MLSE = Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment
The date on that explains it for me. I saw a ton of Raptors playoff games during the run to their title. More in that playoffs alone than in all the time since. In fact, I may not have seen a single Raptors game from the beginning since that season ended.
So, if they werenât doing it at that time, I didnât miss anything.
Anyone see it on an American broadcast of a Raptors home game?
I dont know if you get it on the broadcasts much. I know itâs usually just before the anthems here but havenât paid a ton of attention to other sports.
I could absolutely imagine the NBA and networks purposely not broadcasting it for a variety of reasons.
Itâs done before anthems or starting lineups so the broadcasts are in commercial. You may see it in the playoffs when they show those.
It indisputable that land acknowledgements are symbolic. Probably about half the people in attendance at any Blue Jays game will be people that think that Indians are a bunch of lazy drunks that donât pay taxes and weâve already given then billions and billions of dollars of my hard earned taxpayer money and they just want to complain and beg for more money. Just read the comments section on any National Post article about indigenous rights. These people arenât shy about their racism.
Even among people that are generally sympathetic to the idea of land acknowledgements, they often do not have a good idea about what the real issues are around Canadaâs conflict with indigenous people over land. Well meaning white people often think that the land acknowledgement statements are a way of conveying to their peers and to indigenous people, hey, indigenous folks, I Feel Your Pain. Thatâs better than hey, indigenous folks, fuck off you dirty inferior animal. So yes weâve got the conservatives beat on morality. But this is a miniscule achievement.
The real significance of land acknowledgements is that the entire Canadian society is built on violated treaties. Treaties that are actually pretty well understood to still have legal weight today. Canadians need to do quite a bit more than say the words. Theyâve got to believe them the same way they believe in the legal weight of their real estate papers that give them the legal right to live in their homes and to claim the economic value on sale of the homes. If you get home one day and find that someone else has moved into your home and thrown all your stuff in the street, you expect the government and the courts to do more than force those people to put up a plaque acknowledging that the house was the traditional lands of your family.
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Acknowledgments are one thing, but really grappling with treaty rights is another.
The ramifications of the recent Supreme Court case with the Blueberry First Nation are really poorly understood among the public. What it actually means to respect treaties will be hard to accept for even the most ardent leftist supporter of indigenous rights, myself included. There are cases in the queue right now asking for the return of huge swaths of land, much of which is heavily populated.
This is going to be a very difficult coming decade for Canada in terms of navigating this legal landscape.
In many ways, this is even more complicated than reparations in the US because it canât be solved with even cutting a massive cheque.
Yup. I think that legally what technically would need to happen is an agreed upon set of rules for two separate nations to share the same land. Which is exactly what the original treaties were designed to do as far as I understand. I guess that theoretically you could do something like come to an agreement that Canada as we understand it is one of only two legitimate governments here (setting aside that the indigenous groups are not actually a homogenous or unified entity, but thatâs another issue). If people really believe the âequal partnersâ stuff I hear from time to time, youâre talking about giving indigenous nations 50% of all the tax revenues, 50% of all the votes in parliament, 50% of the Senate seats, etc. etc. etc. Iâm not sure Canada wouldnât be a better country if we did that, but racist white people would start a shooting war to try to stop it.
It is going to be a crazy road forward. For example, there has not been a single approved oil and gas well in BC since the blueberry decision last year. Normally it would be 250ish. Now some will be happy about that, which is fine, but imagine no approved roads, no approved new homes in your town, no new stores, new sports venues, no improvements to public transit ect.
We are going to have some serious political upheaval in the near future.
This is a possible on ramp to white supremacy fascism in Canada. So far Canadians have been mostly too polite to go for the worst of American style conservatism, but thereâs a big cohort of deplorables in Canada that are chomping at the bit to do all the racism and hang Justin Trudeau and act on their God given constitutional rights that Facebook tells them that they have. If Canadian white people have their creature comforts disrupted in a way that can be pinned on The Indians, watch out. Thatâs a powder keg of racism that is ready to go off.
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My point though is the pushback is going to come from a much larger percentage of the population than just the already racist right.
I have to be in the top 0.0000001% of Canadians in terms of my daily experience with indigenous people and my understanding of the situation and Iâm honesty not sure what the right thing to do is.
A lot of the left is going to reflexively say âwell of course we should honour treaty rightsâ without thinking about what that actually means.
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Of course. What they think it means is âsomeone else should honor their treaty rightsâ. This is why the land acknowledgements are so flat and ceremonial. That has some value, sure, but no one is volunteering their own house. And when they eventually come around to understanding that their house is on treat land, thatâs the end of indigenous rights support.
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Iâm glad youâre better than all 1 billion other Canadians in your daily experiences with the Indigenous.
Yep thatâs the worry.
I assume in the end they will come to some agreement but the blueberry and government have already missed several deadlines for an agreement because itâs intractable.
A big part of the intractability is that Canadian folks simply do not understand the position of the indigenous people, and they donât understand what indigenous people want. Even when you come around to a position where you understand that reconciliation is required and justice is required, the conversation stops when you get to a point like âwell, indigenous people want half of Toronto back, but they donât want the condos or office buildingsâ. Oh.
Agree. Thatâs why I think itâs actually a much harder problem than something like reparations. Even with numbers topping $1.5 trillion you can imagine the US paying that and it not having cataclysmic impacts on overall society. It could have positive effects actually.
I have trouble seeing the same for true âlandbackâ reconciliation. It would obviously have positive effects as well but the negative seem very daunting.
It should be said the true âlandbackâ position isnât widely held even among indigenous people. That said, even shy of that position Blueberry has really widespread implications.
Electricity is definitely the most expensive way to heat, but forced air, baseboard and radiant can all be done with any source of energy. The differences in efficiency between those energy sources is large, while the differences between the methods used to turn that energy into heat are small.
Apologies for continuing to derail a derail!
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I figured baseboard was always electric, thanks for the clarification.
Well, he probably meant his ranking to include past and future Canadians as well.
Our next PM
Heâs âone of the few Conservatives weâve seen in a long time that doesnât play defence, heâs always on offence,â said Conservative strategist Shakir Chambers. âHe says, âIâm a strong Conservative and hereâs why Iâm a strong Conservative.â I think that really resonates with the red-meat, grassroots Conservative base, and thatâs why his numbers are so high. I think thereâs a lot of appetite not just in our party, but amongst the general population, for being anti-establishment.â
Canât wait!