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Best argues that, with this legal change in place, the reserves, the Indian Act, and other purely race-based special rights and entitlements of Canada’s Indigenous population, could be phased out as proposed in Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy.

As Best writes, Nelson Mandela was not the only inspired and courageous leader who saw clearly and advocated strongly that all citizens of a nation must have exactly the same set of civic rights and responsibilities (if that country and its citizenry are to be successful). Think of Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and of Western Canada’s pioneer moral hero in this area, Indigenous lawyer and AFN co-founder William Wuttunee. In his brave 1971 book, Ruffled Feathers, Wuttunee advocated for the White Paper/Nelson Mandela way forward.

In apartheid South Africa citizens carried status cards denoting their race. Their rights, or lack thereof, flowed accordingly. Mandela campaigned for many decades, and from inside his jail cell, against these loathsome symbols of overt racism. The world responded, and recognized the moral truth of what he was saying. Status cards, and the entire rotten regime they represented, came tumbling down. Canada’s political leaders, including AFN leader Shawn Atleo, all seemingly honouring what he stood for, travelled to his funeral.

Yet these same leaders, back in Canada, continued to insist (even more so today) that Indian Act status cards, which serve the essentially same illiberal function as the South African ones did, remain! And our Supreme Court, in the recent Daniels case, piled on with more unintentionally racist “Indian blood” reasoning, adding 600,000 “Metis” as new candidates for purely race-based, dependency-assuring cards.

Best argues that instead of binding us together, our elites, with all this race-based conduct, are dividing us — creating resentment and preventing true reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. With our current laws, the situation in Canada is getting worse, not better.

In There Is No Difference, Best provides the only true way forward for Canada to reconcile — a future of one set of laws for all.

— Brian Giesbrecht, a retired judge, is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.