Canada’s reconciliation with Indigenous People will be incomplete without official acknowledgement of the Indigenous genocide on Canadian soil

By Fareed Khan

Today, September 30th, marked the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada.  It is seen as a historic occasion where Canada officially acknowledged the history of what was done to Indigenous People on this land.

Creation of this commemorative day was one of the 94 "calls to action" in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which was released in December 2015.  Establishing the holiday, according to the TRC report, was intended to honour survivors of Residential Schools, their families, and communities, and ensure that public commemoration of the history and legacy of residential schools remains a vital component of the reconciliation process.  It is also an opportunity for settler-Canadians to consider the trauma that was inflicted on Indigenous Peoples, and the trauma that they have been dealing with generation after generation until the present day.

Establishment of this day is a positive development in the process of reconciliation, but it is still only a small step forward since most of the TRC calls to action have yet to be implemented.  Canada still has a long way to go to address and undo the legacy of anti-Indigenous racism on which this country was founded.  While acknowledgement of Canada's racist legacy towards Indigenous People is part of the process of reconciliation it also needs to include an official acknowledgement by Canada's Parliament that colonial authorities and the Canadian government willfully and knowingly committed genocide against Indigenous People on the territory that became Canada.  Without this the process of reconciliation will be incomplete.

Evidence in the form of academic research, historical documents, actions by political leaders, and policies established by colonial and Canadian governments demonstrate that Canada was founded on policies of white supremacy, anti-Indigenous racism, and acts which constituted the genocide of Indigenous People.  The Indian Act and Indian Residential Schools are two examples of Canadian government policies that attempted to suppress and eliminate the Indigenous history, culture and people of this land.  Combined with colonial policies in the centuries before Confederation this led to a precipitous 95 per cent decline of the Indigenous population on Canadian territory.  This needs to be acknowledged officially at the highest levels of political leadership if the process of reconciliation is to have any meaning, and if Canadians are to understand the history underlying the nation that Canada became.

Under the Genocide Convention there are five acts which constitute genocide.  They include: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.  All the crimes defined under the Genocide Convention have been committed by colonial and Canadian governments against Indigenous People.  While officially acknowledging these crimes as genocide was not part of the TRC's 94 calls to action, doing so would send a strong message to Indigenous People about the desire of the government and political leaders to accept Canada's anti-Indigenous history.

The Indian Residential Schools system is one area that has received considerable public and political attention, especially so since the discovery of thousands of unmarked graves on the sites of former residential schools since the spring of 2021.

 

From 1831 to 1996 there were 140 residential schools across the country operated directly by the federal government or in collaboration with various Christian church denominations.  For decades, school survivors and communities spoke out about the intergenerational trauma caused by these institutions, which included physical and emotional trauma inflicted on Indigenous children, loss of language, community, and culture, and the ongoing forcible removal and assimilation of children under the present day child welfare system. 

 

An estimated 150,000 children were forcibly taken from their families and communities, and sent to residential schools, which in many instances were thousands of kilometres away from their homes. They experienced horrific conditions of physical and sexual abuse, unsanitary conditions resulting in disease, malnutrition and starvation, forced labour, and indoctrination to wipe out their identity, languages and cultures. Thousands of them never returned home, dying and being buried on residential school sites without their families being informed, or running away from the schools and dying in their attempts to return to their families. 

 

The colonial policies and practices which created Residential Schools continue today.  Indigenous children are overwhelmingly represented in Canada’s child welfare system. Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people experience staggeringly high rates of violence. And governments frequently approve industrial projects on Indigenous territories without the free, prior and informed consent of the communities directly affected. 

 

As Canadians observe this historic day they also need to think about pressuring the Canadian Parliament to officially acknowledge that an Indigenous genocide was committed on Canadian soil.  Because if Canada is going to recognize and condemn international genocides, like that of the Uyghurs, the Rohingya, and the Yazidis, then it would be supremely hypocritical for Canada's political leaders to refuse to acknowledge the genocide perpetrated on Indigenous People in Canada.  It is something that our political leaders must do if we want to demonstrate our integrity in the process of reconciliation. 

