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I found a statement from an Australian official that claims to speak on behalf of Canada and New Zealand as well, but it’s from October 16th, so not sure if it’s the same reasoning.
Thank you Chair,
I have the honour to deliver this explanation of vote on behalf of Canada, New Zealand and my own country, Australia.
CANZ members are strong supporters of the right of all peoples to self-determination.
We will continue to promote the full implementation of Article 73 of the UN Charter.
CANZ continues to work across the United Nations’ decolonisation agenda.
We abstained from voting on this resolution for three reasons.
First, there are already a number of existing resolutions on colonialism under consideration by the Fourth Committee.
Second, the resolution contains proposals that go against the spirit and intent of the UN80 Initiative and the UN General Assembly Revitalisation process.
The Secretary General’s UN80 mandate report of 12 May 2025 called for ways to “avoid duplication and ensure strategic use of resources across the UN system”. The GA Revitalization resolution (A/Res/79/327) noted “with concern the significant increase in the number of proposals to proclaim international days” and called for restraint on new mandates. CANZ shares these concerns regarding the proliferation of international days and their resource implications.
Third, this resolution is being introduced by a sponsor whose voting rights are currently suspended in the General Assembly.
Chair, it must also be re-stated in this Committee that one of the co-sponsors of the resolution - a permanent member of the UN Security Council - is actively undermining the decolonisation agenda by waging an illegal war to reassert imperial control over an independent sovereign state.
Russia’s illegal war of aggression undermines the UN Charter which prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
Our collective commitments to uphold sovereignty and territorial integrity are intrinsic to decolonisation.
Chair,
CANZ remains open to good faith discussions on innovative solutions to the complex issue of self-determination.
Thank you.
Here is Article 73: https://legal.un.org/repertory/art73.shtml
Seems we voted in favour of another similar notion on the same day
So, the sky is blue. Thanks tips
Can you link to the actual proposition? I can’t find it in 5 minutes of searching.
The usual suspects. UN votes do expose what values they truly hold.
So whose colonizing now? I’m sick of this shit I’m not a colonist my a sisters came to Canada long after it was colonized. What a bunch of useless shit and the decolonization. So do Russians have to go back to Ukraine where they originated? Britain have to leave if you don’t have Briton blood.
decolonization does not mean expelling immigrants or doing ancestry tests. To be honest it’s a vague term with disputed meaning, but in my opinion, it means restoring equity to an inequitable society.
So does that mean the indiginous loose their special privilages or we get the same.
special privileges? Like, their sovereignty as nations?
You know, people in the USA have different rights than Canadians; Australians, Japanese, Chinese people, all have different rights. Perhaps in an ideal future we might not have different nations, and we’d have equal rights for all humans. But for now we live in a world where different nations make deals and arrangements and secure different rights for their peoples.
Canada literally occupies unceded land right now.
- https://globalnews.ca/news/11324599/canadas-longest-trial-precedent-setting-bc-land-claim-first-nations
- https://www.osler.com/en/insights/reports/2025-legal-outlook/reconciling-aboriginal-title-and-private-property-rights-on-unceded-land
Canadian mining companies are famous for doing colonialism in Africa, among other places
Canada literally occupies unceded land right now.
And as I commented in another thread - I believe in response to your post - we can either collectively acknowledge the true and full cost of rectifying this situation, including fairly compensating those who are affected, or we can stick our heads in the sand and pretend that me and my kids, who were born in this country no differently than indigenous families and who know no other home, are expected to destroy our lives in service of the wrongs of the past.
If private property is affected, then the displaced people need to be fairly compensated. In general the impact on everyone needs to be considered in the calculus. I opened my eyes for the first time in this country, just like everyone else born here did, regardless of what atrocious actions were committed by those in the past. I have nowhere to go, this is my home as much as it is anyone else’s.
If we don’t acknowledge these facts willingly and openly i fear we will be forced to acknowledge them unwillingly.
You keep talking about this as something that happened in the past as opposed to something that’s currently happening.
Well it did happen in the past.
And it is happening now.
I’m going to talk about private land exclusively.
What happened in the past is the government appropriated the land, it seems at the very least unethically, and then sold it to private interests. Somewhere along the line an innocent citizen bought the land thinking it was freehold or otherwise was the owner’s land to sell. It seems that now the land is being expropriated.
If it was never the government’s land to sell, and the courts have ruled in that way, then the government needs to compensate the people to whom the land was sold.
This cost needs to be considered by the government when they negotiate with FN groups. It is the true and total cost of reconciliation. If it is excluded then it will cause enormous dissatisfaction with the entire exercise of reconciliation, and it will eventually destroy the program. If the goal is harmonious coexistence, this will be unachievable if some of the victims - and they are also victims - are pushed out and ignored.
