Quotulatiousness

April 15, 2026

MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is “a case study in progressive linguistic self-sabotage”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay highlights how NDP politician Leah Gazan’s freshly coined replacement for our already over-long initialism for other-than-cis-gendered individuals has been a boon to online commentators and comedians across the internet:

While the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was announced in 2015, its final report wasn’t published until mid-2019. The three-and-a-half year period in between overlapped with Justin Trudeau’s manic campaign to replace the idea of biological “women” in public discourse with faddish gender-inclusive terms that describe female-identified men. The initialism he eventually came up with is “2SLGBTQI+” (whose “2S” component signifies a special — albeit ill-defined — “two-spirited” LGBT category that Indigenous people can opt into).

And so, channelling the state-of-the-art in Canadian gender jargon, the Inquiry’s commissioners duly expanded references to Indigenous “women” by addition of the words “… and 2SLGBTQQIA people” — i.e. Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual.

The term “2SLGBTQQIA” appears in the final report 1,197 times. Agglomerating that with the original “MMIWG” mandate yields “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA”.

Detail from page 229 of The Final Report Of The National Inquiry Into Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women And Girls.

If this unbreakable wi-fi code sounds familiar, it’s because a Canadian MP named Leah Gazan just became an international laughingstock for using it at a televised 8 April news conference. (Indeed, she lengthened it even further by adding a plus sign to the end — suggesting that yet more letters, numbers, and/or symbols are on their way.) This unintentional comedy routine was made all the more meme-worthy by the casual, deadpan, en passant way the sixteen-character term rolled off Gazan’s tongue, as if it were a set of ASCII characters that ordinary Canadians ran together all the time in normal day-to-day discussions.

As some Canadians (including me) tried to explain on social media, “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” is not a commonly used term outside of activist circles. I also let people know that Gazan is not a Canadian government representative (as was being claimed), but rather a member of a small and increasingly radicalised hard-left federal party known as the New Democrats.

But by then, no one was in the mood for such nuances. Elon Musk‘s three-word tweet on the subject — “Canada is cooked” — has, as of this writing, garnered more than half a million likes and 77 million views. Thanks to Gazan, millions of people around the world now believe that ordinary Canadians talk in this ridiculous fashion. We don’t.

Gazan told CBC News that the whole episode only goes to show that “bigots are offended by my positions around equality”. A more useful lesson she might take away from this experience is that the use of cultish ideological jargon can turn discussion of even the most serious issue into a farce. This is especially true when terms such as “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” (or “menstruators”, or “uterus-havers”, or “people with a vagina”) are used to soothe the sensitivities of men who demand the right to be called women.

April 10, 2026

“MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Another Canadian interest group decided that their already oversized abbreviation needed to be super-sized. Jonathan Kay provides some useful context for those not familiar with Canadian domestic politics:

Canadian here, with four (count em) points of clarification on the “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” thing, which has now escaped its absurdist Canadian genderwang containment chamber, and gone viral internationally:

1) the speaker here is @LeahGazan, a fringe minor-party politician. She’s not in the government. She regularly calls for dumb things, such as criminalizing anyone who dares talk candidly about the 2021-era unmarked-graves social panic. CBC types treat her as a serious person because she’s indigenous and because she always talks in the tear-drenched idiom of white-settler colonial evilness. But she’s not.

2) MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is a mashup of two acronyms (each unique to Canada). Her decision to run them together is hilarious, which is why this has gone viral, but it’s not a common practice, even in rarefied leftist circles.

3) MMIWG refers to “Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls”. The problem of violence against indigenous women is a real and tragic issue. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago, a bunch of activists produced a ridiculous report on the subject that called it a “continuing” (!!!) “genocide”, and demanded that we all call it that. The whole movement collapsed when it was pointed out that something like 80% of the indigenous women who are killed are killed by indigenous men, which is very much off-message from the whole white colonial G-word thing. But the acronym still gets name-dropped when people are indicting Canada for all its infinitely genocidey genociding of everybody

4) “2SLGBTQetcetc…” Americans always ask me what “2S” stands for. It stands for “2 spirited,” a term that white academics popularized 50 years ago to give expression to their mystical reveries about sacred indigenous elf-people living in some precolonial eden-like genderwang Nirvana where everyone has three penises and five vaginas. No one is allowed to ask what the term even means, but our government made it official policy to use ridiculous words like this under Trudeau, so we’re stuck with it. Basically, if you’re an indigenous guy who likes to wear eyeliner, or an indigenous woman with blue hair and sensible shoes, you call yourself “2 spirited” on your govt grant applications. No one is even allowed to ask whether it’s a gender identity or a sexual orientation. It apparently exists in some exalted state that defies this kind of rigid colonial typology, or something like that.

