Can Justin be anti-Racist?

This morning, I sent the following to my Liberal member of parliament. Do you know who your MP is? Are they also a member of the same party? Maybe this is a letter you can forward to them.

E-mail from constituents matter. Many e-mails from many constituents matter more. Many thoughtful e-mails (I tried to be so) even when forwarded with few edits matter still more. We. can. influence. That's what responsible citizenship is about. Look up your Liberal MP's e-mail address at parl.gc.ca and fire it off, too, okay?

Hi <name of your Liberal MP>

<I'm quoting something someone posted on FB but I feel strongly this way, too.> <For what it's worth, my status with regard to First Nations Membership is ... >

I'm calling on your leader, our Prime Minister, to repudiate, disavow and do actual things to reverse the policy embodied in something his father said.

Recently, someone posted on Facebook one of those annoying graphics-with-texts in them. I call them annoying because it means you can't copy/paste the text somewhere else in order to interact with it. But that's okay. I'll type it in here.

The. Rt. Hon. Pierre Elliott Trudeau said, "If you no longer speak your language and no longer practice your culture, then you have no right to demand aboriginal rights from us, because you are assimilated with the ruling power."

The graphic has a split face, on the right is Pierre Trudeau's face, on the left, his son, Justin's.

This would be a good moment for our current prime minister to quote his father explicitly, to disavow and apologize for the statement -- not just as a statement of his father but as of one made by his predecessor in the office he holds -- and pledge now, and act promptly to undo the structures established by the cabinet department whose animus (despite its several-times renaming, rebranding) has often been that echoed by the one time Deputy Minister, Duncan Campbell Scott: "I want to get rid of the Indian problem ... Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada who has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question and no Indian Department." Even if that kind of policy was meant kindly (I'll allow that he may have thought it was so far as he was concerned, but I'm inclined to doubt it, and it hasn't worked out that way, ever), it's racist and offensive and a piece of our past that must be actively turned away from if only to lend a shred of credibility (and a very tiny shred at that) to our self-congratulation in looking across the border to the south (and their looking across the border to us), to say that on race we're at least not as messed up as they are.

For starters piles of First Nations communities have not had clean water much longer than Flint, Michigan has suffered under that lash.

"Not a racist" was never good enough, and now we all know why. It's time for even the Canadian Government to start turning towards striving to become anti-racist.

Sincerely,

<your name>

Are you going to?

Peter MacKay wants my vote, eh?

My Facebook feed has been lit up recently with ads from Peter MacKay. It's been a long time since I voted Conservative but I thought, "okay, I'll tell you what it would take to get my vote". So I went to his web-site, to the contact page, and asked him some questions. With the current unrest to the south -- and the prissy-pure reputation we're enjoying now (falsely), you know where I started, don't you? And then I got going.

At the bottom, I promised to post it here, and to post any something-deeper-than-press-release response I get from his people.

So, Peter...

How serious an anti-racist are you? Do you pledge to bring clean water to the numerous reservation-Flints across Canada regardless of cost? Do you pledge to correct the historic rates of over-incarceration of non-white and/or indigenous folks? (those, for starters; what about these other issues...)

Will you bring back the progressive taxation system that Brian Mulroney dismantled, so that adequate social programs can be fully funded without question? Will you remove contribution limits from payroll deductions to CPP/QPP and EI and keep those funds within those systems? (only the first reliable way to fund the kind of retirement that my parents' generation could count on and that is fundamentally threatened for me and for my kids. If you do that, don't stop there, but that's a good first step.)

Will you amend the Canada Health Act to compel the provinces to include basic vision and dental care in all their provincial plans? ("basic" here includes checkups, cleanings, fillings, root canals and caps -- together with public-health accountability so that those costs don't go crazy - braces maybe, too, where the current state is beyond a certain point)

Will you increase Canada's commitment to combat global warming by bringing in even more aggressive measures than the carbon tax, by slashing subsidies to Big Oil and instead fund fusion, solar, wind and non-weaponizable fission (LFTR, for instance) sources of energy? Will you compel oil companies and their successors to clean up their garbage, their leftover wells that they have abandoned with no budget in place for their decommissioning?

Will you help Alberta manage the political pain of finally adopting a provincial sales tax so that their budget is not so dependent on oil revenues and/or return the revenues unconstitutionally seized from them through the National Energy Program (while also, still, slashing the subsidies given to the oil companies as suggested above)?

Will you actively close down and mandate the clean up of non-closed-system salmon farming on the west coast?

Will you bring in real electoral reform, at the least bringing proportional representation blocks to individual large metro areas (i.e. all metro areas larger in population than Calgary or so) whose fragmentation into small ridings means that many voices (like mine) are never, ever heard at the ballot box? Failing that, will you at least bring back public funding of elections based on popular vote that Your Predecessor, Mr. Harper removed from me (stealing the last echoes of my voice)?

I thought not. I guess you know whether you can count on my vote then.

Go ahead, Peter, surprise me. I know the bigots whose votes you need in order to get nominated won't go along with these ideas but if I don't Say All the Things! nobody will ever hear them.