BRIAN FLEMMING, "NOVA SCOTIA NO PLACE FOR REPARATIONS," NATIONAL POST  (AUGUST 15, 2001).

Copyright National Post 2001

HALIFAX - The absurd veneration of victimhood reached a new high- water mark last week when leading African-Bluenoses formally declared it was payback time for their race. At a Halifax symposium on "racism and black world response," it was announced the reparations movement had finally come to Canada.

Halifax lawyer Burnley (Rocky) Jones declared governments worldwide -- including Canada's -- owed people of African descent reparations for the damage caused by slavery. Dalhousie law professor Esmeralda Thornhill said: "Governments have addressed the Jewish Holocaust, Japanese resettlements and aboriginal peoples. Reparation talks for slavery are needed to address the legacy of colonialism."

Irvine Carvery, Africville Genealogical Society President, continued to claim the 1960s resettlement of 80 Africville families was an example of racism red in tooth and claw. Africville reparations could amount to $25-million.

As usual, the steam for this anti-racist engine is being generated in the United States. There, a new best-seller, titled The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks seriously suggests African- Americans alive today are owed billions for centuries of state- sponsored slavery, followed by another century of state-sanctioned discrimination.

Some serious commentators (and lawyers) say every African- American family should get US$50,000 cash. That would cost nearly US$500-billion. Lawsuits have been started to get this issue before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The idea of extracting reparations has been around for more than a century among some black intellectuals. Until now, it has gone nowhere. The publication of The Debt has given the issue legs. It is a manifesto for reparations.

Jones has grabbed the reparations idea. Last week he said, "Slave labour was used to build public institutions. Government had a direct benefit from slavery that still exists." (I assume he was referring to "Canadian" institutions and governments.)

Now, there's no question slavery existed during early colonial times in British North America which, until 1783, included the United States. But North American slavery took different directions, especially after American independence.

In what remained of British North America, a respected British judge, Lord Mansfield, decided a slave who made it to Britain (or one of its colonies) could no longer be a slave. Accordingly, black United Empire Loyalists who made it to Nova Scarcity, as it was then known, upon arrival were free. And those who settled in Shelburne County got the same rocky soil as white UELs did.

By the 1830s, Lord Wilberforce's anti-slavery movement succeeded in getting most civilized states to sign an anti-slavery treaty. The United States did not sign. It therefore had the use of about two million slaves for four more decades. Nova Scotian descendants of Jamaican "Maroons," who built Halifax's Citadel Hill fortifications, would be best placed to claim any reparations. But who are they? Do they live in Preston? Did they live in Africville? Or did they head for Sierra Leone with many Nova Scotian blacks in the mid-19th century?

Reparations claims are the wrong way for Nova Scotia's black community to go. Slavery did not build this province. This was not the Carolinas or Virginia. And reparations claims could backfire if they lead to assertion of other, equally valid, minority claims.

As it happens, today is the Acadian "national day," the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, patron saint of Acadians and the person commemorated by the gold star in the corner of the Acadian flag. So, what better day to talk about Acadian reparations?

Acadians were deported in 1755 from their 150-year-old farms in the Annapolis Valley which they'd dyked and made fertile. Those who eventually walked back to the Maritimes through the New England wilderness had to settle in far rockier places than Shelburne County. And, like all Nova Scotian Roman Catholics, Acadians were denied their full civil rights until many decades later. Their schools were closed. They were assimilated. Shouldn't it be Acadian payback time too?

Claiming reparations is a crude distortion of whatever collective responsibility Nova Scotians might have for their ancestors' sins. Indeed, reparations is a political Pandora's box that shouldn't be opened here.

Close it, Rocky.