Back in 2022, I read a whole report about how to teach two spirited concepts to Canadian students, and it turned out that even the authors of the report admitted they had no idea what the term meant. I wrote about it for @Quillette: https://quillette.com/blog/2022/10/0

March 25, 2026

UNDRIP’s malign power in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) has been adopted into law by the provincial government in British Columbia and the federal government. In BC, voters were assured that this was a purely symbolic act to advance reconciliation with First Nations groups in the province. But that was deliberate misdirection and lies:

During the debate on DRIPA [BC’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act] in the legislature in late 2019, government ministers of the day waxed lyrical that DRIPA and UNDRIP created no new rights, had no legal force, did not apply to private land, and did not provide a veto. Those assurances were used to justify passing DRIPA, which resulted in the B.C. Opposition unanimously supporting the legislation. It turns out that the government’s assessment and promises were neither correct in substance nor valid legally.

Much has been written lately about DRIPA, some of it wrong. Prior to the B.C. Court of Appeal decision in Gitxaala, some DRIPA defenders insisted it was merely a “process” piece of legislation that bound the government to an arguably undemocratic joint government and Indigenous leadership arrangement, set out in section 3, to evaluate every B.C. statute for conformity with the 46 Articles of UNDRIP and then amend statutes as deemed necessary to create that conformity.

DRIPA itself, though arguably highly undemocratic and perhaps unconstitutional, is not the real problem in this province. The real problem is that DRIPA has been effectively employed as a “smokescreen” by the B.C. NDP and certain of its allies, while the government, secretly and with no explicit public mandate, imposes the Articles of UNDRIP throughout B.C. as a fundamental matter of policy, as though they have the force of law.

Let’s be clear, this is a devious political manoeuvre, much of which is not underpinned in law by DRIPA or, more importantly, by Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence at all.

Notwithstanding statements made to the legislature in 2019 to get DRIPA passed, the NDP government immediately chose to implement a policy approach to UNDRIP throughout B.C. under which UNDRIP Articles would be applied by the government and the public service as though they were, in fact, the law in this province, notwithstanding the fact that they are inconsistent in many respects with Canadian constitutional law.

In the wake of recent court decisions, there is no indication that the government’s policy approach has changed or that the Premier is thinking about backing away from it, even though there is now much greater public scrutiny of what the government has really been up to since 2019.

The Eby government claims to be upset that UNDRIP is now being applied by the courts as the law in B.C., which it knows will create utter chaos. What has upset it more, however, is that the courts have usurped the NDP government’s desire to quietly and secretly implement UNDRIP everywhere in the province as a matter of policy, a policy that they would like to be viewed as law but without being legally enforceable by judges.

This amounts to a policy of subterfuge by a government that has shown an inclination towards deception on matters concerning First Nations. It appears that a law is not a law unless the B.C. government says it is a law, but some laws, like DRIPA, can be used as a false “front” to allow the covert implementation of a complex UN-based policy that is clearly unfit for the Canadian context, with no one being the wiser.

In the National Post, Warren Mirko explains the murky theory that allows “indigenous ways of knowing” to be taken more seriously than science, history, and legal procedure:

Canada is rapidly abandoning a principle that has shaped western democracies since the Enlightenment: the idea that no person or group has privileged access to sacred or divine knowledge unavailable to everyone else.

Now, this principle is being threatened by Canada’s increasing embrace of “Indigenous Knowledge” — whereby knowledge is treated as collectively owned and restricted by ancestry rather than something open to examination and shared across society.

The governments of British Columbia and Canada — both of which have formally adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) — endorse “Indigenous Knowledge” as inherited, rooted in ancestral relationships to the land, and encompassing spiritual, cultural and metaphysical dimensions passed down through generations.

Remarkably, the defining quality to possess this knowledge is not study, training, time spent on the land, or lived experience by any individual alive today. Instead, it’s lineage itself.

That’s a paradigm shift. When knowledge is said to be possessed by birth rather than learned, its universality is replaced with mysticism and its value diminished.

This comes with real-world consequences: ancestry-based considerations are reshaping how public land and resources are managed on Canadians’ behalf.

In British Columbia, newly proposed changes to hunting and wildlife regulations are described as being informed by “the best available science and Indigenous Knowledge“. In practice, this means “Indigenous Knowledge” is being used to design a regulatory regime that falls almost entirely on non-Indigenous users. That’s because Indigenous harvesting rights are recognized under Section 35 of the Constitution, not bound by the same hunting seasons, bag limits, gear restrictions, or limited-entry systems that apply to the broader public.

The growing influence of this genetically transmitted, ancestry-qualified knowledge extends to matters of public safety and economic security, like nuclear regulation: “Indigenous ways of knowing and the Indigenous cultural context enhance the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s understanding of the potential impacts of nuclear projects and strengthen the rigour of project reviews and regulatory oversight”, says the government of Canada website.

Governments championing the principles of UNDRIP insist that “Indigenous Knowledge” can be combined with “Western” science to produce better public policy. But this is a contradiction. Knowledge cannot at once be exclusive and universal.

March 7, 2026

“Canadians were told there were 215 graves”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Rustad expresses his anger at the federal government’s apparent connivance in concealing information from Canadians in the not-really-an-investigation into the alleged mass graves at a former Residential School in British Columbia:

Canadians were told there were 215 graves.

