I Amuse Myself

47 Replies to “I Amuse Myself”

1. I would like to Know what the SCJ was phoning (PM) Harper about?
   If it was not Court Business, was it phone sex? CBC thinks it was a private issue…

2. They do get one decision right every few years, think of the Olympics or World cup, and just like those it takes two or three decades to pay for it / or reverse a decision.
   They don’t seem to like freedom very much though, which grates me to no end.

3. I pray this serves as precedence for one of them elitist b@st@rds gated communities some day.

4. Alright, I’ll vote for Marc Nadon and Michael Moldaver. I think Beverley McLachlin is a spent force, and many of the others are even worse, with Rosalie Abella being the bottom of the barrel.

5. I want to know what the difference between electing the a@@holes,and having them appointed by other elected a@@holes makes any difference?

6. “They don’t seem to like freedom very much though, which grates me to no end.”
   That would be because they have it, and we don’t. Freedom that is.
   Oop! Sorry I was confusing freedom with power. Sad when that happens. Whatever happened to English common law?

7. “Let’s just elect the bastards and be done with it.”
   Or we can just forego democracy altogether and hand the reins to unelected appointees. We’re already halfway there.

8. The REAL problem is that governments don’t have the spine to utilize the Notwithstanding Clause at every opportunity when the SC believes they are God. That is why the damned thing was put in our horribly flawed Constitution in the first bloody place.

9. And as the learned readers of SDA will all know, 6 of the 9 members of the court were appointed by Harper which makes this ruling all the more depressing.

10. The property rights of Canadians are codified by the BNA (British North America Act) The Indians will love their taxation obligations and sharing the same burden as the Whiteman.
    Does this mean the Crown has no obligation to Manage the Indian Lands?
    Title is mostly symbolic in Canada

11. Trudeau made sure that the “elites” would rule Canada just like in a communist state. His charter of rights was rigged to give the judiciary power over our elected officials.
    Who in their right mind gives a handful of natives full rights to stop industry? If the government wants to run a 150′ power tower through my property I have no recourse. These Indians now get the last word to holding up resources being extracted and transported.
    These so called guardians of the land want to live like 1814, then let them. Dismantle all Indian affairs departments provincial and federal. I’m fed up with this. Blocking roads, rail, threatening elected officials.

12. There is a method to this madness that most do not appreciate. An end game. The winning goal being a steady reduction in Indian Affairs funding as Aboriginals start receiving the benefits of resource extraction on lands claimed by them. The Natives will soon regret these court decisions as it will signal the end to the publicly funded gravy train.

13. Smart move by the Supreme Court soon Indians with property rights in hand will figure out that leasing the land is more secure for their own future and well being than saying the things Mr Suzuki wants them to say and only sends them a few bucks if the media reports on the story. Wen the green political interest in their land goes away so will the money. The pipeline and its benefits will be there for a long time.

14. Its good to be Kings with no consequences for themselves..

15. It wasn’t so long ago I believe that McLachlin clearly pointed out that justice for Canadians was on the SCC priority list secondary to social engineering and making sure the natives got a bigger slice of the pie. So now one of the only peoples on earth who have never contributed a single thing toward making the world a better place and have done nothing to benefit society in general are going to control the ones that do, and all the while demand more from them. What a sick mf’n society we are becoming.

16. Beverley Mclachlin is hardly a spent force.
    She is only 70,so will be Chief Justice for another five years.Imagine what she and Trudeau would do to this Country together!

17. Oh dry up. The SC is doing its job-enforcing the law. It is not ruling over anyone, and electing judges is obviously a terrible idea. Conservatives also need to be careful before going all tears and tantrums over the Native land decision-it does not over-ride private property, and I think environmentalists are in for a rude shock regarding what a lot of natives choose to do with their newfound properties over their land. Many native bands are very shrewd quasi-business organizations essentially. The keys are 1) cutting red tape (this has been very bad for holding back native development but some red tape has been eliminated) and 2) cutting the pogey.

18. Wrongm hero…..the SC is not enforcing the law. They are interpreting what they THINK the legislators meant. Which is nonsense as we have seen in the past. It is long past time where legislatures, whether they be federal or provincial start to push the desires of the people onto the SC rather than the other way around. THAT is what the Notwithstanding Clause was designed to do. Use it and use it often.

