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Conrad Black: A disgraceful attack on free speech

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Conrad Black: A disgraceful attack on free speech

Progressives who want to criminalize discussion of residential schools are embarrassing Canada

Published Oct 26, 2024  • 

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New Democrat MP Leah Gazan speaks during a press conference in Ottawa, on Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2022.
New Democrat MP Leah Gazan speaks during a press conference in Ottawa, on Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2022. Photo by Spencer Colby/THE CANADIAN PRESS

Once again, commentators in friendly countries throughout the western world are expressing sincere alarm over whether Canada has succumbed to terminal wokeness and is voluntarily and by force of law strangling free speech and ceasing to be, by traditional definition, a free country. Leah Gazan, a Manitoba New Democratic MP, who has been a tireless propagator of the defamatory fraud that French and English Canadians attempted to perform an act of genocide against Canada’s indigenous people, is at it again. Her private member’s bill, supported by the NDP, proposes to make it a crime to question, dispute, minimize or justify the activities of the so-called Indian residential schools which she continues falsely to represent as a genocidal enterprise.

No one disputes that there were many tragic and frightful occurrences in the schools, but there is no doubt that the purpose and intent of them was to assist native children in escaping poverty and illiteracy and giving them a route to a normal and prosperous life. Nor is there any dispute that can withstand even cursory scrutiny that many of the approximately 150,000 students in those schools did in fact go on to much more successful lives than they might have led without having attended them. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission resisted with evident reluctance the rampaging temptation to try to swaddle this macabre fable in the winding sheet of genocide, but it did come to a number of conclusions that were not justified by the large volumes of accompanying documentation and the report has effectively failed as a basis of reconciliation.

There is a general consensus among thoughtful Canadians that as a society we have not adequately addressed the needs, and rightful ambitions and grievances of Indigenous communities. This has not been for many years a question of inadequate funding. Tens of billions of dollars have been poured into a cornucopia of programs designed to compensate and durably improve the lives of Indigenous communities. The residential schools themselves began contemporaneously with legislation seeking to assure that all children in Canada were educated, and the indigenous populations were so dispersed that it was fiscally impractical to build the number of day-schools that would have been required to educate large numbers of them. Tuberculosis was a widespread problem in society and not just in native communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even amongst prosperous families. Schools in general, including elite boarding schools, had an excessive amount of corporal punishment in that era and there was undoubtedly, in almost all western countries, inadequate monitoring of the deviant and even sadistic behaviour of some teachers.

The commitment, by Canadian governments and churches of $7 billion of reparations for claimed victims of the residential schools is excessive and if these awards and concessions had been coordinated properly, they would have been conditional on the native victimhood industry ceasing to press on what has been an open door of Canadian majority guilt while steadily escalating its outrageous demands. The former minister of justice of Canada, Jody Wilson-Raybould, went so far as to order that no claims made by native individuals or organizations against the government of Canada should be litigated: they should instead be settled by negotiation. Canada is not and has never been a uniquely deliberately or systematically unjust jurisdiction. But in these matters it has consistently been a stupid jurisdiction, and remains so.

The respected Americas commentator of the Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, recently wrote, as a number of Canadians have, (including me), that the unmarked graves scandal, after more than three years, has yet to be supported with one scintilla of probative evidence. If Canada is to be taken seriously in the world or even by itself, it must arm itself with the self-respect to investigate such controversies promptly and thoroughly, to redress matters fully and generously when that is appropriate, and to revise or debunk the allegations when that is justified. As I have written here and elsewhere before, our own government is complicit in blood libels against the founding European nations of this country. That is not the purpose of government.

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Given that our entire society has effectively capitulated to ever more extreme complaints, who seem to be cranking up to claim the estimated 200,000 mostly nomadic Indigenous people who roamed around the 3,800,000 square miles of what is now Canada when the Europeans arrived 500 years ago, were invaded and occupied in a manner legally indistinguishable from the conquest of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939. What is needed is a comprehensive assessment of the past and plan of action for the future, worked out by impartial and altruistic people in intimate discussion and agreement with a representative group of Canada’s many extremely talented and successful native people.

Illustrative of the sort of semi-formalized misinformation and cant and emotionalism that obstructs serious discussion of these matters was an email sent to the eminent writer and journalist Robert MacBain (and shared with me), whose most recent book was on the tragic death of the young native boy Charlie Wenjack, from the fund that has been established in the boy’s honour. The email claimed that Charlie was “taken from his family at nine years old and forced to attend” the residential school at Kenora, Ontario; that he “had run away from the school to reunite with his family 600 km away,” and “succumbed to starvation and exposure,” and that his death “became the first to spark a formal investigation into the treatment of indigenous children in residential schools.”

