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1867. This year, as Indigenous peoples continue to suffer brutal mistreatment at the hands of governments and their agencies on every front, the significance of the fact that this land on which Canada was established is Indigenous land, is striking more and more people as an ugly truth. For the past several years and especially since the 150th anniversary of Confederation, Canadians from coast to coast to coast mark the occasion by joining as one with the Indigenous peoples to decry what Canada stands for as concerns its violation of the principle of nation-to-nation relations and the genocidal policies and conditions it imposes on and off reserve.

The government of Canada treats relations with the Indigenous peoples as property relations in an unequal deal where the government seizes whatever it wants, forces the Indigenous peoples to litigate everything and then offers the measliest payments possible.

In essence, the Constitution imposed in 1867 established an authority over Indigenous nations which negates their right to their lands, their resources and their way of life by depriving them of the conditions and authority to exercise their hereditary rights as well as their human rights. As wards of the state, children were stolen from their families, subjected to brutal inhuman treatment and even buried in unmarked graves when they succumbed to their treatment by the religious orders acting at the behest of the government based on the policy imposed by the “Crown.” The graves were unmarked in part because the names of those buried there had been stolen from them, many being tagged by numbers as in a concentration camp.

The ill-treatment of the Indigenous peoples constitutes crimes of genocide. A modern constitution is required which settles scores once and for all with the conditions which perpetuate this racist ill-treatment based on the violation of hereditary rights and human rights.

Cancel Canada Day action in Vancouver, July 1, 2021

Since the revelation of some 10,000 unmarked graves linked to the residential school system, the Canadian state and government have shed a lot of tears and issued apologies and statements of regret, all in a manner which relieves them of having to right historical wrongs which continue in the present. In other words, they hide behind a legal framework based on a conception of rights which favours those with power and privilege and denigrates everyone else and, first and foremost, the Indigenous peoples. Most importantly, they continue to uphold the racist and unequal structures on which Canada was founded.

The nature of the relations between humans and humans and humans and nature established by Canada’s founding fathers at the behest of the British colonizers is not only unconscionable, but also unsustainable, with the rich getting richer and the poor more numerous and poorer. The state is incapable of providing for the well-being of the people and of Mother Nature. Corrupt ruling elites have armed themselves with powers and structures which permit them to rule with impunity and keep whatever they do out of the reach of the people so that they cannot be held to account. Today not only are the Indigenous peoples considered non-persons as concerns the manner in which fundamental rights are trampled underfoot — as persons who face civil death — but so too broad swaths of the population are forced to live beyond the reach of civil rights as well as human rights. People are forced to fend for themselves and have no recourse when they fall victim to circumstances beyond their control.

Today those in positions of power can pass laws which denigrate teachers and education workers, health care workers, workers in the mines, mills and factories, agricultural workers, gig workers, warehouse and retail workers, transportation and communications workers, women, children and seniors, as well as injured workers, poor people, homeless people, migrant workers, undocumented workers, Black, brown and national minority people and all those who comprise the majority and have no means or desire to hire lawyers to defend themselves. Nowadays, everyone is increasingly reduced to the status of non-persons who have to fend for themselves.

It is an indictment of a country which boasts that it is the best democracy in the world.

Nothing could better underscore the necessity to enact a new Constitution to replace the one that was used to found Canada in the conditions that prevailed in 1867 and its alleged modernization in 1982. The 1982 incorporation of an onerous amending formula and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms further underscore that a power above the people gets to define limitations on rights. Among other things, the limitations criminalize the right to speak and act in a manner that is to the advantage of the people.

The need to renew the democracy and to renew nation-building so that the aim is the well-being of all, not the few, is a historical challenge which must be accomplished in order for Canada to meet the needs of its people and contribute to the same for the peoples of the world.

A modern constitution must abolish the Royal Prerogative on which the present Constitution is based. It must vest sovereignty in the people and get rid of the prerogative powers and all police agencies which enforce narrow private interests, serve those with power and privilege, sacrifice the interests of the people and violate basic democratic principles which recognize that people have rights by virtue of being human.

A modern constitution for Canada is needed to end the colonial injustice and old arrangements suffocating the Indigenous peoples. Such a constitution must implement the principle of nation-to-nation relations. If the federation is to be free and equal, it must recognize Quebec’s right to self-determination, stop inciting divisions on the basis of neo-liberal definitions of nationalism and language and ethnic rights. It must uphold the hereditary rights of the Indigenous peoples and Inuit and the rights of the Métis nation as well.

A modern constitution recognizes the rights of all human persons by virtue of being human. It must end all notions of superior and inferior cultures and races, rooted in the Eurocentric concept of founding nations and racist divisions based on ethnicity, notions of superior and inferior political and traditional cultures and religious beliefs. To achieve this, the rights of citizens and residents must be recognized by virtue of their membership in the body politic, entitled to everything they require to flourish.

Legislation must have the aim of making sure these rights are guaranteed as a first principle, no matter what the conditions or circumstances. Concrete measures which empower the people must be put in place to hold governments accountable for the negation or violation or people’s rights.

A modern constitution must introduce a political process based on equality of membership in the body politic and forms of governance where members of the polity have a say and control on all decisions which affect their lives and the practical means to hold those in government to account.

The renewal of the political process is required so that citizens and residents can directly decide the matters that concern them, participate in solving problems and take up in earnest the humanizing of the social and natural environment.

A modern Canada and a modern constitution are needed to stop the nation-wrecking of those who have subjugated the country to the decision-making power and empire-building of a foreign power and the financial interests and oligopolies in its service, supranational trade arrangements and U.S.-led military alliances and wars. Canada needs independence so Canadians can develop modern human-centred social relations among themselves and with all humanity.

Canada also needs an anti-war government that makes Canada a zone for peace and demands that problems in international relations are solved without violence and war.

Canada’s latest crime is to endorse a new strategic concept for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which calls for its global expansion. The word peace is mentioned at least twenty times if not more in the document setting out NATO’s new strategic concept, as if Canada along with the U.S. and other bellicose NATO members can hide the real reason for NATO’s endless expansion to dictate to the entire world what they are permitted to do on pain of war and destruction. So too, the more Canada hides behind the U.S.-led NATO to flout international law and the rule of law, the more it repeats ad nauseum that its actions are all designed to uphold a so-called rules-based international order, which is made to seem like just another way of referring to the rule of law, or something of even greater merit, as opposed to what it really means: an international order in which the U.S. and NATO make the rules for others to follow.

This is what Canada is doing, along with further integrating Canada into U.S. war production and its war machine and criminalizing dissent in the name of protecting critical infrastructure, providing prosperity and safeguarding national security.

History calls on the peoples of Canada and Quebec and the Indigenous peoples and Métis nation to establish modern arrangements among themselves based on a free and equal union of sovereign entities. The challenges are great but the present conditions beckon us all to rise to the task of building a bright future where the rights of all are guaranteed.

Let the working class constitute the nation and vest sovereignty in the people with a modern constitution that builds Canada on the new historical basis!

There is already evidence of a movement that is firmly demanding something new in which security is not based on the military and police powers. People are demanding investments in social progress, not war. Fidelity to human relations, relations between humans and humans and between humans and nature reveal that this old political power in the hands of elites is finished. It is no longer capable of even hiding its corruption and decay which are more apparent with every passing day. Their power and privileges are an obstruction on the path of human progress, on the emancipation of all.

Only one path is indicated on this Canada Day 2022: Make Way for Renewal! All Out to Build the New!

TML Daily, posted July 1, 2022.