19. The SCOC is free to make up laws, by “reading into” those laws passed by parliament, items of interest to itself, this is part of what Bev Mclaughlin said herself in her infamous speech given… was it 20? years ago in New Zealand.
    They should enforce law only rarely, and when the appellate courts stumble. They should decide if those laws passed are in accordance with and lawfully written under the guidelines of the constitution of Canada.
    I agree with Joey at 12.54 above, pass each and every law in the country with a notwithstanding clause, right down to those mundane laws dictating how fast we can drive on provincial highways. They can eat the notwithstanding clause every morning for breakfast in their hallowed corridors.

20. National Post:
    “Suppose, then, a government wishes to put a power line through a particular stretch of land. If the land is subject to aboriginal title, all of the rights the Court has now delineated kick in.
    But if it is merely someone’s property, no such constitutionally guaranteed rights apply. Now that we have defined and accepted aboriginal title as a constitutional right, is it not time this discrepancy was redressed?”
    http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/06/27/andrew-coyne-after-aboriginal-land-title-ruling-why-not-protect-property-rights-of-all-canadians/

21. This could spell the end of resource development in BC. The only way to ensure that such development continues is to cut gov’t funding, which should be a no-brainer. Non-natives with vast holdings of property and resources can’t collect welfare, why should they?

22. Thanks for that Marc. My letter to the Ottawa Sun yesterday on that very subject:
    Yesterday, Supreme Court Chief Justice McLachlin conferred property rights to a B.C. Indian band based on testimony about traditional hunting grounds and a decidedly activist interpretation of the intent of centuries-old treaties. Yet as recently as 1996 in the R. v. Edwards decision, this same judge looked at the invisible print between the straight forward lines in Sec. 8 of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure) and summarily declared, “It (The Charter) protects people not places”. With one stroke of her pen she dashed any hopes that Trudeau’s wonderful Charter protected the property rights of ordinary Canadians.
    So I have a question. If I wanted to look up the Supreme Court of Canada in a dictionary, would I find it next to inconsistency, or hypocrisy?
    Yours truly,

23. So Let me see if I understand this:
    I work – I pay taxes but if any Resource company, Municipality, Province or the Feds wants MY land or access thereto for any reason…I have zero recourse..basically I am screwed.
    INDIANS (I can say that now), on the other hand don’t work, pay zero taxes, suck the F***ing daylights out of Canada’s economy to the tune of about 12Billion annually, now OWN their land, the resources thereupon and can deny access to any other Federal land they deem to be “traditional” + can halt and prevent ANYONE from doing ANYTHING on said lands…???
    WTF..??
    What brand of insanity is this.??

24. Neither of these is THAT big of a deal. BC has had bizarre dysfunctional treaty issues, forever. They just extended claims on lands that basically were Indian lands no?
    The Wal-Mart thing was due to Quebec’s socialist labour laws. If Wal-Mart didn’t want to get penalized by strident labour code then don’t do business in Quebec. I wouldn’t.

25. I see several comments about property rights. folks there is no such thing in the Canadian constitution. the scoc is made up of socialists and I don’t care who appointed them . when they run roughshod over our elected government then it is time to rein them in.

26. “…Neither of these is THAT big of a deal….”
    Years from now, when you’re dining on (raw) crow, pause to reflect on your wise words.

27. Everyone assumed that British Columbia extinguished Indian rights before British Columbia joined Canada and they were right until a dozen or two years ago, the Supreme Court said no. Now they essentially said B.C. Indians own it all.
    Apparently the number one law in the world, the right of conquest does not apply in B.C. We whupped them and tricked them and demographically overwhelmed them. It’s not theirs any more except in perverse non-democratic judgements of a self-important appointed board.
    In Alberta they signed it all away for $ 5 per year plus hunting rights on the land they gave up. In their minds and those of some soft-headed judges, hunting rights mean major control.

28. Well, the truth is that ALL land “owned” by private citizens or entities other than the government is held by them at the pleasure of the Crown. Nobody really OWNS land….they own certain RIGHTS to land. And the crown holds the power to expropriate it. The real test in all of this will be if the SC now tries to claim that the title held by Indians is stronger than the titles held by all others.
    If so, the SC needs to be flushed down the toilet as the racist apartheid types they would be. If not, the Indians hold no more power to stop a government approved project than any other individual landowner……which is as it should be.

