For anyone whoʼs claimed that the CoN and its Nelsonia City Police State are systemically racist, we now have the scoreboard stats to back up your assertion. Under the headline, “Disturbing’ pattern of discrimination alleged among B.C. police services”, an article in the Vancougar Liquid Sun states how a report was funded by BCʼs Human Rights Commissioner Kasari Govender that “collected race-based data from five police jurisdictions — the Vancouver police and Nelson police departments and the RCMP in Surrey, Prince George and Duncan/North Cowichan.”

Anyone whoʼs been to these five areas deliberately selected for valid human rights reasons likely knows (whether they will admit it or not) that each member of this inglorious quintet are among the most racist places in the province, so the self-proclaimed Heritage City being picked for this sorry list of public shame is the ultimate condemnation of its despicably preferential treatment of its puerile WASP-y demographic who apparently couldnʼt care less about the fedsʼ tragicomic declaration of the Sinixt people as being extinct when they are very much alive. 

“ʼIt is time to act,ʼ said the summary, which added that analysis of the data provided by the five police departments confirmed what communities had long been saying, namely that Indigenous and Black people are either grossly or significantly overrepresented in arrest incident statistics.” How many of our resident colonial glitterati who celebrated the newspaper covers heralding the “Land of the Lakes Tribe” this year will do anything at all about the duplicitous CoNʼs documented abuses of its stated corporate mandate to protect all of its citizens regardless of their skin colour and genetic background, etc.? Unfortunately for our non-white neighbours whom we should all love with equality and fairness, the skanky CoNʼs hypocritical pattern of vile discrimination is not an exception to the rule in this foolʼs paradise, where the villainous Ghoulie Gang has perfected the dark arts of gentrification and elitist white supremacy as well as any settler jurisdiction. 

We now have the publicized stats to back up countless civilian claims that our ruthless police stateʼs diabolically ill-advised program to enforce their way out of a fentanyl disaster (only one its many snafus!) has failed miserably as seen on the deathly scorecard; and in general, guess who gets arrested and abused the most in this rigged game of corporate snakes and antisocial ladders sanctioned by all grim governments no matter how much they protest otherwise? Our Indigenous and Black people, of course, along with South Asians and all the other races that white systemic racism loves to prosecute and persecute while their white-collar criminal buddies are getting high off the hog from their nationalized money-laundering narco-state scam which profits only them and their fascistic frat-boy gonad culture fuelled by their sadistic sacraments of misogynistic tech, resource theft & toxic drugs, etc.. 

Floods, wildfires & heat domes have shown us how Farnie and the Nihilist Democrats only truly care if the societal emergency created by their own cheapskate negligent incompetence affects richer old-boy territories where theyʼve decided to grow half of our food-basket in a drained lake-bed that experts have been saying would flood yet again for decades. Praise be to the Sumas elders who sagely advised their nation to build its village on the highlands above the low-lying mistaken prairie where the invasive farmers would inevitably watch their crops be inundated. 

While the complicit troops salvage the financial chickens and cows first, the First Nations like the neglected folks in Merrit who should be called first are rightfully objecting to being ignored during the Nu-Dippersʼ emergency preparedness planning with no warnings or rescue information — despite their First Nations Emergency Services being granted equal status with those of the colonizers. Tribes cut-off by the extreme flooding in the Frazzled Valley and the Sloughed Interiour such as the Nlakaʼpamux people of Cookʼs Ferry, Shackan, Oregon Jack Creek, Skuppah, Boothroyd, Nooaitch & Siska are speaking out about their ongoing isolation from the outside world without any contact from Horgsyʼs politburo, while rare good reviews such as the reserved plaudits from the Nicomen people for the beastly governmentʼs belated rescue efforts stand out like a sore thumb among its detritus of broken promises, inadequate funding & disrespectfully patriarchal ignorance of Indigenous fact-based concerns learned from firsthand experience on their sacred sustainable land for millennia more than itʼs taken the arrogant white-volk to botch it all up to Hellʼs Gate and back.

Even when the establishment white authorities are supposedly protecting First Nations interests on Indigenous lands, thereʼs an overzealously disproportionate amount of militaristic hardware allocated to resource disputes orchestrated by the inept meddling of the imperial government infrastructure that has proven incapable (if not unwilling!) to resolve conflict peaceably in any sort of timely fashion with its off-putting passive-aggressive ʻneutralityʼ. Whatever you may think of the Coastal Gasbag Link and the absurd debacle at Faerie Creek, employing massive paramilitary forces with assault rifles to deal with protestors on stolen Indigenous lands looks really weird when floods are wreaking havoc on your beloved highways and rail-lines where they need a bunch of able bodies and equipment just like theirs. All those beefy dudes couldnʼt have served their masters (the people!) better by operating all that military and flood-relief equipment that the insane feds abandoned in their unused Chilliwack warehouse on our dime during a biblical catastrophe?

Setting aside why we still canʼt figure out how to have an unarmed civilian emergency force that responds to un/natural disasters in a promptly localized manner, a meagre platoon from the Canadian Armed Farces finally makes it way to time-crunched Princeton the Pauper almost two weeks after the floods when theyʼre arguably way too late. Wouldnʼt several hundreds of these violently trained-to-kill soldiers and mercenary cops have been better served saving Sumas and Merritt and the Similkameen and Lytton (again!) from predictable doom, instead of arresting people in the thick of costly simultaneous disasters, period? Isnʼt saving lives and livelihoods while prioritizing food security and national supply chains much more important than throwing people in jail during a destructive opiod crisis thatʼs killed more people this year than Covid? 

These ghastly Orc-like armies of souped-up military men paid by our tax-dollars couldnʼt have helped stop poor Princeton and its original First Nations who have little control over their own lands from becoming a frozen, sewage-infested, flooded battle-zone where their beleaguered settler mayor has been pleading for relief assistance on the ground on a daily basis, even though he knew the big-city levers of government would definitely let him down again as they always have when asked for more dyke money to save their rural town from what the natives knew would happen someday — as it now has. So if youʼre an Indigenous person, would you trust any of this royally effed nonsense? 

As Chief Minnabarriet of Cookʼs Ferry said, her peoples “have been put on these little tiny parcels of landʼ which were deemed ʻnot appropriate or acceptableʼ by settlers who took better pieces of land. ʻAnd then things come in like weather storms, whether it be fire or floods, and weʼre impacted first and we canʼt make a living on that land.ʼ” 

 

#forstmedia #opinion #goldenheron