 

© 2021 The View From Here.  © 2021 Fareed Khan.  All Rights Reserved

Trudeau, O’Toole and Singh didn’t address racism during the election, they need to make it a priority in the new Parliament

By Fareed Khan

The election that a majority of Canadians did not want is over and it returned a Parliament barely different than the previous one.  Now that it is over it is time for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Conservative leader Erin O'Toole, and New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh to get to work dealing with Canada's other pandemic, the one none of the party leaders addressed during the election campaign that has been around long before Covid19 landed on our shores, namely the pandemic of racism and hate which has been ignored for decades.  

Addressing this issue is even more urgent given that more than 800,000 Canadians voted for the People’s Party of Canada, a party that is anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and has embraced racism and white supremacists.

Many Canadians, particularly members of racialized communities, were troubled that combatting hate was barely mentioned by Trudeau, O’Toole or Singh during the campaign.  It begs the question “why not” when 60 per cent of Canadians see it as a serious problem, according to a poll released on September 3rd.

Canadians took to the streets to protest in the tens of thousands over the last year and a half calling for racial justice, for action to fight Islamophobia, and supporting justice for Indigenous people.  Yet none of the three major party leaders took this as a signal to make the fight against hate and racism one of their priorities in their campaign messaging.

However, the Liberal and NDP leaders should be credited for including proposals to fight racism in their respective policy documents while O’Tooles Conservatives did not.  In fact the Tories failed to mention the words “racism” and “Islamophobia” even once in their campaign platform.  This says volumes about how serious the Conservatives are about fighting hate and supporting calls for racial justice.  It also shows that they have a ways to go before racialized minority communities see them as a sincere partner in the fight against hate.

 

One area where all three party leaders were spectacular failures with racialized communities is around Quebec’s Bill 21 “secularism” law, a law deemed racist by human rights experts and legal scholars.  For the sake of political expediency all three leaders turned their backs on those Quebecer’s impacted by the discriminatory Quebec law which targets racialized religious minorities.  Furthermore, all three leaders need to be chastised for failing to challenge Bloc Quebecois leader Yves Francois Blanchet for his specious claim that the moderator of the English language debate had called Quebecer’s “racists” by asking a question about Bill 21.  And while Trudeau left the door open to a legal challenge to the law by the federal government, it should be noted that he made the same promise in the 2019 election but did nothing to follow up on it afterwards. 

As the only racialized leader of a major party Singh also needs to answer for his failure to take a strong and principled stand against Bill 21, and support of the rights of Sikhs, Muslims and Jews in Quebec.  One would expect him to be at the forefront of opposition to the Quebec law instead of caving in to Quebec’s Francophone ethno-nationalists.  The fact that he is not is deeply disappointing and contradicts his claims that the NDP would be there for the people that needed them, and that he is committed to the cause of anti-racism.

These actions demonstrate the hypocrisy of all three men for claiming to be defenders of human rights in their campaign platforms, but refusing to stand up for the human rights of Quebec’s minority religious communities against an unjust Quebec law that promotes government sanctioned racism.  In so doing they sent the message that in Canada not all minority communities are worthy of human rights, or having them defended by our national political leaders. 

As soon as Parliament reconvenes Trudeau, O’Toole and Singh must put the fight against hate into high gear and help push back this pandemic which is deeply affecting the lives of millions of Canadians.  They also need to rethink their positions on Bill 21 if they want to have any credibility as defenders of human rights.  If they fail to do this in the new Parliamentary session the anger of Canadians who have marched in the streets over the last year and a half will be expressed loudly and politically.  Anti-racism activists in particular will be watching what they do closely, and will hold all of them accountable for their failure to confront this deeply rooted and ugly disease which needs a forceful national effort led by principled political leaders to counter it.

© 2021 The View From Here.  © 2021 Fareed Khan.  All Rights Reserved

Maxime Bernier’s “People’s Party of Canada” is no different than the “MAGA” cult of Donald Trump

"Bernier’s affinity for far right (and frankly fascist) ideology is a draw to the anti-vax crowd, white supremacists, Islamophobes, anti-Semites and other hateful elements in society."

