Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was in Vancouver on this date in 1969. He was there to speak about his government’s White Paper on Indigenous Affairs at a meeting of First Nations’ leaders. All these decades later, the White Paper remains very controversial. It was at the time as well, and Trudeau and his government eventually withdrew it in the face of intense opposition from Indigenous leaders.
You can read highlights from Trudeau’s August 8, 1969 address below.
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau: So this year we came up with a proposal. It’s a policy paper on the (Indigenous) problem. It proposes a set of solutions. It doesn’t impose them on anybody. It proposes them – not only to the (Indigenous) , but to all Canadians – not only to their federal representatives, but to the provincial representatives, too, and it says we’re at the crossroads. We can go on treating the (Indigenous) as having a special status. We can go on adding bricks of discrimination around the ghetto in which they live and at the same time perhaps helping them preserve certain cultural traits and certain ancestral rights. Or we can say you’re at a crossroad – the time is now to decide whether the (Indigenous) will be a race apart in Canada or whether it will be Canadians of full status.”
Trudeau then continued.
“And this is a difficult choice. It must be a very agonizing choice to the (Indigenous) peoples themselves because, on the one hand, they realize that if they come into the society as total citizens, they will be equal under the law, but they risk losing certain of their traditions, certain aspect of a culture and perhaps even certain of their basic rights, and this is a very difficult choice for them to make and I don’t think we want to try to force the pace on them any more than we can force it on the rest of Canadians. (But) here again is a choice which is, in our minds, whether outside, a group of Canadians with (whom) we have treaties, a group of Canadians who have …many of them claim, aboriginal rights or whether we will say we’ll forget the past and begin today and this is a tremendously difficult choice because, if – well one of the things the (Indigenous) bands often refer to are their aboriginal rights.”
“We will recognize treaty rights,” continued Trudeau. “We will recognize forms of contract which have been made with the (Indigenous) people by the Crown and we will try to bring justice in that area and this will mean that perhaps the treaties shouldn’t go on forever. It’s inconceivable, I think, that in a given society one section of the society have a treaty with the other section of the society. We must be all equal under the laws and we must not sign treaties among ourselves. And many of these treaties, indeed, would have less and less significance in the future anyhow, but things that in the past were covered by the treaties…things like so much twine, or so much gun powder and which haven’t been paid, this must be paid. But I don’t think that we should encourage the (Indigenous) to feel that their treaties should last forever within Canada so that they be able to receive their twine or their gun powder.”
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.