My other adjacent point is that a full cost and schedule for reconciliation must be made clear to everyone, so that all stakeholders can understand the objective and agree on the end goal.
Let’s be clear about what you are actually saying here. You are describing the privatization of stolen land as if it were a simple matter of unfortunate paperwork. The government did not simply unethically appropriate the land. The settlers orchestrated a campaign of displacement and genocide, then laundered the loot through property deeds to create a class of settlers whose innocence is built on that foundational violence. That citizen did not buy freehold land. They bought a fantasy, a clean title washed in the blood of the original people who were murdered or removed from it. The courts are not handing down philosophical rulings. They are finally, begrudgingly, acknowledging a truth that Indigenous people have never stopped stating which is that the land was never Canada’s to sell.
Your entire argument hinges on the moral panic of the settler who feels cheated. But where is your panic for the people who were cheated of everything? You call for the government to compensate the buyer, to make the settler whole, but this just completes the cycle of colonial logic. It says the ultimate victim of theft is the one who ended up holding the stolen goods, not the people who were robbed in the first place. You call them also victims. They’re not victims, they are the beneficiaries. Unwitting perhaps, but beneficiaries nonetheless of a system that granted them property through ethnic cleansing. Reconciliation priced on making those beneficiaries happy is not reconciliation. It is the perpetuation of the same power dynamic with a polite apology attached.
When you demand a full cost and schedule, you are talking about a budget for justice. You want to put a ceiling on what is owed. But true reconciliation isn’t a government program you can sabotage with stakeholder dissatisfaction. It is the unfinished business of dismantling a colonial project. If the current property owner is compensated, that is a cost of doing business for a state that built itself on theft. It is not a debt owed to the public by Indigenous people. The goal is not harmonious coexistence built on a ledger that balances the comfort of settlers against the rights of nations. The goal is justice, and justice is inherently disruptive to the unjust peace that has existed here for centuries. You cannot put a timeline on decolonization. The only thing that needs to be made clear is that the era of pretending these lands were ever legitimately Canada’s to give away is over.
Well let them come and take it.
just look at this brave colonizer
You can wrap it in as many words as you want. What you are saying is that I, and others like me, who were born here just like you were, and just like indigenous people were have less of a claim to this country as their homeland. This is the basis that seems to allow you to justify taking away the lives of other people.
The goal can only be harmonious coexistence, or it will be doomed to fail. If your project is built on the destruction of the lives of others, then it will not succeed.
I will say again - I first opened my eyes in this country. It is my home and I know no other. I and FN peoples are the same in this regard. I am not special nor do I hold an exalted position over you, and neither do you over me. In the end I’m putting demands on the government to recognize the true and full cost of reconciliation. I’m not putting demands on FN people. I’m not sure why you feel aggrieved that I’ve identified another group that is being impacted by this project.
You are asking for people to sacrifice to right the wrongs of the past. I want to do this, and others do to. But if you treat them as lesser and don’t try to understand the impacts on them, and you invoke academic concepts to justify why they should just ‘suck it up’, you’re going to be unsuccessful. Eventually you have to live with these people. And like I said before, they are no different than you, no less and no more.
This is not about wrapping anything in words. It’s about confronting the central lie you are telling yourself. You are conflating birthplace with historical claim. Being born on stolen land does not grant you the same claim as the people from whom it was stolen. That is the brutal fact of colonial history. You opened your eyes here. But the people we displaced had their eyes open here for thousands of years before you had your epiphany. To pretend those two facts are equivalent is the foundation of the injustice.
You keep talking about harmonious coexistence as the only goal. But you are demanding that this harmony be built on your terms, on the continued denial of the original crime. You want reconciliation to be a polite transaction that leaves your sense of home and ownership undisturbed. That’s just perpetuation of a settlement that never ended. True coexistence begins with the uncomfortable truth that your homeland is built on the homeland of another, and that reality demands more than just a budgetary line item.
You say you are putting demands on the government, not on First Nations. But you are. Your demand is that the government prioritize compensating settlers as the true and full cost before anything else. You are framing settler dissatisfaction as the primary risk to the project. That is a direct demand on Indigenous people to wait, to accept less, to once again watch as the state manages the feelings of the beneficiaries before addressing the rights of the dispossessed. You have identified another impacted group, yes. But you have placed them at the front of the line for justice, ahead of the people who were robbed. That is why there is grievance.
No one is asking you to suck it up. You need you to wake up and understand that your personal connection to this land does not erase the collective, unbroken connection of the nations that were here first. The question is who has already sacrificed everything and who is now being asked to share a fraction of what was gained through that loss. You say we all must live together. We do. And living together means finally building a shared home where the foundation isn’t the myth that we all started here with the same claim. We didn’t. Justice starts when we stop pretending that we did.
