Ongoing Genocide Caused by Judicial Suppression of the Existing Aboriginal Rights

We turn away, easily, from injustice done to others.

BY Robin Mathews: Anyone in Canada who can read should read this book by Bruce Clark.  It opens up such important aspects of history and politics and justice in Canada that it should be required reading by all those in the country who can read. At least two points of focus are present in Bruce Clark’s Ongoing Genocide…. Perhaps the most important is the betrayal of the Constitution and laws growing from it by the Courts in Canada and the Legal Establishment in order to impose upon the indigenous peoples an arbitrary and illicit regime that has and does lead to their deracination, alienation, social isolation, unnecessary illnesses … and very high levels of suicide.  (Quite apart from robbing them of their real status in law and in the courts.)

Part One of this column, devoted to the subject, reviewed the process by which – as an unvarying constant – the judicial and legal Establishments in Canada have created an illegitimate regime of judge-made law that goes unchallenged and that contradicts the clearest Constitutional statements and – flowing from them -  the precedents upon which the fabric of justice is (normally) maintained.

Part One also proposed that ‘bastardized’ law and adjudication are not confined to indigenous matters but are very frequently – almost as a parallel and so, perhaps, in some sort of relation – the rule of actions in the Higher Courts whenever  Established Power, criminal government, and/or large Corporate Power come into contention with the Constitution (and, therefore … come into the realm of Canada’s judicial and legal Establishments).

New report shows an exclusive increase of not being represented the aborigines of Canada in prisons.

What needs also to be focussed upon is Bruce Clark himself, his struggle to gain justice for the indigenous peoples, his having been cited for Contempt of Court, imprisoned, and disbarred – and, therefore, prevented, ever again, from engaging in the practice of law.

The reason he was disbarred is simple and in perfect harmony with the large betrayal of the Constitution and laws properly growing with and from it.  The assembly undertaking the adjudication of his status agreed that Clark was serious, articulate, informed, and skillful in his presentation of fact and argument. Brought against him at some point was an allegation that his unpopular opinion had been answered (already) forty times!  If it had been answered even once (by, of course, a judge) a record would be available: none exists. That his position was prevented from being articulated in any way recognizable by the Court is quite another matter. Being denied the right to articulate the position for the court to consider is quite another condition.

And so – with the greatest regret of course – and only because he would not accept the fraudulent denial (and attempted erasure) of the Constitutional realities concerning the indigenous peoples … Bruce Clark was, regretfully, disbarred from the practice of law: “because of the finding that the solicitor is ungovernable” (p. 98)

His story is known by many familiar with indigenous history in Canada.  It is not unknown among judges and lawyers across Canada.  And yet … and yet … there is no ‘movement’ among bright young lawyers (or bright old judges!) to re-visit the persecution of Bruce Clark … and to seek justice in his case.  ‘Seeking justice’ apparently has very little to do with the lives and the professional conduct of the members of the Legal and Judicial Establishments in Canada.

Unfortunately, in his description of the usurpations of the Constitutional identity of Canada’s indigenous peoples, Bruce Clark cannot do anything else but point to the (knowing) participation of the Judicial and Legal Establishments in that process.  Judges (and lawyers) have to know when ‘judge-made law’ is usurping the Constitution and Constitutionally-empowered law.

Populations (not just Canadians) respond to knowledge of serious injustices done to others with remarkable calm.  History has many astonishing precedents. In the 1630s Galileo was forced by the then all-powerful Roman Catholic faith to recant his proposition that the earth moved around the sun and was not the center of the solar system (or, indeed, of the whole universe). We laugh, now, about the foolishness of power at that time … forgetting, perhaps, that Galileo was punished for life … and forced to live under continuing house arrest.
 
“When I fought to protect my land and my home, I was called a savage. When I neither understood nor welcomed his way of life, I was called lazy. When I tried to rule my people, I was stripped of my authority.” - Chief Dan George 

In time, perhaps, Canadians will laugh at the stupid Canadian State, the stupid judicial and legal Establishments which engaged in the destruction of Bruce Clark’s career as a lawyer, permanently punishing him (like Galileo) for speaking the truth.

But for anyone with the smallest sense of fair-mindedness and a shred of belief that justice can win out in Canada, justice for Bruce Clark ‘sometime in the future’ is not good enough.  Where is the lawyer or the judge who will begin, now, the movement to erase the astonishing injustice and indignity visited upon Bruce Clark. Surely there is one man or one woman in the legal and judicial Establishments willing and able to take on that task.  Unless of course being a member of either of those Establishments absolutely rules out such a possibility….