The slippery slope reality of criminalizing residential school ‘denialism’
It’s pretty hard to trust the system when its major components get basic facts wrong — and insist on sticking to them years later
It’s easy to downplay the residential school system. Here’s one example: It wasn’t as bad as the Holocaust, which saw millions of people exterminated, or the Holodomor, which saw millions more intentionally starved to death. That doesn’t mean it didn’t harm people, but it wasn’t as bad as the full-on genocides that had happened in the same time period. There, I just did it.
For now, a 911 call reporting this blasphemous paragraph won’t go far. But that could change.
On Thursday, NDP MP Leah Gazan tabled a bill that would send the whole spectrum of residential school “denialists” — and downplayers — to jail for up to two years. Anyone who is caught publicly “misrepresenting facts” about residential schools, or “condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying” them, in the course of wilfully promoting hatred against Indigenous peoples, could be found guilty if Bill C-413 passes.
There are, of course, limits that the bill’s proponents will be especially keen to point out. The draft crime comes with a set of draft defences: truth, good-faith religious discourse, public interest and communication of hateful materials. Beyond that, courts have established (albeit foggy) limits to hate-promotion crimes as well — “Only the most intense forms of dislike” are in scope, and considerations must be made for the circumstances, tone and audience of the speech in question.
But it’s hard to feel much confidence that these limits will hold, considering how fast we’re headed down the slippery slope, which is more of an inevitability than a fallacy.