By Fareed Khan

On the day the federal election was called, the far right People’s Party of Canada (PPC), led by former Conservative Maxime Bernier, was polling at 3.3 per cent, below the Green Party.  A month later, the PPC has surged past the Greens, and as of September 18th it is polling at 7.3 per cent, placing it fourth nationally for voter preference.  

 

If voter turnout in this election is the same or surpasses that from 2019 it means that more than 1.34 million Canadian voters are thinking of casting their ballot for a party that would undo measures to curb hate speech and fight racism, reverse climate change initiatives, whose leader has refused to get a Covid vaccine and supports Covid conspiracy theorists, is seen as anti-science, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, has promoted homophobic and anti-trans messaging, and is okay with having extremist right-wing and white supremacist voters among its supporters.  This ideological and policy direction of the PPC makes it no different than the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) cult of Donald Trump in the US.

Given Bernier’s embrace of far right ideology, the Conservative Party seemingly dodged a bullet when he lost the leadership of that party to Andrew Scheer in 2017.  However, if current polling trends hold Bernier could be back in the House of Commons in the next Parliament with a level of voter support that the Green Party has only managed to achieve once (in the 2019 election).  Even if Bernier does not win his seat, gaining the support of over 1.3 million voters will give him a platform and financial resources that could make him a bigger threat to Canadian political discourse in the future than he and his party already are.

This surge in support for the PPC is a potentially dangerous trend that has not received the media coverage or analysis it should since the start of the election.  If there are well over a million Canadians thinking about voting for a political party rooted in far-right ideology, that is reminiscent of the worst elements of Donald Trump’s MAGA extremists, then Canadians should be worried and prepared to see a level of political ugliness in our future similar to what we have witnessed from Trump supporters in the US.

Canadians have already seen a very disturbing side of politics in this election with PPC supporters showing up at campaign stops for Justin Trudeau to shout racist and misogynistic obscenities at him, and in one instance assault him by throwing gravel at him.  Within their midst have been known white supremacists who the PPC has not disavowed.  This should not be surprising considering that Bernier expelled a candidate from the party during the 2019 election for calling on him to denounce white supremacy and racism.

Bernier’s affinity for far right (and frankly fascist) ideology is a draw to the anti-vax crowd, white supremacists, Islamophobes, anti-Semites and other hateful elements in society.  If a PPC candidate were to be elected on Monday it would be like having a neo-Nazi sitting in Parliament and showing a middle finger to Canadian soldiers who fought and died to defeat Nazism in World War 2.

To get a sense of the hateful nature of the PPC, one only needs to look at a media release put out by them last week where they opposed Bill C-16 – an amendment to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression – and parts of C-6 – an amendment to outlaw activities related to conversion therapy.  In public statements the PPC made outrageous and bigoted statements conflating transgender identity with homosexuality by claiming, “Boys and girls suffering from gender dysphoria are being encouraged to start transitioning, when most of them would grow up to become healthy gays and lesbians.”

The latest polls show that the PPC has more than tripled its support from what it received in the 2019 election.  If political developments in the US over the last decade are any indication, this evolution should be considered a danger to political and social stability in Canada, and Canadians need to be worried if we want to avoid falling down the same black hole that American politics has fallen into during and after the Trump era.

The danger posed by the PPC should not be underestimated given its embrace of the most extreme right wing elements of society.  Even if the party does not win a seat the support of almost 1.4 million Canadians would give this anti-science, homophobic, white supremacist and racism friendly party a level of legitimacy that would be detrimental to Canada’s political culture.  Should their polling numbers translate into votes on Election Day then Canadians who believe in a diverse, accepting and progressive society with a progressive political culture had better get prepared for political discourse in this country that is more like the distasteful and hostile politics that we have witnessed in the US over the past several years.  All signs point to Trump style populist politics becoming a reality in Canada.  How much prominence it will have and how long it will be a factor in Canadian politics remains to be seen.

© 2021 The View From Here.  © 2021 Fareed Khan.  All Rights Reserved