Opinion: Aboriginal voters will make up their own minds – Regina Leader-Post

July 27, 2015

One curious side-effect of modern identity politics – the regressive notion that your skin colour, ethnicity or gender determines your priorities, privileges and politics – is how it leads leaders to assumptions that they “own” others or, at least, can speak for them based on some shared, but irrelevant, characteristic.

Enter Perry Bellegarde, grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations, the taxpayer-funded federal lobby group that represents many reserve chiefs.

With an eye on the upcoming federal election and the possible effect of native votes on the outcome, Bellegarde recently observed: “Fiftyone ridings can make a difference between a majority and a minority government.”

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