Peter Best is an author and lawyer based in Sudbury, Ontario.For decades, indigenous leaders and activists in Canada have been successfully engaging in a quasi-separatist, political and legal campaign for more and more Canadian taxpayer money, and more and more “independent”, “nation to nation” legal power with which to, amongst other country-harming things, deal with that taxpayer money in whatever unaccountable and non-transparent ways they see fit.One effective weapon used by them in this country-fragmenting campaign is the false and insulting labelling of their fellow non-indigenous Canadians, past and present, with horrible epithets such as “racists” and “colonialist settlers."By these means of constantly filching the good names of ordinary, non-indigenous Canadians, they exploit the unjustified phenomenon of naïve white liberal guilt, a phenomenon endemic amongst our unconfident and historically illiterate elites, who have debased themselves and their country by acquiescing to — and even agreeing with — these horrible epithets, directed not only against themselves and their ancestors, but against all their fellow non-indigenous Canadians and all their ancestors..MCCRAE: Every child matters, or perhaps not.It has been open season to egregiously insult non-indigenous Canadians, and, meeting no pushback while seeing short-term success, the indigenous calculated-insult campaign builds, getting wilder and more unchecked and unrestrained all the time.The Assembly of First Nations says that non-indigenous Canadians are systemically racist, with AFN Chief Woodhouse-Nepinak applying that label to Canadian police forces.Chief Clarence Louis of the Osoyoos band in his book, "Rez Rules," accuses Canada of systemic racism and suggests that non-indigenous “bloodlines” are inferior to those of the indigenous. His book was lauded by former prime minister Paul Martin.Indigenous academic Pamela Palmater, representing pretty well the prevailing orthodoxy cynically peddled by most indigenous academic elites, calls white people the “enemy” and writes of “… the entirety of the colonial structures, powers, laws, authorities and measures used to maintain us in poverty and to dispossess and oppress us.”Part-indigenous Globe and Mail journalist Tanya Talaga accuses Canadians of racism towards Indigenous peoples, of “betraying the treaties” and letting indigenous children die of “flat neglect”. Her recent book, "The Knowing," is filled with virtual hate speech against white people. No pushback from anyone for any of this, not even from her employer, which continues to regularly publish her false insults against its readers..Part-indigenous former journalist Jesse Wente, in his book "Unreconciled," rails incoherently against “racist systems and structures." No pushback from anyone. In fact, the CBC gushed over Wente and his country-insulting book.As part of the general campaign by Canada’s elites to suppress free speech on this general topic, chiefs in British Columbia publicly called a lawyer’s and a politician’s attempts to correct a BC Law Society misstatement about the Kamloops allegedly-murdered-children story “dishonest, repugnant and ugly”. Similarly, indigenous leaders in Ontario labelled an opinion of Premier Ford about indigenous people always coming “hat in hand” to governments as “racist”, causing Ford to apologize.Even parliament has been guilted into unanimously voting that Canadians, past and present, committed genocide against indigenous peoples. Again — no pushback.Members of our judiciary have, in the absence of any properly adduced evidence, repeated the genocide falsity, said that water problems on reserves are caused by systemic racism, and that indigenous people have a “rational distrust of court systems," and called non-indigenous Canadians “uninvited guests” in Canada. Again — no pushback..FLETCHER: How can island tribes claim ancestral territory on the mainland?.Many of Canada’s non-indigenous academics followed suit, basically calling their fellow citizens and their forefathers land thieves and murderers. Clearly, it’s open season against non-indigenous Canadians, who, bewildered and demoralized, see themselves and their ancestors being recklessly attacked with impunity from all sides every day, and never defended.Most of these insulting attacks are immune from successful legal defamation claims because the insulters carefully avoid naming specific, living Canadians. The insults are usually against general categories of Canadians. A general group that is collectively insulted, with no specific names mentioned, cannot successfully sue for defamation. But once in a while. one of these insulters, flushed with the sense of reckless impunity that years of lack of pushbacks have created, makes a mistake and insults a living, named individual, and thereby opens up himself or herself to a valid defamation claim.This is what happened to Dr. Michelle Stewart, an associate professor in women’s and gender studies at the University of Regina, whose research and community work "focuses on the ongoing role of settler colonialism and systemic racism that creates racialized disparities in Canada – with an aim to decolonize programs and practices.".She had a kneejerk, emotional reaction to a book written by Alberta writer Candis McLean which was a strong, passionate and principled defense and attempted exoneration — in the honorable, courageous and vaunted tradition of J’Accuse! — of two Saskatoon police officers who, she argued, unjustly lost their jobs over the tragic incident of Neil Stonechild, a 17 year-old indigenous person found frozen to death in a field outside the city. It seems that the mere facts that Neil Stonechild was indigenous and the two policemen were white caused Stewart's internal trip-switch to be flipped to the on position. Without even having read the book, she rather recklessly wrote and published on Facebook that it was “racist garbage."The trial judge in the ensuing defamation case brought by McLean actually read the book. He ruled that there was nothing racist about it at all, and that Stewart calling the book “racist garbage” equated to falsely defaming the author of it a racist as well. In addition to ruling that the book was not racist in any way, and that Stewart had recklessly defamed McLean, and given that Stewart had refused to retract or apologize for her defamation, the trial judge awarded McLean financial damages for the injury to her reputation and dignity. He also ordered that Stewart compensate McLean for part of her legal costs..SLOBODIAN: Yet another Jewish senior randomly attacked — just another day in the new Canada.Hurrah and kudos to McLean! Someone finally called out the relentless stream of lies about and insults against non-indigenous Canadians made by indigenous leaders and activists. We should all thank her for taking the one small step that as a private citizen she was capable of taking, not only to defend her own reputation, but by extension, defending the reputation of all non-indigenous Canadians and the objective fact-finding process itself.We can live vicariously through McLean’s victory of objective truth over reckless, factually indifferent propaganda, and feel better about ourselves because of it. We can hope that indigenous leaders and activists will take McLean v. Stewart to heart. We can hope that indigenous leaders and activists will heed the trial judge’s warning that “democracy is imperiled when people think it better to suppress or ban books rather than debate their merits.”The lies and half-truths daily uttered and published by indigenous leaders and activists hurt non-indigenous Canadians, individually and collectively. They make us feel, as Shakespeare said, “poor indeed.” Harsh and dishonest words close minds. They create profound social division and resentment, the opposite of the supposed “reconciliation” that indigenous leaders and activists profess to want.Peter Best is an author and lawyer based in Sudbury, Ontario.
