I watched a speech given by François Hollande in Algeirs yesterday in which he made it clear that he wouldn’t apologize for the colonial occupation of Algeria by France, but that the truth of the occupation needed to be spoken, made plain for all to see, that truth being that the colonial period was a period of brutality, exploitation, massacres and torture. His lack of willingness to apologize was linked to his being of a generation that was too young to have participated in the suppression of colonial peoples. We don’t have that luxury here in that “our” people have continued to pursue a policy of social, economic and cultural suppression right up to the present day, and the culmination of that policy is the passage of yet another omnibus budget bill by the Harper government in which they enforce a false accountability on First Nations to which they, especially do not adhere. The bill also contains further provisions to sidetrack and criminalize anything that inhibits the Wild West expansion of Canada’s energy infrastructure and mining undertakings, the benefit of which will be bled off to the U.S. and China with crumbs to the investment class here in Canada, and the downstream consequences of which will be shouldered by Canadians, and, disproportionately, by Canada’s First Nations as the whole idea of treaty rights goes out the window and land that should be set aside for First Nations gets dug up for bitumen, waters are drained out of systems on which First Nations depend and befouled in a way that threatens the health of wildlife and of the people who depend on those systems for their lives and livelihoods. This bill, it bears mentioning, will also move us closer to weather disasters occasioned by damage to the climate from the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels, to continued extinction of species, and to economic and social disruptions to which no one will be immune, not even those deniers who will think themselves well-insulated in their armed and gated communities. First Nations have been positioned as the last best line of defines against the ravages of colonial industrial devastation, and bill C-45 is a stealth bomb intended to remove that line of defence. I guess I can’t apologize for anyone else, but I can express my regret that I’ve been part of a system that denies a reasonable life to many citizens, but none more consciously and consistently as the First Nations.