Opinion

[Map of the Haldimand Tract — insert image here. Print caption: “The watercourse we measured from is the one in the Grand River Conservation Authority’s own data. The arithmetic is ours. Every input underneath it is theirs.”]

Picture three people in Brantford. A 29-year-old with a job sleeps in her childhood bedroom, because no one will rent to her at a price she can pay. Her grandmother, who raised four children around a full table, lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment she can barely afford to heat. Her cousin, laid o

People ask me how complicated the Haldimand business really is, usually with a look like they already know and are bracing for it. It is not complicated. It comes down to four documents, and you could read all four before your coffee goes cold without anyone standing beside you explaining what they

There are people in Canada, who say they will believe what happened at the residential schools when somebody shows them a body. Produce remains, a name, a cause of death, and until then this is a story. The demand arrives dressed as rigour, and sometimes in balaclavas; it is worth answering on its o

A man in Brantford fills a glass at his sink without a thought. Out here a truck comes up a driveway in the dark, a hose goes over, a cistern fills under the yard, and every child in the house knows the hollow note the tank makes when it is nearly empty. When the delivery is late, or the pump quits,

Two hundred and fifty years on, the US and its citizens are celebrating the Declaration of Independence. Hardly anyone reads it carefully. I’d ask you to. Read the thing. Because when you actually read the charges the colonists filed against the King of England – the facts, as they put it, submitted

At the end of this month the country observes the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and because Ontario has not made it a statutory holiday, most children here will spend it in a classroom, at an assembly, learning about what was done to children in classrooms. Nobody designed that. It fall

For twenty-four years it was a crime in this country for an Indian to hire a lawyer.

On the nineteenth of August the Lands and Resources Department held a virtual engagement session on the proposed Birkett Lane development, a hundred acres on the Brantford side of the river. Sessions like it happen often. This one produced four answers worth setting down, because together they descr

There is a distinction buried in the founding documents of this country that almost never gets spoken aloud, and it may matter more to the…

Terminology has shifted, but the underlying constitutional framework has remained remarkably consistent.