The country lowered the national flag for months. Churches were burned. International headlines declared the discovery of mass graves at a former residential school. The federal government responded by allocating $12.1 million in taxpayer funding specifically to support investigation and exhumation work to verify those claims.

Now we learn that no remains have been exhumed.

At the same time, the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations has released the activity reports tied to that funding, but every meaningful detail has been redacted. The reports describing what work was carried out, what investigations were conducted, and how public money was spent have been blacked out and labelled confidential.

That is unacceptable.

When the federal government spends millions of your taxpayer dollars to investigate a claim that shook the entire country, Canadians have a right to transparency. They have a right to know what work was performed, what evidence was found, and how their money was used.

This is not about denying history. It is not about attacking Indigenous communities. It is about basic public accountability.

If the government funded an investigation, the public deserves to see the results of that investigation.

Let me be clear: The records should be released in full. The spending should be explained clearly.

Canadians deserve the truth about what was done with their money. And if that money was not spent for the purpose it was granted for, then the public deserves accountability, including repayment of those funds.

March 3, 2026

New name for Vancouver incoming in 3 … 2 … 1…

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian federal government is not eager to share the details of a new agreement they’ve signed with the Musqueam First Nation that apparently cedes most of the city of Vancouver to the band, casting the property rights of two million people into legal limbo:

The Liberal government is refusing to publicly release an agreement with the Musqueam Indian Band that recognizes Aboriginal title over a vast area of British Columbia, including Metro Vancouver and surrounding areas, potentially affecting nearly two million people.

Buried in a seemingly mundane fisheries announcement put out on February 20th, the acknowledgement could radically undermine property rights in one of Canada’s largest and most populated metropolitan regions.

On February 20, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada issued a news release with little fanfare titled “Musqueam and Canada Sign Historic Agreements Recognizing Rights, Stewardship and Fisheries”.

The news release reads: Canada “recognizes that Musqueam has Aboriginal rights including title within their traditional territory and establishes a framework for incremental implementation of rights and nation-to-nation relations with Canada”.

That phrase “including title” refers to Aboriginal title. Under Canadian constitutional law, Aboriginal title is a contentious but increasingly recognized property interest, affirmed by recent court rulings, including the controversial Cowichan decision. Courts have recognized Aboriginal title as a prior and senior right to land that critics say threatens fee simple title or traditional private property ownership in Canada.

The Musqueam Indian Band’s traditional territory encompasses virtually all of Metro Vancouver, including Vancouver, West Vancouver, North Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, New Westminster, parts of Delta and Surrey and other regions.

Based on 2021 census and other data, that territory is home to an estimated 1.8 million British Columbians.

The federal government has now formally recognized in writing Musqueam Indian Band’s Aboriginal title over that territory, yet Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada refuses to make the agreement public.

The February 20 announcement specifically refers to the “šxʷq̓ʷal̕təl̕tən Rights Recognition Agreement”, described as recognizing Musqueam’s Aboriginal rights, “including title” and establishing a framework for implementation.

Musqueam Chief Wayne Sparrow emphasized the Aboriginal title component directly in the release:

    Our Musqueam community celebrates these historic agreements as a step forward in our path to Reconciliation. In signing these agreements, the Government of Canada is acknowledging Musqueam’s Aboriginal title and rights to our traditional territory and recognizing our expertise in both marine management and fisheries management.

But when Juno News requested a copy of the agreement from Crown-Indigenous Relations, the department’s media relations spokesperson Eric Head confirmed receipt of the request and then cut communication altogether, even when pressed to ask if the agreement would be made public.

February 1, 2026

Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter reacts to an Australian race-grievance grifter “Race Discrimination Commissioner” bloviating talking about Australia as “stolen land”:

The implicit meaning of this framing is that Anglos stole the land so it’s only fair for them to give hundreds of millions of Hindoids the opportunity to steal the land.

Revealed preference demonstrates this. If he believes the land is stolen, and he believes theft is morally wrong, then he would not accept a salary of hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Australian government (this is blood money), and he wouldn’t live in Australia.

Since he doesn’t do either of those things, he either doesn’t believe what he’s saying, or he does but he doesn’t think theft is bad, in which case he’s simply trying to emotionally manipulate white Australians by using their own morality against them in order to guilt them into continuing to allow him and people like him to parasitize the Australian people.

He then elaborates:

It really cannot be emphasized enough how dishonest all of this is.

America stole land from the natives, purchased some African farm equipment, and has always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “open the borders and give us your country”.

Canada is built on stolen land, sent some kids to boarding school, and has also always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “Let my people in, saar”.

Australia, same narrative as Canada.

New Zealand, same as Australia.

Britain did an imperialism, therefore “your country belongs to us now, saar”.

France, same as England.

Spain, same as France.

Ireland never had an empire and hasn’t had slaves since the Viking Age, and indeed was itself colonized by England … therefore Ireland must accept unlimited migration in solidarity with other post-colonial countries.

Germany was too mean to Jews for a few years, therefore Germans must abolish themselves and give their country to North Africans.

