In the National Post, Barbara Kay discusses a recent book on the key legislation that regulates relations between the Canadian federal government and the various First Nations groups:
Few and far between are disinterested scholars of Canada’s Aboriginal history who have the tough hide and principled will to publicly depart from the approved Indigenous “nation-to-nation” narrative that keeps the guilt and money flowing, but perpetuates a dysfunctional status quo on many reserves. Most of the dissenters are university academics. But Best is simply an intelligent man with a passion for his subject, a deep impatience with political correctness, and unremitting determination to weather whatever storms afflict him as he shepherds his views to a public market.
I’ve written before in the National Post and elsewhere about Best’s lonely battles with our society’s forces of repression. There Is No Difference began its public life as a post on a dedicated online site in 2014, copied to his legal firm’s. Shortly afterward, complaints were filed against him with the Law Society of Upper Canada (now the Law Society of Ontario), asking that Best be “disbarred or suspended” and that he be forced to apologize for using his law practice “to disseminate racist materials.”
After two years of stressful limbo, the Law Society graciously allowed that the excerpts submitted by the (unnamed) complainant were “not enough to merit a finding of any form of professional misconduct on their face.” (The last three words telegraph the ardent wish that they had been; apart from a dissenting group of new benchers, the Law Society’s board has increasingly demonstrated worrying Thought Police tendencies.)
Best believes the Indian Act is a benign form of apartheid, and advocates for the integration model of equal citizenship for all, a model promoted, for example, by Pierre Elliott Trudeau (who called the system “apartheid”), and the late Aboriginal lawyer William Wuttunee, author of Ruffled Feathers, who was marginalized and discredited as an “apple,” red on the outside, white on the inside.
Best believes the federal government must be the ultimate master in its own house for Canada to function as a healthy nation. He is fiercely critical of the Supreme Court’s 2004 emphasis on the “honour of the Crown” concept in its Haida Nation vs. British Columbia ruling, with key words “to consult and where appropriate, accommodate the Aboriginal interest” virtually decreeing a devolution of Crown sovereignty to Aboriginals, and effectively turning Indigenous bands into a third order of government with the power arbitrarily to advance or restrict Canada’s economic fortunes.
It’s easy for Indigenous activists to bash a white historian, or even an Aboriginal dissident without special standing like Wuttunee. But it will be more difficult to dismiss the opinion of a former Supreme Court justice. Best just came in for an unexpected stroke of luck. Former Supreme Court justice Jack Major (1992-2005) has given the book his endorsement in a letter discussed in an article by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (FCPP).