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It claimed that the school changed the boy’s name from Chainie to Charlie, and has given mass circulation to drawings of Catholic nuns delousing Charlie and other Ojibway boys. It is clearly alleged that Charlie was sexually abused by the school staff. All of these assertions are false, as Robert MacBain meticulously demonstrated, Charlie attended a Presbyterian school, not a Catholic school with nuns, and there is incontrovertible evidence that all these claims are bunk. Clergy are caricatured as hideous and brutal people, and perhaps a few of them were, but the Kenora school has many positive and grateful alumni.

Until we demand and elicit the truth about all these issues, we will have no defence against the self-defamation of our country and its history and no adequate response to the Indigenous people who have so long awaited one. Canada is becoming a laughing stock in the world. This entire issue goes to the heart and moral core of this country and it has to be faced and resolved, and not by repealing free speech and criminalizing legitimate discussion of it.

The NDP is high on censorship: NDP MP calls for hate speech law to combat residential school ‘denialism’

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Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller interested in reviewing proposed bill

Olivia Stefanovich · CBC News · Posted: Feb 18, 2023 4:00 AM EST | Last Updated: February 18

A growing memorial outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in B.C. following the May 2021 discovery of suspected unmarked graves. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

WARNING: This story contains distressing details.

Some Indigenous academics and activists say they’ve become the targets of a growing backlash against reports of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential school sites — and they want Parliament to do something about it.

They say they’re being flooded with emails, letters and phone calls from people pushing back against the reports of suspected graves and skewing the history of the government-funded, church-run institutions that worked to assimilate more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children for more than a century. 

They call it “residential school denialism” and describe it as an attempt to downplay, twist and dismiss the facts to undermine public confidence in the Indigenous reconciliation project.

CBC News: The House13:11What is residential school ‘denialism’ and should it be banned?The discovery of possible unmarked graves on the site of several former residential schools shook many Canadians, but some Indigenous academics fear it has also led to a backlash: people misrepresenting facts or dismissing the harms of residential schools. CBC’s Olivia Stefanovich has a special report on what’s being called residential school denialism — and whether anything should be done about it.

NDP MP Leah Gazan, who got the House of Commons last October to unanimously recognize that genocide occurred at residential schools, now wants to take the issue a step further by drafting legislation to outlaw attempts to deny that genocide and make false assertions about residential schools.

“Denying genocide is a form of hate speech,” said Gazan, who represents the riding of Winnipeg Centre. 

“That kind of speech is violent and re-traumatizes those who attended residential school.”

A woman speaks at a news conference.
Leah Gazan, the NDP MP for Winnipeg Centre, wants to craft legislation to outlaw what she calls “residential school denialism.” (Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press)

Gazan’s proposal is causing controversy, even among those who want the facts about residential schools widely known. But the Office of Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller said he would be interested in reviewing the proposed legislation.

“Residential school denialism attempts to hide the horrors that took place in these institutions,” Miller’s office told CBC News.

“It seeks to deny survivors and their families the truth, and distorts Canadians’ understanding of our shared history.”

‘People are responding … with fear’

More than 130 residential schools operated across the country from roughly 1883 until 1997. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found the federal government created them for the purpose of separating Indigenous children from their families and indoctrinating them into the culture of the dominant Euro-Christian Canadian society. The goal, said the commission, was to weaken Indigenous family ties and cultural linkages.

The commission said that many children at the schools were subjected to physical and sexual abuse. It described conditions at the schools as “institutionalized child neglect.”

Michelle Good, author of the upcoming book Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada, said she believes denialism is rooted in Canada’s shifting power dynamics.

“Indigenous people are experiencing a very important renaissance, a resurgence,” Good said.

“As we are returning to our strength as nations, as peoples, people are responding, I think, with fear.”

Michelle Good is the author of the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award-winning novel Five Little Indians, which is about the residential school experience. (Silk Sellinger Photography)

Good, who also wrote the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award-winning novel Five Little Indians, said declaring denialism hate speech would send a powerful message that the era of oppression and racism is over.

“My mother watched her friend Lily haemorrhage to death from tuberculosis at the Onion Lake Residential School,” said Good, a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation, 153 km northwest of Saskatoon.

“To have people respond to our lived experience as though it never happened is devastating, and our country should be beyond that at this point.”

