July 14, 2025
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.

A disgraceful attack on free speech

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

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.

Interesting Read…

Loading