I honestly don’t understand what all the resistance against these concessions are. Sure, in dollar terms it’s sizable, but reparations don’t need to be in dollar terms: they can be given through economic concessions that stimulate the economy as a whole.
For example, First Nations land within cities can be given zoning concessions to simultaneously address the Canadian housing crisis and drive profit to First Nations. First Nations businesses can be given greater tax concessions for R&D. The Canadian government can use its liabilities as a blank cheque to invest in anything, so long as First Nations people are the ones who profit from it.
Because when the average person hears “the government owes x Billion Dollars” the assumption is “they will be handing over X billion in cash”. It’s like the Ukraine military support - people hear “3 billion USD in military aid for Ukraine” and think the US is handing over 3 billion dollars, not handing over about 3 billion worth of old soon-to-be-retired equipment.
Which makes conversations about government debt really fun. It’s just a lack of understanding.
Canada is fascist as fuck behind the cloak of respectable liberalism. Have to realize that the Liberals were considering just slaughtering scores of indigenous protestors occupying an illegal pipeline that ultimately didn’t end up built anyway because Biden cancelled it. God forbid if the PCs were in charge, they were the biggest voices calling for a full on genocide during all that, and they would have done it too.
The furthest left party was like “lets find a peaceful solution to get this built” if we actually had a real left party they would have been calling for jailing the oil execs responsible for this whole fiasco the moment they decided to outright break the law.
I honestly don’t understand what all the resistance against these concessions are. Sure, in dollar terms it’s sizable, but reparations don’t need to be in dollar terms: they can be given through economic concessions that stimulate the economy as a whole.
For example, First Nations land within cities can be given zoning concessions to simultaneously address the Canadian housing crisis and drive profit to First Nations. First Nations businesses can be given greater tax concessions for R&D. The Canadian government can use its liabilities as a blank cheque to invest in anything, so long as First Nations people are the ones who profit from it.
Because when the average person hears “the government owes x Billion Dollars” the assumption is “they will be handing over X billion in cash”. It’s like the Ukraine military support - people hear “3 billion USD in military aid for Ukraine” and think the US is handing over 3 billion dollars, not handing over about 3 billion worth of old soon-to-be-retired equipment.
Which makes conversations about government debt really fun. It’s just a lack of understanding.
Canada is fascist as fuck behind the cloak of respectable liberalism. Have to realize that the Liberals were considering just slaughtering scores of indigenous protestors occupying an illegal pipeline that ultimately didn’t end up built anyway because Biden cancelled it. God forbid if the PCs were in charge, they were the biggest voices calling for a full on genocide during all that, and they would have done it too.
The furthest left party was like “lets find a peaceful solution to get this built” if we actually had a real left party they would have been calling for jailing the oil execs responsible for this whole fiasco the moment they decided to outright break the law.