29. That’s what I’ve been saying all along.
    Turn BC into a gigantic park, and welafare state, beyond the Lower Mailand and developed urban areas of the Island.
    If you are a business owner in PG or Williams Lake (god forbid), sell now, and leave, the natives are taking over. Contrary to JT’s ignorant fantasies, The native’s idea of business, is they take all the profit, and you’re just lucky to be there.
    This cements the downfall of rural BC.
    Bush bunnies speak with fork tongue

30. You would be correct, scar, in regard to “the right of conquest” except for one small problem. In Canada, that war was never declared. Had it been the situation today would be very different.

31. So why does a war have to be declared? The British, by assuming ownership, conquered. Almost every border in Africa was from occupation, not war. Let’s go into Africa and the Arab world and say “all the borders are wrong – let’s negotiate.” Then sit back and watch the fireworks.

32. “The real test in all of this will be if the SC now tries to claim that the title held by Indians is stronger than the titles held by all others”. Joey
    The federal Government should use the Indian act & BNA to nullify this stupid Judgment. Individual title will not have a good result. In 50 years the Indians will have sold all their land to the highest bidder. They will be crying, like the case of residential schools, that this SCC Judgment was an act of discrimination.
    The Mohawk Six Nations Treaty, in the Canadian Indian Territory, was also organized into individual Title. The Indians sold the land and you now have their descendants claiming their ignorance of land ownership allowed whites to take unfair advantage. (Caledonia) The idea that the Indians never intended to sell their land is a childish fantasy.
    JMHO

33. THAT is what the Notwithstanding Clause was designed to do.
    The Notwithstanding clause is a cowardly footnoote that basically makes the rights the Charter limply attempts to codify subject to the whim of the legislature. You can keep your lawless majoritarian nightmare to yourself I prefer the rule of law.
    Contrary to one ignorant poster above, many bands are good with business and it’s spreading. There’s even private healthcare facilities being built on one.
    There is no ‘activism’ here. The BC and federal government should have negotiated and clarified these treaties eons ago. The only problem is that the property rights of average Canadians aren’t being upheld and that’s what needs to change.

34. So let me get this, if I can. Your status as a Canadian is determined by when your ancestors immigrated to the country.
    If your ancestors came here, say before 1600, you are a first class Canadian and you have property rights. But if you immigrated here after then you get to work and build the country but you have no rights to The Land.
    Yes, that’s right, we are all immigrants to this Continent. There were estimated to have been 5 Immigrations of Indigenous Peoples.
    One of these groups was of Caucasian Race and was likely driven to the South by new immigrants from Asia.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas
    After studying the bones, Chatters concluded they belonged to a Caucasoid male about 68 inches (173 cm) tall who had died in his mid fifties.[6]
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick_Man
    But, I guess, our Supremes don’t dabble in the Sciences.

35. “JT”
    They’re “good” with business when gubermint largesse greases the bottom line.
    Soo all those fishboats and seiners owned by the bushmen? They weren’t exactly bought with bank loans.
    You and I, and everyone else bought them, for the rez dwellers.
    That’s not good business, that’s ectortion, and it continues to this day

36. Or perhaps the “good business” you refer to is Chief “Broth” from Attawapiskat, who funnelled away millions into her nutual accounts, while “her people” live in shacks, with Big screen TVs mind you…….
    Or perhaps our prarie bruddas, where the Cheifs family runs the casino, takes multiple annual vacays, on thebands dime, while the non-chief families look on from the outside.
    How many more examples of “good business” from natives do you want?
    BC, the new giant park!

37. “The Indians sold the land and you now have their descendants claiming their ignorance of land ownership allowed whites to take unfair advantage. (Caledonia) The idea that the Indians never intended to sell their land is a childish fantasy.”
    The Papaschase and Michel bands near Edmonton enfranchised. Of course they were poor ignorant savages who didn’t understand what they were doing. Now they want new reserves so maybe they can sell them again.
    The Papaschase Band only existed from 1877 to 1888. At that point most of them took Metis scrip and ceased being Indians. The Supreme Court recently refused to grant them a revival.
    The Michel (Calihoo) Band enfranchised starting in the 1920s, finally eliminating the band completely in 1958. Success was what did in the Michel Band. They were descended from Iroquois traders and Metis and had no love for the reserve. One old Calihoo guy told my father that they’d have to shoot him to get him to go back to the reserve. The Calihoos had a strong work ethic and from what I see today, they still do. Heaven knows why they want to join the Indian industry.

