White Paper had real worth
Re: Pierre Trudeau’s misbegotten plan. Michael Bryant, June 23.
Mr. Bryant never explains why Pierre Trudeau’s progressive vision of “one set of laws for all” was morally wrong, which should be the issue for debate. The 1969 White Paper proposals were too quickly dropped, a victim of the counterculture movement, with its then culturally-ascendant phenomenon of identity politics, where people care more about the special group they identify with than their country — where people sacrifice ageless liberal values at the altar of baseless, abstract divisions of blood: mythical divisions that are undeniable only because people believe them. But they untrue and they must be resisted!
South African apartheid was an especially sordid version of the immoral, segregationist Canadian laws and policies that Trudeau’s White Paper was laudably trying to end. Nelson Mandela, whose memory and moral example Canadians justly revere, successfully advocated the establishment of a legal regime in South Africa of all races living in a state of complete legal equality. Canada should follow Nelson Mandela’s example. The present circumstances of Canada and of Canada’s downtrodden indigenous peoples, where only their elites seem to be prospering, at this, our 150th anniversary, should compel us all toward working to establish in our country the White Paper’s and Nelson Mandela’s positive, liberal, and inspiring goal of one set of laws for all. Peter Best, Sudbury, ON
Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau and his Indian Affairs minister, Jean Chretien, should not have backed off on their plan to bring the indigenous people into the 20th century through desegregation. By that they meant scrapping the Department of Indian Affairs, scrubbing all reference to Indian laws and rescinding special status for indigenous people, thus making them full status citizens of Canada. It didn’t happen! And so almost 50 years later we continue to receive reports of thousands of ghettoized indigenous people living depressing, desperate lives in poorly-serviced, hopeless, farflung northern settlements with nothing to do and no chance for a future.
Clinging to their nostalgic, romantic vision of the past may have seemed the right way to go for indigenous people, but in reality many can only eke out a bare existence through billions of dollars, annually, of handouts from Ottawa. Because no one had the courage to bite the bullet and change course ( although insightful Pierre Trudeau made an attempt), the indigenous people are still wallowing in their desperately poor, self-imposed ghettos. Jim McDonald, Dundas, ON