John Rustad was accused of fearmongering and spreading misinformation about Indigenous land rights at a town hall-style event he hosted in Smithers last weekend along with two fellow Conservative MLAs.
The former Conservative Party of BC leader was joined by Bulkley Valley-Stikine MLA Sharon Hartwell and Abbotsford South MLA Bruce Banman at a meeting billed as an opportunity to discuss B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, or DRIPA. But the panel was criticized over the lack of First Nations representation and the venue’s lack of space. About 100 people packed inside the Smithers legion and at least a dozen more were turned away after the hall reached capacity on Saturday evening.
Many took to the microphone to speak in favour of DRIPA — groundbreaking legislation that passed unanimously in the B.C. legislature in 2019 and is meant to provide a framework to guide reconciliation in the province.
Although Rustad voted for DRIPA, the Conservative Party of BC has now promised to repeal the legislation if it forms government.
An early comment that First Nations “wouldn’t exist” without Canada elicited gasps and some comments from the packed hall.
Holy hell, what an ignorant, frankly racist thing to say. This guy’s an idiot.
It’s true, they wouldn’t be called “First nations”, they’d just be called “nations”
Good grief get this embarrassment out of politics.
Send him to Alberta to roam free with his kind.
To some extent, I’m kind of glad the provincial Conservatives in BC are so openly nuts and awful. It’s kind of amazing that they so openly say the dumbest stuff, and it’s wild that they still win their local ridings, but at least they let everyone see who they are.
It’s true they wouldn’t exist in anything like the form they do today. For one thing they’d be a lot bigger.
And wouldn’t have generational trauma
It would be an uno-reverse, where whitey has “A Ward of The Haudenosaunee Confederacy” on their birth docs.
When they tell you who they are, believe them.
They don’t even need a copy of the Trump playbook - it’s ingrained, like an instinct.
I mean, there’s an argument to be made that the first nations under US occupation had it a lot worse, and many nations were entirely ethnically cleansed, but “Hey, at least we only committed mild genocide!” is still a pretty wild take.
Does he mean like the actually physical land the country is situated on? Cause I guess that’s technically correct?
Even if he’s being technically correct, only a fool doesn’t understand the context and subtext of what he’s saying.
Even his dumb supporters get it.
I think he meant that if the US had just taken the entire continent rather than having to share it with Canada, they would have been even more ruthless in their genocide than we were.
He’s probably right, but saying it that way betrays how truly broken his worldview is.
First Nations people have been on this land for 25,000 years.
I know, coming from the perspective of if the land never existed at all.
