The Boer War and Canada’s First Veterans The Vancouver School Board has voted to change the name of the Lord Roberts School. They claim Roberts ran concentration camps and targeted Indigenous people. They say renaming schools will help Reconciliation. But are they right? The first Vancouver soldiers to ever fight and die for Canada were led into battle against pro slavery forces in the Boer War by Lord Roberts. Local Black Africans worked with him and our soldiers. Mahatma Gandhi himself personally organized hundreds of medical support workers. Their victory saved countless people from slavery. The Truth and reconciliation Commission of Canada rejects what the Vancouver School Board is doing as ‘counterproductive’, and harmful to reconciliation. Let’s look at the facts together. Thanks for joining the Global Civic Think Tank on this voyage of learning. Tell us what you think about this renaming, and keep up with developments in this case. Global Civic loves British Columbia, our institutions, our traditions and philosophy of liberal democracy. They give us our prosperity and freedoms. Back at home, British Columbians waited daily, impatiently for word from the front. Under the intrepid leadership of Lord Roberts, our soldiers broke the Siege of Kimberley. British Columbia was so ecstatic that they named the town Kimberley BC in their honour. One of the people they liberated was Baden Powell the founder of the Boy Scouts. Would the Boy Scouts even exist today without the bravery of our soldiers? It was in this war that the first soldiers in Vancouver history died in combat. Of 17 soldiers from Vancouver, William Jackson and Fred Whitley died while Harry Niebergall and Clarence Thomson were wounded. Young soldiers from Cranbrook and especially Victoria took heavy losses. Sergeant Moscrop, a teacher with the Vancouver School Board,… Read More »Vancouver School Board and Lord Roberts
Editorial
In 2017, the Law Society of BC removed a statue of Judge Begbie in a well-intentioned gesture for reconciliation. The decision was made in secret.
Judge Begbie: British Columbia History
Do you want to choose your own MLA or do you want a political party to choose for you? Do you want your MLA to look to you for your vote or owe their position to a political party? A referendum will decide if you’ll continue voting directly for your MLA or move towards a system where political parties make this decision for you. This referendum could shift power from voters to parties. All three proportional systems give parties a greater role in choosing MLAs; none of the fully ‘voter choice’ proportional systems will even be on the ballot. In 2004, a Citizen Assembly of 160 voters studied proportional representation. They selected a ‘voter system’ STV (Single Transferable Vote) and rejected the ‘party system’ MMP (Mixed Member Proportional). But the current process is in the hands of politicians. Their public consultation offered four possible systems, both voter choice and party choice. But the two governing caucuses submitted a joint endorsement of MMP, the system rejected by the Citizen Assembly, in which political parties choose 40% of all MLAs. When the referendum question was made public, three of the four systems were gone. The MMP system remained and two new systems were added. Neither had ever been tried nor were they part of the consultation process. Both featured MLAs chosen by political parties. How many is uncertain; details will be decided after the vote. The public consultation did not even hint of this possibility. Citizens will choose from four systems Our current system essentially holds 87 elections. The winner of each gets a seat in the assembly, usually with a stable, majority government so voters know who to hold accountable. This is the only system on the ballot where citizens vote directly for all MLAs. If… Read More »Proportional Representation