Conrad Black: A shameful attack on free speech

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Once again, commentators from friendly countries throughout the Western world are expressing their sincere alarm that Canada has succumbed to terminal awakening and is voluntarily and by force of law stifling free speech and ceasing to be, by traditional definition, a free country . Leah Gazan, a New Democrat MP from Manitoba who has been a tireless propagator of the defamatory fraud that French and English Canadians attempted to commit 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, challenge, minimize or justify the activities of so-called Indian residential schools which she continues to falsely portray as a genocidal enterprise.

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No one disputes the fact that there were many tragic and frightening events in the schools, but there is no doubt that their purpose and intent was to help native children escape poverty and illiteracy and provide them with a path to a normal life and thrive. Nor is there any dispute that stands up to even a cursory examination that many of the approximately 150,000 students in those schools did in fact lead far more successful lives than they might have led without them. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission resisted with obvious reluctance the overwhelming temptation to try to wrap this macabre fable in the winding sheet of genocide, but it reached a series of conclusions that were not justified by the large volumes of accompanying documents, and the report effectively failed as a basis for reconciliation.

There is a general consensus among thoughtful Canadians that as a society we have not adequately addressed the needs, aspirations and fair grievances of Indigenous communities. This has not been a matter of inadequate funding for many years. Tens of billions of dollars have been poured into a myriad of programs designed to compensate and sustainably improve the lives of indigenous communities. Residential schools themselves began at the same time as legislation to ensure that all children in Canada were educated, and Indigenous populations were so dispersed that it was fiscally impractical to build the number of day schools that would have been necessary to educate a large number of them. . Tuberculosis was a widespread problem in society and not just in native communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even among 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 behavior of some teachers.

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Canadian governments’ and churches’ pledge of $7 billion in reparations to alleged residential school victims is excessive, and if these awards and concessions had been properly coordinated, they would have been conditional on the native victim industry ceasing pressure on what was. an open door of guilt to the majority of Canadians as they steadily escalate their outrageous demands. Canada’s former justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, went so far as to order that no claims made by aboriginal individuals or organizations against the Canadian government be brought to trial: they should instead be settled through negotiations. Canada is not and has never been a uniquely, deliberately or systematically unfair jurisdiction. But in these matters it has consistently been a stupid jurisdiction and remains so.

Respected American Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady recently wrote, as did a number of Canadians (myself included), that the unmarked graves scandal, more than three years later, has not yet supported by a scintilla of 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 remedy the situation fully and generously when appropriate, and to review or disappoint the charges. when this is justified. As I have written here and elsewhere, our own government is complicit in blood libels against the founding European nations of this country. This is not the purpose of government.

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As our whole society has effectively capitulated to increasingly extreme complaints, which seem to become triggered to claim that the 200,000 indigenous people, mostly nomads, roaming around the 3,800,000 square miles of what is now Canada, when Europeans arrived 500 years ago, were invaded and occupied in a manner legally indistinguishable from Hitler and Stalin’s conquest of Poland in 1939. There is a need for a comprehensive assessment of the past and a plan of action for the future, drawn up by unbiased and selfless people in intimate discussions and agreements. with a representative group of many extremely talented and successful Canadian natives.

An email sent to the eminent writer and journalist Robert MacBain (and shared with me), whose most recent book was about the tragic death of young native boy Charlie Wenjack, from the fund that was set up in the boy’s honour. The email claimed that Charlie was “taken from his family at the age of nine and forced to attend” residential school in Kenora, Ontario; that he had “run away from school to join his family 600km away” and “succumbed to starvation and exposure” and that his death “became the first to trigger an official investigation into the treatment of Indigenous children in residential schools. .”

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It was alleged that the school changed the boy’s name from Chainie to Charlie and circulated cartoons of Catholic nuns that deceived Charlie and other Ojibway boys. It is clearly alleged that Charlie was sexually abused by school staff. All of these claims are false, as Robert McBain has meticulously demonstrated, Charlie attended a Presbyterian school, not a Catholic school with nuns, and there is irrefutable evidence that all of these claims are insane. Clerics are caricatured as hideous and brutal people, and maybe a few of them were, but Kenora School has many positive and grateful alumni.

Until we demand and obtain the truth about all these issues, we will have no defense against the self-defamation of our country and its history, and no adequate response to the indigenous people who have waited so long for one. Canada is becoming a laughing stock in the world. The whole issue goes to the heart and moral core of this country and must be faced and resolved, not by abrogating free speech and criminalizing legitimate discussion of it.

National Post

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