Without clean water what do we have?

Eh, this seems a petition I’d rather not sign, in part due to unfamiliarity with the nuance of it.

Right to clean drinking water shouldn’t translate as the government needing to spend a bunch of money to build infrastructure for a really remote group of a tiny number of people – if someone is living in a community of like 100 people in the middle of the northern tundra, I wouldn’t expect the government to have to dedicate a ton of resources to build some sort of water desalination plant nearby, at a cost of milllions of dollars. Especially if the people in that remote community are A) hostile to Canada as a nation, and B) not producing millions of dollars in tax revenue.

Aboriginal title, allowing for “Shared exclusivity” is kinda an over reach in my view as well – many of the FN weren’t friends, in fact many of the west coast tribes routinely practiced slavery, raiding each others tribes for women etc (estimates are that about 25% of most west coast bands, were slaves). When Canada banned slavery at its formation, one of the most impacted groups were west coast First Nations. To pretend that “shared exclusivity” between such bands, bands which weren’t exactly working together, should give them any elevated privilege over general ‘public’ lands, is bonkers – we’ve got tiny bands people claiming title over all of the lower mainland of BC, and we routinely see any ‘modern’ treaty that gets signed instantly challenged by 5 other bands due to the shared exclusivity stuff. We see projects held up because there’s a stream of bands coming forward claiming title, asking for payouts – we’ve had solar farm projects in BC delayed years because of this issue. And it’s one that was created largely by the courts, in the 80s or something, not a concept specifically in the legislation/charter docs – in other words, the concept of ‘shared exclusivity’ is one that the Canadian court systems decreed should be a thing, not something the Canadian public supported: it’s an artificially created concept that screws up a lot of areas. Limiting the scope of government obligations to just specific reserve lands makes sense, given how expansive the aboriginal title stuff is – that whole ‘aboriginal title’ definition may warrant revision.

And lastly, all the modern treaty stuff just feels like its overly one sided and not benefiting the general public good – but rather a minority of increasingly entrenched, biologically defined people. Like there’s a 500 person band in BC that’s shifted over $100 million in tax revenue in the lands they oversee, into a fund just for their ethnically defined group – they pay their members an annual ‘allowance’ of a few thousand bucks, have one time bump payments of 5-20k at like 55 and 65, and so on. And with membership determined by bloodlines, and funding determined primarily by the public purse / tax payers, it can’t help but evoke images of white people creating legislation that gives white people explicit benefits, and how fucked up that would be – especially if 99% of the revenue were coming from non-white demos. Despite the rhetoric/PR campaigns, FN people are just as self-interested as anyone in a capitalist cultural setting, and the modern treaties just make it look like they’re rail roading our government – hell, even our own government negotiates from a position of weakness on these treaties, given that FN people are on the governments side of the negotiating table, and are clearly subject to conflict.

I still can’t figure out why this even has to be a thing.

How is it that everyone in Canada does not already have access to clean and safe drinking water? And im not talking about buying single use waterbottles.