The only peoples the Swedes ever conquered or enslaved were neighbouring Europeans, but Sweden might have sold some iron that might have gotten used on some slave ships a few centuries ago, therefore must open its borders to Bomalians and give them all the rape toys they can penetrate.

The justification differs, but the conclusion is always the same: open borders and ethnic replacement.

The uniformity of the repugnant conclusion indicates that these narratives are formed by reasoning back from that tendentious repugnance, with the arguments tailored to national conditions using whatever specific historical circumstances are handy, with the intent of emotionally manipulating native populations into laying down their arms, foregoing resistance, and placidly accepting the loss of their countries to the hundreds of millions of third-worlders intent on flooding every developed white country on the planet.

The people making these arguments don’t believe a word that they say. Their seething resentment for Europeans is entirely real, but this is almost entirely an inferiority complex, humiliation at having been so easily conquered and then taught to eat and wipe with something other than their hands. They don’t believe that slavery or conquest are wrong: if they did, they wouldn’t still practice slavery, and they wouldn’t be trying to conquer the West in the guise of beggars, by shamelessly playing to our pity and misplaced guilt. They say these things in order to trick you by playing on a conscience they don’t have themselves. It’s a sales tactic, and they’re selling you annihilation.

January 25, 2026

Mythologizing Australia’s “noble savages”

Filed under: Australia, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Celina101 provides examples of Australian Aborigine behaviour vastly at odds with the progressive belief in the “noble savage” myths:

For decades a rosy and romanticised narrative has prevailed: pre-contact Aboriginal Australia was a utopian paradise, and British colonists the only villains. Yet, the historical record painstakingly chronicled by scholars like William D. Rubinstein and Keith Windschuttle, tells a far more complex, often brutal story. This article examines how politically charged revisionism has whitewashed practices such as infanticide, cannibalism and endemic violence in traditional Aboriginal societies. It also warns that distorting history for ideology does a disservice to all Australians, especially Anglo-Australians who have been bludgeoned over the head with it.

The Noble Savage in Modern Narrative

Many contemporary accounts frame Aboriginals as the ultimate “noble savages”, a peaceful, egalitarian people living in harmony with nature until the arrival of the cruel evil British colonists. Textbooks, media and some activists repeatedly emphasise colonial wrongs while glossing over pre-contact realities. But historians like William D. Rubinstein challenge this rosy picture. Rubinstein bluntly notes that, in contrast to other civilisations that underwent the Neolithic agricultural revolution, Aboriginal society “failed … to advance in nearly all significant areas of the economy and technology” for 65,000 years. In his words, pre-contact Aboriginal life was “65,000 years of murderous, barbaric savagery“. This harsh summary confronts the myth head-on: it implies that life before colonisation was not idyllic, but marked by entrenched violence and brutality.

The danger of the noble-savage myth, Rubinstein argues, is that it inverts history. By idealising and practically lying [about] Aboriginal society, modern narratives often cast settlers as uniquely evil. In one essay he warns that contemporary inquiries (like Victoria’s Yoorrook Commission) are “defined to ascribe all blame to the impact of colonialism, rather than the persisting deficiencies in traditional Aboriginal society“. Ignoring those “gross, often horrifying, shortcomings” in Aboriginal culture, Rubinstein says, can only produce “findings written in the ink of obfuscation and deception“. In short, to truly understand Australia’s past we must examine it dispassionately, acknowledging human failings on all sides, not just one.

Documented Brutalities in Pre-Contact Society

Early observers and anthropologists left abundant evidence that some pre-colonial Aboriginal practices were brutal by modern standards. The selective amnesia about these practices in progressive narratives is striking. For example, infanticide (the intentional killing of newborns) was a widespread means of population control in traditional Aboriginal tribes. University of Michigan anthropologist Aram Yengoyan estimated that infanticide “could have been as high as 40% to 50% of all births … In actuality [it] probably ranged from 15% to 30% of all births“. In practice, this meant large numbers of healthy babies, especially girls, were deliberately killed to cope with limited resources. Babies up to a few years old who fell ill or were deemed surplus were often strangled or left to die. This grim truth is rarely mentioned in schools or media today. According to Rubinstein, it was “ubiquitous” in Australia prior to Western influence.

Several anthropological accounts describe cannibalism of infants and small children in some regions. For instance, an 19th-century observer on the northern coast reported: “Cannibalism is practised by all natives on the north coast … Only children of tender age – up to about two years old, are considered fit subjects for food, and if they fall ill are often strangled by the old men, cooked, and eaten… Parents eat their own children … young and old, [all] partake of it.” (In this passage, even adults were implicated in rare cases: two lost Europeans were reportedly killed and eaten by a tribe in 1874.) Such accounts are shocking, yet they were recorded by colonial-era missionaries and explorers. Today’s activists tend to dismiss or deny them entirely.

