This piece was originally published in June, 2021. The core message remains relevant today.
Canada has consistently failed to make progress that is commensurate with so many lofty pronouncements and expectations on the Indigenous file. By statistics alone, it is a national shame that most Indigenous Canadians in reservations live far below acceptable socio-economic standards. Money is not the problem. By 2022, the federal budget allocations to Aboriginals will have doubled since 2016 to nearly $25 billion.
Symbolic gestures like the new ritual acknowledgements when standing on Indigenous land improve nothing. The culture of pronouncements, symbolic nods, confessions of privilege, apologies and promises that governments have developed are virtue-signaling political gimmicks. Similarly, engaging in Truth and Reconciliation is in principle a good thing, but the engagement has been partially derailed away from both truth and from reconciliation. The reporting coverage and reactions to the 215 graves in Kamloops are a case in point.
None of these observations are meant to deny documented abuses or the grief and pain that the news evokes in individuals. It is precisely in respect to the painful experiences of victims and their families that the reporting and reactions have failed.
Our intellectual and political classes keep failing miserably. There has been no shortage of public officials, organizations and private citizens rushing to exhibit pain as well as anger and indignation. But for a few opinion-makers, the rush to express these sentiments, real or affected, has trampled on truth and on reconciliation.
The trampling on truth is most evident in the descriptions of what was found in Kamloops. Take the reporting of “mass graves,” for instance. This formulation is inflammatory and callous when we consider victims’ relatives. Saying “mass graves” evokes the murderous intention of killing machinery at work, like the trenches in the Balkans where the victims of ethnic hatred were dumped by the thousands. Jagmeet Singh has alluded to such places in making references to “genocide.” Here and abroad Reuters, The Guardian, BBC, and The New York Times have parroted the false formulation. While calling for prayers in “truth and reconciliation,” a University of Toronto scholar friend of mine affirms that Indigenous children were “wantonly murdered and dumped in a mass grave.” [I reached out to him several times to warn him about what he was saying and its implications, but I never received a response. Now that he is back in Alberta, I have invited him to meet, to no avail. This is a small indication of the state of the current intellectual class in Canada].
There is more at play here than semantics. The graves, unmarked at the time of finding, are individual graves located inside the perimeter of an institution that operated for over 8 decades. They are not a mass grave.
Allowing for the future possibility, even if remote, that foul play was involved in every case, there is no evidence that warrants such conclusions while the remains are still buried. No one has yet been exhumed, no investigation has commenced. As Peter Stockland recently pointed out, it is also impossible to determine the age of buried remains using the methods employed in finding the graves. In this sense, truth has been sacrificed in the rush to display sympathy and outrage, to the point of mainly serving condescension and falsehood. The political co-opting of the pain of others is particularly offensive; the misreporting is injurious and irresponsible.
Such careless liberties in the reporting, whether honestly expressed, rooted in sophistry, or seeking sensation, re-open wounds and rub poisonous salts. They subject relatives to imagining atrocities unlived and victims to remembering, for no benefit, nightmares lived. They erect real obstacles to national reconciliation. Reconciling requires forgiveness. Presenting monstrous untruths as facts obfuscates reason and enflames anger that impairs forgiveness.
People who care about Indigenous Canadians, especially the press, have the greater responsibility to report accurately and truthfully, mindful of the consternation and the renewed suffering they stir.
Moral character has never been exclusively measured in words but in deeds. For generations now, successive federal governments have made promises without delivering. For all the inflated rhetoric, even the present federal government has been incapable of permanently delivering potable water to so many Indigenous children. Worse still, not that long ago, Prime Minister Trudeau openly mocked Aboriginal women at a Liberal Party fundraiser in Toronto when the women demanded clean water for their children. Expressions of solidarity, vacuous electoral promises and virtue-signaling schemes will not deliver the outcomes that Indigenous Canadians need, just as handing out large amounts of unaccountable monies over decades has failed.
If politicians and the press begin with truth instead of grand schemes, we might pave the way to reconciliation. Similarly, modest, effective development, and targeted action lead to meaningful solidarity. Otherwise, cheap talk offers no solutions. Cheap talk invites more self-congratulatory attitudes. Cheap talk snuffs opportunity. Cheap talk is a formidable obstacle to moving on from past injustice.
Other related essays:
1. Rustad’s Claims Are False: Former BC Conservative leader John Rustad’s claim about residential school deaths, arguing that politicians conflate deaths at schools with deaths recorded elsewhere or later in life. The piece calls for accurate records and transparent public debate.
2. Symbol Without Substance: Mary Simon’s Vice-Regal Years: Mary Simon’s tenure as governor general elevated reconciliation symbolism while leaving Indigenous conditions unchanged. He criticizes her residential school rhetoric, treatment of skeptics, lack of French, and silence over church fires.
3. Trudeau’s small gestures speak louder than his deeds: Plutarch’s test of character contrasts with Justin Trudeau’s reconciliation promises, his Tofino trip on Truth and Reconciliation Day, and his sarcastic response to Grassy Narrows protesters, raising questions about his sincerity toward Indigenous Canadians.
4. Seven senators and a thought crime: Parliament’s 2022 residential school genocide motion outran the evidence, while a proposed Senate amendment threatened open inquiry. He urges MPs to revisit the declaration and distinguish coercive assimilation from deliberate mass murder.
5. CBC helped drive the Kamloops narrative, and still won’t come clean: Challenging Rosemary Barton’s statement about recovered children’s remains and CBC coverage of the Kamloops announcement. He calls for corrections, disclosure of any advance access to the story, and stricter verification of consequential claims.
6. Stop pretending campus mobs are an accident: The University of Lethbridge used safety claims and trespass powers to silence Frances Widdowson. Her cafeteria arrest prompts a call for Alberta legislation enforcing campus free expression with meaningful institutional penalties.