by Jeff Burgar

Anywhere you go, you will find people who have low opinions, high opinions, no opinions of anything you care to name.

Start with people. Doctors. Nurses. Plumbers. Farmers. French people. German people. Americans. Albertans. Central Canadians. Black people. Red. Yellow. Green. Blue. White. Old. Young.

Well, you get it. We don’t even need to get into what religion someone might be.

Before you get off on a tangent, read that opening sentence again: Low opinions. High opinions. No opinions. There are often common threads. When you hear a good opinion, the person usually has had one or two experiences that were impressive. As in, “I think Dutch men are the greatest guys in the world.” Come on. So that person thinks every Dutch fellow has to be fantastic?

It’s the same when you hear a low opinion. Almost always, the person doing the bad mouthing has little experience of what he is bad mouthing.

That’s just the way we are. We would rather have an opinion, than say we don’t really, honestly, truthfully, know. Reading, or writing, a couple of editorials doesn’t really make us an expert, as much as we would like to think so.

Let us move on to some meat – the Supreme Court Daniels decision on Metis and Indians.

First, it is not surprising nobody really knows what it means. The decision was handed down by what could aptly be called, lawyers on steroids – the Supreme Court justices. Laws in the western world are mostly written by lawyers.
Writing and interpreting laws and contracts is an industry. Laws are written which cannot be understood. They must be constantly interpreted and re-interpreted. It seems nobody in this industry really wants to write a law that explains to any affects what the law really means. That will be left for other lawyers to argue, interpret, disagree.
And so they do. Over and over again.

It strikes me as homeowners wondering why a carpenter built a house wall in a certain place and manner, that didn’t quite match the plans. Why no note? So homeowners after homeowners look at the plans, see something amiss, and spend hours and years arguing over what happened. With other carpenters. And plan makers. It’s all jolly good fun.

In the Daniels decision, people are celebrating. Other people are horrified. Frankly, no one really knows what it all means. More rights for Metis? More rights for off-reserve Indians? More rights for non-status Indians?

Sure. And we will be spending more months and years interpreting that, just as we have spent years debating our own nation’s Constitution.

There is still the biggest question of all – will there be more money coming from Ottawa, and possibly even from Edmonton? Money coming to our region and to our people to do the good things so many celebrating hope can be done?

Answering such questions may take more years.

In the meantime, most of us will continue to speak poorly, perhaps highly, of people and things we don’t really know enough about to comment. Such as editorial writers commenting on lawyers.