Busting myths

Crystal Gail Fraser, a Gwichyà Gwich’in assistant professor of history and Native Studies at the University of Alberta, said she would welcome the opportunity to engage in fair dialogue with denialists.

She said she receives messages every week from people arguing that residential schools were established with good intentions, or that Indigenous communities are concocting claims about unmarked graves. Some of these messages, she said, come from missionaries working overseas.

“For people who do this as a part of their jobs, their professional lives, that is very disturbing,” Fraser said.

“How is it that we can better educate everyday Canadians so we don’t have to be at the point where we’re directing efforts to bust more myths about Indigenous peoples in Canada, and we can really redirect and return our attention to the truth and reconciliation part?”

Métis archeologist Kisha Supernant taking readings using ground-penetrating radar. (Submitted by Kisha Supernant)

Kisha Supernant, director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology at the University of Alberta, said she received an email challenging her own family history after she identified 169 potential graves through ground-penetrating radar in March 2022 at the former Grouard Indian Residential School in northern Alberta.

Supernant, who is Métis, also shared messages with CBC from people threatening to dig up suspected burial sites. 

“I’m already dealing with the emotional toil of spending my time walking over potential graves of children who went missing, and then for that to be called into question makes the work a lot more challenging,” she said.

Supernant said expanding hate speech law to cover residential school denialism is an idea that should be explored but she doesn’t think it will silence the “denialists.”

“If nations decide to exhume, which some may, and they do find the bodies of children, they will still not be enough for denialists,” she said.

“They’ll still find ways to excuse it. Because it’s not actually about the facts.”

‘This is totalitarianism’ 

Some academics have experienced consequences over their stances and statements on residential schools.

Frances Widdowson was fired last year as a professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, in part for her criticism of what she called “dominant residential school narratives.” 

A speech she planned to give at the University of Lethbridge last month was also cancelled after students protested. 

She said using hate speech laws to criminalize some opinions and views on residential schools would cross a dangerous line.

“This is totalitarianism,” Widdowson said.

The announcement of 200 possible unmarked graves in Kamloops, B.C. sent shockwaves around the world. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press)

Unlike the House of Commons, Widdowson doesn’t believe the institutions were genocidal. She gained notoriety for saying the institutions gave Indigenous children an education that “normally they wouldn’t have received.”

But Widdowson said she’s not a “denialist.”

She said she acknowledges residential schools caused harm and children died, but takes issue with the reports of possible unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site in B.C., which she said caused “hysteria.”

“The only way that you are going to determine whether in fact there are burials there is to do excavations on that site,” Widdowson said.

“I’m completely, you know, open to the fact that I could be misguided and wrong. But the answer to that is not to make what I’m saying illegal, which is ridiculous.”

Countering ‘denialism’ with education

Richard Moon, a law professor at the University of Windsor who specializes in freedom of expression, said any law targeting residential school denialism would invite a Charter of Rights challenge.

“We want to be very careful about regulating claims about historical events — even if we think those claims are misguided, ignorant or hurtful,” he said.

“The Supreme Court has said only a very narrow category of extreme speech is caught by hate speech laws, and that’s all they should catch in order to reconcile the regulation of hate speech with our commitment to freedom of expression under the charter.”

Eldon Yellowhorn, professor and Indigenous Studies department chair at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., said he knows that many sceptics are demanding that suspected unmarked graves be dug up for proof.

He said that’s controversial because it crosses many taboos about the treatment of the dead in Indigenous cultures.

“People like myself are working hard on finding a resolution to this and to making the evidence stronger so that we can be more confident in the statements that we make,” said Yellowhorn, who is from the Piikani Nation, 200 km south of Calgary.

“You can’t legislate stupidity away.”

A man in a suit poses outside for a photo.
Sean Carleton, an assistant professor of history and Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba, wants governments to educate the public about how to confront mistruths about residential schools. (Submitted by Sean Carleton)

Sean Carleton, an assistant professor in the departments of history and Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba, said he doesn’t think hate speech legislation would be the best approach either. 

“It takes the responsibility out of Canadians’ hands to challenge the people in their lives,” Carleton said.

“It risks … giving denialists more of a platform to say, you know, look at the heavy-handed approach of the government. What do they not want us, Canadians, to really understand?”

Carleton said his preference is for governments, churches, schools and community associations to counter lies and misinformation about residential schools with education.

“We need to get to that point where denialism is seen as people who deny gravity or say the earth is flat,” he said.