smacks of Arizona or Texas, doesnt it? certainly sounds like the sort of voting documentation dangers that republicans & banana republicans like to wheeze about: When the Conservative party promised to transform Canada, who dreamed it was modelling on Josef Stalin? Because thats sure what it looked like when the Canada Border Services Agency swooped down on a tiny First Nations reserve near Chemainus to snatch a 60-yearold grandfather of 14 who has been living there quite openly with his Penelakut wife for 37 years. Richard Jermans sin? No papers. Raised in foster care, were told his father was California Miwok, his mother Mexican - a population where indigenous genes also dominate. No papers doesnt disprove First Nations status, it just means proof of ancestry is absent - for now. The Assembly of First Nations and various lawyers believe the Jay Treaty of 1794, the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982 and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples - which Canada endorsed in 2010 - grant aboriginal peoples a right to move freely across imposed borders they never recognized. So Jermans status is open to debate. But rather than discuss status, immigration agents seize him while his terrified, weeping family watches, carry him off to a distant city, toss him into the clink and refuse to disclose reasons because of privacy concerns. Kafkaesque reasoning from an outfit that had no problem bringing reality TV crews along when raiding work sites in search of illegal aliens who were presumably ably stealing jobs from foreign guest workers. ... Ive moved 20 times - eight times from one province or territory to another - since I started working at the age of 18. Whole bankers boxes of papers have just left one residence not to be located at the next. Sometimes they turn up after the next move. Sometimes they dont. Maybe they are in my basement in a box labelled ski wax or old DOS manuals. Who knows? But if some government heavy shows up like the East German Stasi, demanding that I produce my papers, instantly, to prove my existence after more than 65 years in Canada, I might not be able to. What then? Into the back of the black SUV without an explanation to family or anyone else - privacy concerns, you know - then off to some cell to await some hearing after which I could be on the next plane to the Falkland Islands? In other words, a kind of de facto two-tiered citizenship emerges. Ergo, if you dont conform to the conventional profile, make sure your papers are in order. If you dont, you too might wind up going for a ride with your government with no one the wiser - because of privacy concerns. Ben Powless, Krystalline Kraus, Lisa Barrett, Dennis Trainor Jr, Dennis Gilman, Kevin Alexander Gray
Posted on: Mon, 24 Feb 2014 19:01:28 +0000
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