38. You really are wantonly ignorant. And way to misspell ‘extortion’.
    Here is a business-oriented band-it may just save your life from Canada’s healthcare system.
    A Kelowna, B.C., First Nation is poised to build a 100-bed luxury private hospital serving medical tourists and the wealthy, becoming the first Canadian band to seek profit in private health care.
    http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/09/19/b-c-first-nation-poised-to-build-luxury-private-hospital-to-serve-medical-tourists-and-wealthy-canadians/

39. Medical tourism? Any reason a private hospital in Kelowna would make more money than one 200 miles further south in the U.S. Medical tourism usually involves countries with low cost of operation and Canada isn’t it. Despite being on reserve land, I am sure all regulations have to be equal to B.C. standards. There is a lot of Indian owned business in Alberta. Some does okay but much of it lasts until the grant money runs out.

40. Private health care? Is that not illegal under Tommy Douglas’s socialist medical FEDERAL and PROVINCIAL system?

41. Scar & Justthinking: RTFA. The reserves are NOT subject to those asinine federal and provincial laws. They will be LESS regulated than any US hospital, which are smothered in paperwork. If the band can pulls it off, then we’ll all be better off for it-including Americans.

42. Actually reserves are subject to provincial laws. There is no way in the world the federal government will allow private hospitals on reserves that don’t meet provincial standards in red tape.

43. I work in mineral exploration and as far as i’m concerned, this is the final nail in the coffin for resource development in Canada. Basically this decision has handed over control of mineral rights to 3 percent of the population who can reject any project for any reason. The only jobs this verdict is going to produce are in the grievance and legal industries.
    Mining is pretty much as dead here as it is in Argentina. Sure there’s a few progressive bands out there but if i’m investing my money into a project, the last thing i need to know is that the votes of a few hundred people determine whether or not a project can advance. There’s enough risk from government on permitting and those are supposedly professionally educated regulators. Ignorant and uneducated indians brainwashed by lying NGOs now determine the fate of whether a project succeeds. This is insanity to the nth degree.
    I am seriously contemplating a move to Australia because there is no future in Canadian mining. Especially when 60 percent of the country likely supports this insanity.

44. The nuances of the imposed Trudopian tribal society where some, the chosen, are more equal than others based on their language (french) or race (Indian), where unaccountable appointed elites conjure (“aboriginal title”) and “interpret” (social engineer) without the inconvenience of democratic governance or oversight. It is perversely amusing that depending on geography and skin pigmentation apartheid is either an evil that must be eradicated or it’s a tool of “social justice” that must be by “law”, embraced, and in some of the more perverse jurisdictions, celebrated.

45. “The Notwithstanding clause is a cowardly footnoote that basically makes the rights the Charter limply attempts to codify subject to the whim of the legislature. You can keep your lawless majoritarian nightmare to yourself I prefer the rule of law.”
    Not necessarily. The problem with the Charter of Rights is that most of the “rights” in it have been eviscerated by Supreme Court of Canada judgments. The notwithstanding clause allows the legislatures to override the Supreme Court when the latter comes up with a rogue “interpretation” of the Charter, such as they have done in the ridiculous InSite decision, Whatcott, tobacco companies vs. B. C., Chatterjee, Law, Bell ExpressVu, and numerous others.
    The Charter itself is the biggest problem – it’s full of mistakes that desperately need to be corrected before Canada can obtain the proper “rule of law” that you (justifiably, I would say) revere.

46. “Actually reserves are subject to provincial laws. There is no way in the world the federal government will allow private hospitals on reserves that don’t meet provincial standards in red tape.”
    Scar old buddy, you must have forgotten(sarc).

47. Looking up some stuff – according to current Supreme Court thinking, the appointment of a senator for Nunuvat was unconstitutional because it was authorized by an Act of Parliament and not a constitutional amendment by 7 provinces having 50 % of the population.
    Willie Adams was originally appointed as Senator of the NWT so he might be okay. Dennis Patterson, the current senator, might owe us some money as might Nick Sibbeston appointed to replace Willie Adams as NWT senator. Get the frauds out of there and thank the Supreme Court for it.