December 26, 2025

The US-Mexican border

Filed under: Americas, History, Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

An amusing exchange on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

    Ordnance Jay Packard Esq. @OrdnancePackard

    Hey @LineGoesDown, interesting your little map includes the Comancheria, a vast section of that northern green area that Mexico never set foot in because they’d get their shit pushed in by the Comanche.

    It was only after the Mexican-American war that the United States put a stop to the Comanche using Mexico like an ATM.

It’s actually even funnier than that.

The reason Mexicans kept getting their shit pushed in by the Comancheria was gun control.

No, seriously. It was Spanish colonial policy to keep the population disarmed and rely entirely on deployment of the military to keep order and prevent Indian incursions. Mexico inherited this.

This was impossible. The land was vast. State capacity and the military were overstretched. The Comanches were too mobile. Result: misery and massacre.

Americans, inheriting the British colonial policy of everybody bring your own guns and form militias, didn’t suffer as badly. Raiders more often went where the soft targets were, and that meant the disarmed ones in the Mexican zone.

This is also why Alta California was so sparsely settled that Spanish and Mexican control over it was at best nominal. Anglo settlers were culturally and politically much better equipped to hold the territory, making the Mexican session eventually inevitable.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-25.

Update, 28 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 14, 2025

Where does all the money go for so many First Nations bands?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Earlier this month, I shared a long thread highlighting some incredible findings from the audit of a single First Nations group in Saskatchewan (here). On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @Martyupnorth discusses how the federal government has gone out of its way not to ensure that First Nations funding is transparent:

    Cory Morgan @CoryBMorgan
    The Siksika reserve got $1.3 billion a few years ago and the housing is still predominantly shit.

    It’s not lack of government funding folks.

    It’s a broken system of racial apartheid.

    This ruling won’t help a bit.

Let’s talk about transparency in First Nations reserve finances in Canada. It’s topic that’s sparked a lot of debate.

Back in 2013, the Harper government passed the First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA), which required chiefs and councils to publicly disclose their salaries, expenses, and audited financial statements. The goal? To ensure accountability for the billions in federal funding going to reserves, empowering community members to hold leaders responsible and curb potential corruption.

But the Act was controversial from the start. Critics, including many First Nations leaders (no surprise there), called it paternalistic, imposed without proper consultation, and an infringement on Indigenous sovereignty. Some argued it violated privacy by forcing the public release of sensitive financial details, like personal remuneration schedules.

Enter Justin Trudeau. During his 2015 campaign, he promised to repeal the FNFTA, saying it wasn’t “respectful” to First Nations and needed replacement with a co-developed approach. Once in power, his government didn’t formally repeal the Act, but effectively reversed it by suspending enforcement. They stopped withholding funds from non-compliant bands, halted court actions, and reinstated frozen money. Compliance rates plummeted afterward, with fewer bands disclosing info publicly.

See the screen shot below. The Siksika Nation, to whom Cory refers to, hasn’t dislosed financial data since 2013.

The Liberals’ rationale? Building “mutual accountability” through partnership rather than top-down rules, addressing privacy concerns and respecting self-governance. But a decade later, as of 2025, the Act remains on the books unenforced, while polls show most Canadians still want transparency in how reserve funds are mis-managed.

What do you think? Does ditching enforcement help or hinder real accountability?

Update: At some point, the audits have to start and the government and the courts will then have their hands full:

December 12, 2025

British Columbia’s embrace of UNDRIP entails vast unintended consequences

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The government of British Columbia may have downplayed or even deliberately lied about the impact of incorporating the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) into BC’s legal system, but I suspect even they are suddenly realizing just what a legal disaster they have unleashed on their province (and indirectly, on the rest of Canada):

A map showing the Cowichan title lands outlined in black. These lands were declared subject to Aboriginal title by the BC Supreme Court earlier this year, in accordance with the UNDRIP provisions added to BC law in 2019.

When the B.C. NDP introduced a 2019 act committing the province to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), they very specifically assured critics that it would not be a “veto” over existing laws.

“The UN declaration does not contain the word veto, nor does the legislation contemplate or create a veto”, Scott Fraser, the province’s then Indigenous relations minister, told the B.C. Legislative Assembly.

Fraser explained that it was not “bestowing any new laws”, it would not “create any new rights” and it certainly wouldn’t make B.C. subservient to a UN declaration.

Fraser would even explicitly assure British Columbians that there was no conceivable future in which, say, a private landowner could suddenly see their property declared Aboriginal land.

“We are not creating a bill here that is designed to have our laws struck down,” he said.

That it only took six years for all of these scenarios to take place may explain why there is so much panic in B.C. right now.

The newly appointed head of the B.C. Conservative Party is calling for an emergency Christmas session of the legislature to excise UNDRIP from provincial law, saying it has become an anti-democratic tool.

Even B.C. Premier David Eby — a onetime champion of the legislation — has said that “clearly, amendments are needed”.

And British Columbians, whose support for the UN law was already not great, are growing restless. According to an Angus Reid Institute poll released on Wednesday, Eby ranks as one of the least popular provincial leaders in the country.

