Gute Absichten werden schlecht [regarding Aboriginal title]

The article is paywalled.

The biggest problem that reconciliation is now facing is that if we seriously treat Indigenous treaties as an important facet of Canadian law, then we need to reconcile with the fact that Canadian provincial governments spent decades breaking standing law to steal peoples land. This land was then take from Indigenous Canadians, and then sold to non-Indigenous Canadians.

This was particularly the case in British Columbia, where the government stole land without signing treaties despite the law at the time requiring it.

The courts have rightly ruled that various Indigenous populations have the right to sue for restitution or to have their land returned. The big question though is what is this supposed to mean for all the businesses, investors and homeowners that own the land now.

We need new treaties too actually fully settle this, but this would amount for essentially a constitutional level negotiations for Canada.

Edit: This article was written by David Frum, and anything he says about Indigenous people needs to be said while keeping in mind he’s a Residential School Graves Denier.

Unlike random guys on Reddit he’s well educated enough to know how ground penetrating radar works. He’s not questioning the reliability of this technology for identify Stalin-era mass graves, or ones for Bosnia or Rwanda, or the identification of mass graves under Assad.

If someone demanded that the mass grave containing a 100,000 bodies be dug up before anyone accused the Assad regime of that number of deaths we’d rightfully accuse them of denying the atrocity. The same is unfortunately true with David Frum. He’s a guy I used to have a lot of respect for.