Major Acid's E-Rag
It Strikes Me...
Whose human rights REALLY count?
The crossing must have been long and dangerous, especially in small
boats designed to hug the sun drenched Portuguese shores, but fishermen
are a hardy lot. Those who secretly crossed the cold Atlantic, before
Columbus ever set sail, and who dropped their nets in the rich Grand
Banks surely earned their wages. Today, their descendants are likely
scattered across the world, but some of them must be in Canada, perhaps
even on that same east coast. If they are, then those descendants could
become important in ways they never imagined. They could become players
in a suddenly urgent game of “whose human rights REALLY count?”
This new game is not in some far-off country ravaged by dictators and
rebels, ignored by the United Nations. It is Canada, and the venue that
brought this game into public consciousness is a British Columbia court
that ruled against an aboriginal only fishery.
Natives along the Fraser River have been fishing for personal,
ceremonial, and commercial use while non-natives have been beached. The
prized salmon are safe from anyone who doesn’t have aboriginal blood
(duly endorsed by the appropriate authority) running through their
veins.
This poses many problems. The restricted fishery has been profitable for
many natives. Profitability is a situation that historical prejudices
and systemic racism have largely kept from many bands. The restricted
fishery was designed by federal policymakers to help address that
historical situation. Blood, then, became a prime determinant in an
effort to address a situation caused by blood preferences to start with.
This carries with it echoes of affirmative action programs of all kinds.
Faced with a regrettable race based problem (or gender based) and
address it by forcing a form of racial equality of access to whatever –
education, jobs, the arts. The theory is that some time down the line,
prejudice will ease and all will be sweetness and light and equality,
and there will no longer be a need for forcing, say, blacks into school
desks that whites might be more qualified for. According to the powers
that be, a little inequality now will lead to a better, more equal
future.
This very question was recently dealt with in an odd ruling from the
United States Supreme Court in a case about using race as a determinant
(but not the only determinant) in university admissions. The oddity is
that race seems to be an acceptable determinant (within rather fuzzy
limits) in the undergraduate world, but not in the post-graduate world.
There’s no telling about the US Supreme Court.
And now there’s no telling about Canadian courts, either, and whether
access to education or control of fishing rights, the problem is, at its
core, the same. Can two wrongs make a right? Does the end sometimes,
after all, justify the means?
In the US, this problem is increasingly debated not the least because of
demographics. Blacks are no longer (or shortly will no longer be) the
largest minority group, courtesy largely of the Mexican diaspora.
Hispanics sit number two, and when you’re number two, you try harder.
Surely it won’t be long before Hispanics will be claiming some of the
spots that affirmative action has taken from the majority and given to
the – mostly black – minority.
In British Columbia the situation is perhaps less complicated, but no
less volatile. Native Leaders will be faced now with the need to answer
whether race is, indeed, a way to solve a rights dispute. For a group
whose claims to special treatment have been based largely on demanding
human rights, natives must find this an uncomfortable position. There
will be consequences, too, a ripple effect that will wash across Canada,
and there is no guarantee that the ripples won’t become whitecaps.
Native lobster fishers on the east coast, already operating within a
cauldron of arson and violence, will likely see the BC ruling as a new,
more dangerous threat. Native hunting rights across the nation, timber
rights, and even politically correct standard practices such as native
job quotas in mining developments, all will be seen as less secure now.
Much of the problem arises because the concept of human rights has
become polluted by the perception that human rights devolve to groups –
this minority or that one demanding rights – rather than to the
individual. Followed to its conclusion, this is a recipe for
totalitarianism: the needs (rights) of the group absolutely trump the
needs (rights) of any single individual. It is also a recipe for
absurdism, which brings us back to those hardy Portuguese who secretly
fished the Grand Banks before Columbus tripped on an island in the
Caribbean.
The descendants of those sailors are the natural allies of the BC
natives in the fight to save race-based redress to racism. Or they would
be if someone could convince a descendant or ten to file a claim for
sole fishing rights to the Grand Banks, a claim based on being there
first – and being full-blooded Portuguese.