What changed was a Dec. 5 B.C. Appeals Court ruling that not only struck down a B.C. law (the Mineral Tenure Act) on the grounds that it violated UNDRIP, but effectively ruled that any law or government action could similarly be overturned if it wasn’t in line with the 32-page UN declaration.

By writing UNDRIP into B.C. law, the province had adopted the Declaration as “the interpretive lens through which B.C. laws must be viewed and the minimum standards against which they should be measured”, read the majority decision.

Although UNDRIP is mostly filled with uncontroversial declarations about languages and traditional medicine, its clauses are pretty uncompromising when it comes to issues of land use or resource development.

“Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired”, reads a subsection of Article 26. It also states that Indigenous peoples “own, use, develop and control” any land that they’ve held traditionally.

Eby is saying that the courts took it too far, and that writing UNDRIP into B.C. law was only ever meant as a holistic decision-making guide, rather than a law superceding all others.

As Eby told reporters this week, by signing onto UNDRIP, B.C. wasn’t intending to put courts “in the driver’s seat”.

December 9, 2025

Auditing where the money goes, First Nations edition

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t think many Canadians would argue with the government providing funding to First Nations groups in remote areas so they have access to services and amenities that most of us take for granted. But the government has been giving so much money for so long with very little evidence that the money is actually making a difference. Surely, a regular system of audits would show what happens to the money after the feds cut a cheque and why conditions in First Nations communities aren’t improving? Well, on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @The Reclamare shares a thread detailing some of the findings of a recent audit of a First Nations NGO and it’s kind of disturbing:

Where our taxes go, First Nations Edition

KPMG audited the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) representing 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan

They analyzed spending between April 2019 and March 2024

Hang on🧵

#1 – COVID Funding

$26 million was audited
KPMG found $23.5 million was questionable
** an 89% failure rate**

– no records
– missing contracts
– missing invoices

# 2 – Travel expenditures

$800K of travel spending was audited
$316K was flagged by auditors, a 39% failure rate

Half the travel bookings couldn’t be justified, either policy violations or they couldn’t explain the purpose. And one Vice Chief was billing personal trips

# 3 – Executive Pay Raises during Covid

On November 5, 2020, a briefing note went to FSIN’s Treasury Board recommending:

$60,000 pay raise for the Chief
$40,000 pay raise for each Vice Chief

Retroactive 8 months prior

(more…)

December 2, 2025

Dead Wrong: How Canada got the Residential School story so wrong

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Juno News shares Candice Malcolm‘s foreword to Dead Wrong by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan:

Canada is off track. We’ve lost our way.

How else could we make sense of the moral panic produced from a half-baked report coming from a small Indian Band in Central British Columbia in the spring of 2021? In response, the country lost its mind. Following reports of 215 “unmarked graves” at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School, the supposedly trusted sources of our society – journalists, elected officials, academics and so-called experts – reported fiction as fact, without doing any due diligence or research into the still unproven and questionable claims of mass graves and secret midnight burials of hundreds of deceased children.

A failure of this magnitude doesn’t happen instantaneously. It’s built over time as those who profess to speak the truth deliver deception, doublespeak, and misinformation – all in the name of addressing some grievance, advancing an agenda, and creating a narrative.

The only conclusion we can now draw is that our country is not what it should be, not what it was.

There are a myriad of complicated reasons to explain our clear downward trajectory – institutional capture, a hard-left consensus among political and cultural elites (driven in large part by government-funded journalists and the state broadcaster pushing woke propaganda), a large and inefficient bureaucracy that stifles growth and

innovation, institutions built upon a moral code that became unfashionable, and so on.

Canada has become a feminist country that proudly discriminates against men and diminishes the role of mothers. It has become a post-national country that loathes its founders and openly discriminates against individuals based on skin colour. It isn’t just post-Christian, it’s anti-Christian – evident from the treatment of Evangelical prayer leader Sean Feucht, the coordinated attacks against him in the summer of 2025 and the cancellation of tour stops across the country, not to mention total disinterest and cover-up of the 120+ churches that have been decimated and destroyed in the wake of the unmarked graves fiasco.

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed our country fall from a functional system, into something almost unrecognizable.

The Canada I grew up in was safe, stable and secure. We knew our neighbours, we trusted institutions and didn’t worry too much about politics. Being Canadian meant something. We had a community, an identity, a shared purpose. Most of us believed in upward mobility and the Canadian dream: that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will have the same – or dare I say better – opportunities and quality of life than your parents.

This is clearly no longer the case for most Canadians under the age of 45, and that is a major problem for all of us.

I came across a simple social graph by William Meijer that clearly explains what has happened better than anything else I’ve seen. You could apply this to countries, companies and even personal relationships.

Simply put: kindness got in the way of truth.

Meijer writes the accompanying caption: “An extreme commitment to the truth makes relationships acutely dysfunctional but systems chronically functional (think Elon Musk).

An extreme commitment to kindness makes relationships acutely functional but systems chronically dysfunctional (think Sweden, UK).”

Canada perhaps represents the “kind dysfunction” better than any other place.

