Besides pouring more money into Indian Affairs with little or no accountability, the federal government has been changing government policy to compensate for the disparity between natives and non-natives.

This is because Canadians believe that they, as a society, should try to right past injustices, make an apology when necessary, and pay appropriate compensation.

In an attempt to rectify past wrongs experienced by Aboriginal peoples, politicians and bureaucrats have produced volumes of preferential legislation, and provided special exemptions and benefits for Aboriginals.

In 1996 the Supreme Court of Canada justified the light sentence handed down to an Aboriginal woman, Jamie Gladue, who fatally stabbed her common-law husband to death. Ms. Gladue received three years, only six months of which were served behind bars.

Why? Why did this man's life mean less than a non-native life?

The ruling stems from a Supreme Court of Canada decision that denounced judges across Canada for their "over reliance on incarceration" for Aboriginal offenders.

Parliament amended the Criminal Code to reflect this decision. Court sentences for Aboriginals are no longer based on the severity of the crime. Now judges are to give due attention to a criminal's "Indianness". What's worse, the Ontario Court of Appeal has recently used this same logic in sentencing blacks in Ontario. Justice is no longer blind.

On education, the Auditor General reported that "the record of education achievement of Indian students living on reserves continues to lag far behind [their non-native counterparts]." Rather than re-examine the curriculum taught at band schools, post-secondary institutions and professional schools have lowered their academic requirements for Aboriginal applicants or offer preferential admission.

For example, the University of Alberta admissions policy states, "The University has adopted a general policy allowing favored treatment of Aboriginal applicants, with a view to having the student population representative of the public the University serves. The policy is applied with an overall quota commensurate with teaching resources in the form of preferential access to a defined number of places for applicants meeting minimum admission standards and ranked among themselves by the usual criteria."

In other words, Aboriginal students are often able to by-pass waitlists for programs that non-Aboriginal students must endure.

Such preferential policies might be barely acceptable - though no less discriminatory - if they actually produced results. Unfortunately, the result has been to make Aboriginals more - not less - dependent on government handouts and special treatment. Not only does this destroy the motivation and pride of Aboriginal people, but it creates resentment and tension in the rest of society.

Most of the native policies have created new victims because they wrongly address group rights rather than individual rights. Thus, group-based laws can only be justified if one looks at the former and not the latter. In either case, it creates victims. For example, should a single mother who is non-native lose a possible job to a native male, just because of his ethnicity? Unfairness can only ever be justified by looking at the group and not the individual.

Canadians want what is just and equitable, and feel a tremendous amount of guilt for the third-world conditions in which many Aboriginals live. But, the current system of awarding special treatment to one group of people while discriminating against another, only results in hostility and inequality in our society.