I live 2 hours out of Winnipeg.

Without seeing anything about the location of the video, not even seeing it was in Canada, my first thought on seeing this was "Hey, that looks like Winnipeg"

Funny as the politeness is, this is just sad to me.

Winnipeg has a reputation for being one of the most racist places in Canada. As often as not when someone in the province hears about a crime near them, you'll hear them guess the description of the suspect will include "native in appearance". Sadder still, it's because as my instinct hit while watching the video, it too often ends up being the case.

Canada has a huge race relations problem. Our native population is grossly over represented in the prison system, which you can talk about now. The fact that stems from them being grossly over represented in committing crimes is NOT supposed to be talked about. Which means you nobody gets to talk about the roots of WHY that over representation exists, let alone talking about solutions to the awful conditions that aboriginal youth are disproportionately growing up in.

"You can keep the tires. I just need the rims."

People in Canada ARE talking about it for the first time.

First Nations people had their entire culture turned upside-down by the government of Canada and the Catholic Church. They were torn from their homes, raised in abusive conditions in institutions that expected them to conform to European norms, and even when they met those norms they were mentally and physically abused.

Now people are surprised that a generation of abused children makes for poor parents? The criminal problem with First Nations people is one that European Canadians created. It is a problem that's been ignored for far too long.

People like this need help. They do not need to see the inside of yet another cell.

Your talking about it historically though. Historical abuse and mistreatment of Aboriginal people in Canada has been acceptable to discuss for at least a generation or two now, up to formal apologies and enormous numbers of court cases and cash settlements around the myriad past injustices.

The trouble is, even while addressing all the historical problems, there still exist new ones right now.

Typical conditions on Aboriginal reserves in Canada are unacceptably awful. You can have a thriving municipality right neighbouring an aboriginal reserve that is a mess of dilapidated homes, boiled water and grossly increased rates of unemployment, substance abuse and suicide. Small wonder then that increased crime rates also come along with all that.

Even that you can talk about, though the increased crime rate will get you in trouble for flirting with being racist against aboriginals.

What you can't talk about is many of the causes of the disparity.

Aboriginal reserves operate under a different legal framework than the neighbouring municipality. They operate under a different framework of governance. They operate under a different system of taxation. Organisation of all related government services like education, healthcare, policing and civil works like roads, water and sanitation are ALL different if you're on a reserve.

Talking about all that you need to be very careful how you say it, because if your not careful my above observations are a statement that coloniser systems are superior to aboriginal ones.

Private property rights are IMO an even hotter topic. The dilapidated housing on a reserve 10 minutes away from the municipality with everything in order is a direct result of who is responsible for maintaining them. In the municipality if a roof is missing shingles, the owner replaces them. If a window is broken, the owner replaces it. On the reserve though, the community is the owner. Unsurprisingly, that abstraction means maintenance on the homes is worse. If the mayor was responsible for using tax dollars to maintain all the homes in the neighbouring municipality it'd be a mess too. This leads to the poor aboriginal family stuck in a destroyed and overcrowded home and a chief saying sorry, the Canadian colonisers didn't give us enough money to fix your place, go yell at them. This just stirs up the Winnipeg citizens I mentioned earlier to respond with wonderment at why you don't fix your own home up yourself instead of protesting hopelessly for the government to hand out the money to do it for you.

The differential treatment still in place now, today is a cancer and needs to be fixed but calling it out like that would get me in trouble.

when you talk about getting in trouble, do you mean being called a racist and if not what kind of trouble?

I find it interesting that in the states, people often use an over represented prison population (relative to % of normal population) to indicate that 'those' people are bad. I think with yours and Drachen Jagers comments, you are actually coming from a place that is trying to find a solution to the discrepancy and looking at the underlying conditions that got people into where they are. I wish more people were like that. I also appreciate the insight into the Aboriginal population in Canada. It sounds pretty similar to what's going on in the States.

Mostly the trouble depends on where you work and how publicly you make your statement. I'd mostly get called a racist, but working for a partially publicly funded place if I was vocal enough losing your job or being told to apologise and be quiet are real possibilities.

The not allowed to talk about it applies much more heavily to anyone in the media. A recent example would be an aboriginal man that was recently shot by a white farmer. The narrative on the national CBC media made a big deal about rampant racism in the region against aboriginals. In their coverage of local opinion it was even more one sided, as they described two sides, the grieving family of the deceased and their supporters, and then the racists who sided with the farmer because they hated aboriginal people. They very slowly, reluctantly and buried deep under a lot of disclaimers released more information on the case.