November 24, 2025

The Canadian paradox – “settlers” will never belong but “migrants” and “refugees” instantly belong

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Mark Milke and Tom Flanagan outline one of the major issues dividing Canadians — the state and state-funded propaganda demonizing “settlers” that also lionizes much more recent arrivals as if they’re automatically better than non-Indigenous Canadians:

A depiction of Samuel de Champlain’s first encounter with the Iroquois (Mohawks) in 1609, a forest skirmish on future Lake Champlain, including fanciful rowboats, rather than canoes.
Caption from the National Post, image from the National Archives of Canada

If Canadians care to understand why our country is increasingly fractured, one key driver is the notion that non-Indigenous Canadians — “settlers” as they are called — should be grateful to live anywhere in the Americas.

The “settler” label is mostly directed at those of British and European ancestry. But it can apply to anyone whose families arrived from anywhere — Africa, Asia, the Levant, the Pacific — who were not part of the prior waves of migration to the Americas.

According to the most recent scientific knowledge, human settlement in the Americas began about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. These pioneers of settlement must have arrived from Asia by boat and hopscotched along the Pacific coast because the interior land was glaciated. They migrated as far south as modern-day Chile, but it is unknown how far inland they penetrated and whether they survived to merge with later migratory settlers.

Another wave of migration started around 13,000 years ago when an ice-free corridor opened through Alberta between the two great glaciers covering North America. This made it possible for people from the now submerged land of Beringia to move south through Alaska, Yukon and Alberta across North America.

Later, but at an unknown date, came the movement of the Dene-speaking peoples now living mostly in Alaska and Canada’s North (though the Tsuut’ina got to southern Alberta and the Navajo to the southwestern United States). Their languages still show traces of their relatively recent Siberian origins.

The Inuit migrated from Siberia across the Arctic to Greenland around AD 1000. Another group inhabited the Arctic starting around 2500 BC, but their relationship to the Inuit is uncertain.

In short, the Americas were settled in waves from Asia. Everyone alive today is descended from settlers. The latest “Indigenous” settlers arrived barely ahead of the first European settlers, the Vikings, who settled in Greenland and Newfoundland, and of Christopher Columbus, who started Spanish settlement in the Caribbean.

Singling out Europeans as “settlers” drives land acknowledgments, as well as demands for compensation and reconciliation. It plays on guilt about the actions of actors long since dead, while the concurrent demands for land, decision-making power and financial settlements occur on an open-ended basis. Internationally, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) also assumes the Indigenous vs. settler-colonial divide is valid.

Why does this matter? Because peaceful, relatively prosperous nation-states are not guaranteed to last. In fact, they’re the exception, not the rule. To make actual progress in unifying Canada as opposed to watching it break down and fragment into hundreds of inconsequential principalities (a separate Quebec, a separate Alberta, and multiple First Nations with state-like powers, of which there would be up to 200 in British Columbia alone), it is overdue to dissect these assumptions, and the related belief that Canadians have done little to make up for some of the wrongs done in history.

November 3, 2025

The BC government “has been doing everything in its power to have Aboriginal title triumph across B.C.”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A Fraser Institute commentary by Bruce Pardy addresses the role of the NDP government of British Columbia in undermining the established laws on land title in the province among other actions to the advantage of First Nations bands and to the definite disadvantage of ordinary British Columbians:

Recently, British Columbia Attorney General Niki Sharma said that fee simple title in private property is superior to Aboriginal title. She’s a day late and a dollar short. In fact, her NDP government, led by Premier David Eby, has been doing everything in its power to have Aboriginal title triumph across B.C.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has granted several First Nations a portion of a 1,846-acre land claim on Lulu Island. B.C. Supreme Court

A few days earlier, the City of Richmond sent out a letter to more than 125 property owners warning them that the security of their land is in doubt. “For those whose property is in the area outlined in black,” the letter reads, “the Court has declared aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership … The entire area outlined in green has been claimed on appeal by the Cowichan First Nations.”

The Richmond letter is a consequence of a recent decision of the B.C. Supreme Court, which awarded Aboriginal title over 800 acres of land in Richmond to the Cowichan First Nation. Wherever Aboriginal title is found to exist, said the court, it is a “prior and senior right” to other property interests, whether the land is public or private.

It is finally dawning on British Columbians that obsequious devotion to reconciliation is putting their land at risk. Sharma claimed that B.C. was pursuing multiple grounds of appeal, but that makes her a hypocrite. Her government did not robustly defend in court against the Cowichan claim. And in a dozen other ways, the Eby government has sought to put title and control of B.C. into Aboriginal hands.

In early 2024, it proposed to amend the province’s Land Act, which governs the use of Crown land in B.C. It planned to give B.C.’s hundreds of First Nations a veto over mining, hydro projects, farming, forestry, docks and communication towers. The government tried to consult quietly, but the backlash was immediate. It withdrew the proposals, promising to be more transparent. But it did not shelve its objectives or its plans. And did not deliver on its promise. Instead, it sought to make agreements over specific territories with specific Aboriginal groups, often negotiated covertly and announced after the fact.

