Critical Perspectives and Reflections

Canada’s Aboriginals need to learn the value of hard work more than they need compensation for abuse suffered in Residential Schools. - Pierre Poilievre, Conservative MP and Parliamentary Secretary; June, 2008 Pierre Poilievre’s easy win of the CPC leadership has been pretty big news in this country. Nevertheless, with all the kerfuffle going on about the death of the British Queen, and the ceremonies that have followed, the recent election of the new leader has received somewhat less media coverage and discussion as would normally occur. But we need to think and talk about, not only the kind of leader he would be, but what type of human being the man is, and what it means about his party, and future implications it might have for the Canadian political scene. Leaving aside his ridiculously and patronizing words, “Canada’s Aboriginals” - really just inane, colonial and racist, codswallop - let us be very clear that, with the snarling and threatening Poilievre becoming leader of the CPC...

Last Thursday, like everyone in the world it seems, I read, saw and heard that the Queen of England had died. Since then, every news outlet of every type, as well as social media, has been jam packed full of stories about the Queen and of how almost all people are mourning the loss. While the general reaction has been sadness and there has been a huge outpouring of sympathy for the “Royal Family”, there have been alternative reactions. One, which I understand, is the position that the British Monarchy has a long history of Imperial and colonial crimes. In the spirit of the well known “full Disclosure”, personally, I come at my view of the British Monarchy, in part, from my Irish heritage, with various ancestors fleeing the country because of resistance to the British colonizers and the poverty, in great part caused by the British land holders who squeezed their Irish tenants and did everything they could to exterminate Irish culture and identity. The last of my ancestors to flee to Can...