The young man that was killed was in a truck with 4 of his friends, and their story was that they got a flat tire and pulled into the yard to seek help with repairs. The CBC ran that much right away. They were much more reluctant to include that the RCMP had been called BEFORE the truck got onto that farm because they had been trying to steal a truck from a neighbouring farm already beforehand. It wasn't until during the trial that even more came out, and CBC again reluctantly included details from the friends that where with the victim. All the occupants of the vehicle had been drinking very heavily all afternoon. They admitted to 'checking cars' at the earlier neighbouring farm. They admitted to using the butt end of a rifle to try and break the windows of the truck at the neighbouring farm, but the stock broke off the gun. It was found at the neighbouring farm by police. Upon arriving at the final farm, they admitted trying to start up an ATV and going through and unlocked vehicle there as well, but disagreed on who was doing which. The trial even included text messages from the night before wondering if one of the friends would be able to "go on missions" tomorrow because they were hiding from police after a liquor store robbery. The farmer also mentioned being scared about what could happen the day of the shooting because he thought back to a story he'd been told about 2 farmers being killed on their yards a few years before he'd moved into the area. Only 1 media outlet in the country, and in 1 article checked out that the identity of one of those killers back then turned out to be the victims uncle. I had to go back looking for the original article from when those murders took place to be sure that the current news article wasn't just sensationalising things.

Now of course none of that means you want to see somebody getting killed over property theft. None of that means racism in any way shape or form is justified. However, when there was a rampant run of rural crime across the area and farmers were getting more and more fed up and nervous about their safety something bad was eventually going to happen. It's a tragedy, but our media was absolutely terrified of covering the full story because listing the facts I just laid out is considered racist. Your blaming the victim. My listing of the above facts is not supposed to be done without including many times more explanations and reasons that this was the white man's fault.

Ultimately, the absolute failure to talk openly about things in Canada is getting people killed. We absolutely need to be clear that stealing doesn't deserve a death penalty. We ALSO need to tell a group of young adults that were going farm to farm, with a loaded rifle, raging drunk, stealing and breaking into vehicles that doing that was a BAD idea and one of the reasons is that doing so might get you shot by someone that doesn't know if your going to hurt them or not. I really believe if the kids had been white that would have been the narrative, but because of race it wasn't. It just makes things worse and inspires more risky and dangerous decisions from people in the future and more people will continue to get hurt.

If your description of the events and reporting are accurate, that's awful.

I must note, however, there is a method used by the right in the U.S. where they claim something outrageous is being ignored by the left, or worse, hidden. Any investigation into those claims has consistently shown that 1) they usually exaggerate the outrageousness of what happened or leave out salient facts that make something normal seem nefarious and 2) completely ignore that it was covered by non right wing news outlets, just wasn't focused on through red colored glasses enough to satisfy them.

I'm not accusing you of doing that, I don't know enough to have an opinion in this case or about Canadian media, I'm just saying that the methodology, used here in the U.S. constantly, has made me fairly suspicious of similar claims like the one you've made above.

Short of looking at the cbc's coverge yourself I'm not sure how I can do much more to represent them. Here's a link to a podcast series they ran:

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcasts/boushie/

The victim was Colten Boushie and the farmer was Gerald Stanley, googling that and grabbing the CBC results will show you pretty quickly what their coverage looked like overall.

The case ended with a not-guilty verdict and the farmer is home now. Now, the only witnesses that were sober that day were the farmer and his son. What's worse 3 of the witnesses all changed their stories in court from what they originally told police because they 'didn't want to get into trouble'. With such poor witness testimony and no other evidence of malicious intent on the farmers part it's not much of a surprise that the defence's characterisation of a robbery that led to a tragic and fatal accident was considered credible.

Despite that, Canada's Indigenous services minister responded immediately to the verdict saying;
"We all have more to do to improve justice & fairness for Indigenous Canadians."

And our justice minister tweeted:
"My thoughts are with the family of Colton Boushie tonight. I truly feel your pain and I hear all of your voices. As a country we can and must do better - I am committed to working everyday to ensure justice for all Canadians."

As though the outcome was somehow dictated by race. This victimhood mentality just ignore the underlying real problem of horrible conditions on reserve. The judicial system didn't racially undermine the case, the real problem is a lot more complex than that and is being ignored because it's easier and more popular to ignore the root causes and just echo platitudes about how everything bad that happens down the road is racial too.