In April 2024, the Eby government recognized Aboriginal title to Haida Gwaii, the archipelago on Canada’s West Coast. Around 5,000 people live on Haida Gwaii. About half are Haida, who voted overwhelmingly in favour of the deal. But non-Haida residents had no say. The Haida agreement says private property will be honoured, but private property is incompatible with Aboriginal title, which is communal. If Haida Gwaii really is subject to Aboriginal title, then no one can own parts of it privately.

Update: I forgot to include the URL to Mr. Pardy’s article … fixed now.

October 21, 2025

The threat to legal title to land across Canada

Filed under: Cancon, History, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’d warned years ago that the performative “land acknowledgements” that so many Canadian organizations started using at the beginning of events and gatherings at least a decade back were a bad idea, because they were almost always historically misleading and might be used in future lawfare. Well, the future is here, and the precedent has been set in British Columbia with a court ruling that aboriginal land claims from a BC First Nation has more standing in court than the legal titles held by the current owners. On his Substack, Brian Lilley discusses the issue:

The City of Richmond, British Columbia is warning homeowners their title to their homes may be at risk. It all dates back to an August ruling from the B.C. Supreme Court called Cowichan Tribes that said Crown and private title in a 7 1/2 square kilometre area of Richmond was “defective and invalid.”

While some at the time said that the ruling would not impact homeowners, the legal department for the City of Richmond clearly thinks differently.

“The court has declared Aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership – this was mandated without any prior notice to the landowners,” a letter sent to homeowners in the area impacted reads.

The letter was sent by Mayor Malcolm Brodie and tells residents the city will be appealing and holding public consultations. It’s not just the City of Richmond appealing this ruling it’s also the province and the Musqueam Indian Band.

You can read more from our friends over at Juno News.

The entire ruling from the B.C. Supreme Court is confusing, as is the jurisprudence set out by the Supreme Court on the issue of Aboriginal title dating back to one of those decisions in 2014. Thankfully Professor Dwight Newman, the Canada Research Chair in Rights, Communities and Constitutional Law at the University of Saskatchewan, has laid out an explainer of what happened in the Cowichan case, the 2014 Supreme Court case and what needs to be done going forward.

Give it a read.

Last week, Kim du Toit responded to an Australian land acknowledgement on a recent TV show:

The history of this entire world is a story of migration, settlement, wars over territory and Tribe A taking land from Tribe B — bloody hell, they’re still fighting the same wars in the Balkans — but it’s only recently that the arguments over who owns what have become a third-party issue rather than something that the involved parties settle between themselves. Or, to put it in a more scholarly fashion:

    Every person alive on this planet today has ancestors who were displaced by force somewhere in their lineage. Every person alive on this planet today has ancestors who displaced other people by force somewhere in their lineage. It’s an inevitable fact of human history. American natives fought with each other over land and resources, and some tribes, like the Dakota (Sioux), were notorious for attacking their neighbors. Europe’s history is rife with such, from the Vikings to the Norman invasion of Britain. In fact, few if any of the people of Europe today are the original inhabitants of the land they reside on now; the one exception may be the Basque of the Pyrenees Mountains, but even they, at some point, came there from somewhere else. The French people we know now derive their name from the Franks, a Germanic tribe, and as for the British Isles, that motley group of islands has seen so many invasions, from Picts to Celts to Romans, Saxons, Anglians, Jutes, and Normans, that it would be difficult to keep track as they go by.

Here’s the simple response to all the handwringing and aggrievement over the “stolen land” claims: get over it, because you’re never going to get it back. End of story.

And to a lesser extent, the same is true of “cultural appropriation”: where White kids are somehow forbidden to wear their hair in those disgusting dreadlocks because Africans somehow have “ownership” of a hairstyle. What bullshit. It’s like saying that Black people can’t drink Scotch whisky because whisky is traditionally a product of the northern provinces of (lily-white) Britain, or that the Irish can’t eat chips because potatoes originally came from America.

Everyone borrows cultural artifacts and customs from everyone else. That’s been the habit of mankind for millennia, and no cries of outrage can overturn it.

When it comes to land, the stronger group has taken it from its “original” (and sometimes not-so original) weaker inhabitants. That this activity has become somewhat less egregious and bloody in recent times does not gainsay its basic premise — and where it has become more bloody, the weaker continue to learn its hard history — as the “Palestinians” are (re-)learning in their efforts to eradicate the state of Israel. (They’re unlikely ever to give up, which simply means that Israel will be forced to teach them the same lesson again and again, ad infinitum. As I’ve said many times before, the Arabs are lucky that the Jews have an inexplicable aversion to genocide, or else “from the river to the sea” could easily have changed to “from the Golan to the Suez”. Vae victis — a Latin expression — has particular currency here.)

So enough with the kowtowing (a Chinese expression) to the Perpetually Aggrieved. Fuck off, all of you, and make the best of what you’ve got. Heaven knows, most of what you can achieve comes courtesy of Western civilization.

You’re welcome.

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