In 2021 Canada’s Conservatives challenged Trudeau and his government to condemn the Chinese Communist’s apparently genocidal treatment of its Uyghur population, over a million of whom are presently in “re-education” camps in the northwest region of Xinjiang. Various human rights groups have expressed their outrage, Amnesty International declaring the Communist government’s treatment of this Turkic people as well as various Muslim sects a “dystopian hellscape on a staggering level.” The U. N.’s definition of genocide includes five different oppressive actions, one of which entails stifling all population growth within the targeted group. Forced sterilizations and abortions, apparently, are major aspects of the Chinese government’s attempt to reduce the Uyghurs to but a minor force in the country’s vast population.
But Justin Trudeau was circumspect in criticizing the Chinese, suggesting the word “genocide” was a loaded term that needed to be used cautiously. Perhaps best representing his party’s perspective, Liberal M.P. Ali Ehsassi of Willowdale Ont. said that while evidence of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs has yet to be corroborated, he is in fact convinced of the genocidal nature of Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous. Other than “conservatives,” few in this country seem to disagree with this grossly simplistic narrative.
In fairness to the Liberals, they have criticized various aspects of China’s often oppressive use of force, particularly its dealings with Hong Kong, a former hive of freedom ceded to its jurisdiction by the British in 1997. But that a Canadian government, with the support of many in both academia and the mainstream press, should unequivocally condemn Canada’s treatment of its Native population as “genocidal,” while being circumspect about China’s approach to its dissenting minorities, is historically, rationally, morally Absurd!
This is no place to engage in a detailed examination of, for example, the history of our Residential Schools. It is a history fraught with ambiguities and unanswered questions which are presently being resolved by biased ideologues in ways consistently disparaging to Canada’s past. “Unmarked” burial sites recently “discovered” were in most cases long known to their local populations and were in fact marked by wooden crosses which simply decayed over the years. Those buried in such sites were often White Canadians who died along with the Indigenous as a result of outbreaks of such virulent diseases as tuberculosis. At the same time diseases such as smallpox introduced by the Europeans were particularly lethal to Indians whose immune systems were utterly incapable of dealing with them. So while some Indigenous leaders have maintained that the burial ground recently discovered at the Kamloops school contains the bodies of over 200 Indian kids who died young at the hands of their heartless keepers, it is not yet known who is in fact buried there or how they may have died. Given the media’s typical refusal to publicize information not in keeping with its bias, several “facts” that are no such thing have become part of the Canadian public consciousness. All students at the Residential Schools, we are told, were ripped from their family homes and forced to attend. Yet a significant number of elderly Indigenous folks have said they willingly sent their kids there in the hope of granting them an education that would equip them for the future. In the same way several Indigenous adults have come forward and thanked the schools for the benefits they imparted which launched them into successful careers. Oftentimes, it seems, government officials hid from the general public the ugly truth of conditions at certain schools. Was their duplicity a symptom of Canada’s systemic racism or in fact an admission that much of the country’s population would have been appalled to know that 6 year old kids were dying because of those conditions? Knowing what I know of Canadians, I have no doubt of the answer to that question. Nor do I doubt the testimony of those who insist that many of the instructors at these schools, whatever their religious affiliation, were decent, compassionate people who cared deeply for the welfare of their students. Indeed I have seen a number of class photos from the 60s of Indigenous kids grinning from ear to ear as they posed with those teachers who, we are asked to believe, were treating them as little more than animals.
In no way am I suggesting we ignore the awful aspects of Canada’s Residential Schools or its treatment of the Indigenous in general. But the furor behind the contemporary Left’s “moral” outrage is clearly born of its conviction that our 19th C. founders had no right to assume the superiority of their Culture to that of the Indigenous. It is a Postmodern assumption based upon the notion that all Ideas and Values are equally worthy of defense. It is what has led “intellectuals” to conclude that MacDonald’s decision to educate the Indigenous was in fact no different than contemporary China’s determination to “re-educate” its Uyghurs. Apparently trying to prepare a people to effectively exercise its freedoms in a Liberal Democracy is indistinguishable from a government intent on forcing a sector of its population to submit to Totalitarian Communism!
That many in this country would agree is hardly surprising given that we have a Prime Minister who declared a few years back that he admired the effectiveness with which the Chinese Communist government got things done! The abject stupidity of this statement is beyond question yet perfectly in keeping with the postmodern tendency to ignore intellectual and moral substance in deference to “inclusiveness.” Communism was responsible for over 100 million deaths in the 20th Century. It is inherently disdainful of the Rights of the Individual. It “includes” only those who submit to its tyranny. Was that the impetus behind the efforts of Canada’s founding fathers to educate the Indigenous? Were they simply obsessed with asserting their authority or was what they were teaching actually essential to the future welfare of their young students? Distinguishing between the merits of Liberal Democracies and Totalitarian Dictatorships would seem essential to any intelligent political debate. Such distinctions apparently being of little interest to many in the West today, Canada’s well intended though often flawed attempt to educate its Indigenous population is now deemed to be no less horrific than the efforts of China’s Communists to oppress every sector of its population not willing to submit to its tyranny.