Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Canada’s elites suppress freedom of speech on indigenous matters
![](https://www.todayville.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/tvrd-canadian-charter-of-rights-and-freedoms-image-2024-05-28-1.jpg)
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Peter Best
Under section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadians are guaranteed freedom of thought, belief, and expression. These freedoms are fundamental in our democratic society. In fact, an official government commentary on the Charter states: “In a democracy, people must be free to discuss matters of public policy, criticize governments and offer their own solutions to social problems.”
Given this claim, it is, indeed, a mystery why free speech is protected when people say that Israel’s policies and practices towards the Palestinians are “racist,” but not when they say that Canada’s policies and practices towards Indigenous peoples are “racist.”
When it comes to Indigenous issues, our academic, media, and political elites have a Charter of Rights free speech blind spot. They refuse to allow contrary minded, but enlightened Nelson Mandela-like beliefs to be voiced unless those people want to be labeled as “racist.” Only a few brave souls have been willing to be pillarized by transgressing this “sacred” boundary.
This writer went over this line when he arranged a Chapters book-signing for There Is No Difference, a book that advocates for the greater integration of Indigenous people into Canadian society, only to have the event cancelled by the bookstore who chose silence over free speech. Surprisingly, only one mainstream journalist, Barbara Kay in The National Post, defended my free speech rights.
But I am not alone.
A few years ago, Senator Lynn Beyak dared to say that some good came from residential schools, a view that is, in fact, reflected in the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) Report, and was shared by eminent Indigenous author and residential school student Basil Johnston in his book, Indian School Days.
For making defensible assertions, Senator Beyak was excoriated by politicians from all parties, and mocked by editorial writers as an ignorant rube. In 2019, she was kicked out of the Conservative caucus, and shortly after she resigned from the Senate.
Associate Professor Frances Widdowson was exercising her “academic freedom,” but, nevertheless, was fired from Mount Royal University in 2021 for challenging the Indigenous status quo. In doing so, the university proved that its core mission was to protect the feelings of Indigenous people and not to challenge fallacies and uphold truth-seeking in a free and open debate.
The same year, an Abbotsford B.C. high school teacher, Jim McMurtry, was fired for saying that most Indigenous children who died in residential schools died because of diseases like influenza and tuberculosis. Even though this fact is reported in the TRC Report, it did not save Mr. McMurtry from unceremonially losing his teaching career.
In 2024, the mayor of Quesnel B.C., Ron Paull, was censured and the nearby First Nations bands boycoted him because his wife — a private citizen in her own right — handed out copies of Grave Error to friends and acquaintances. This book is a scholarly challenge to the “cultural genocide” claimed by the Kamloops Indigenous band.
Also, in 2024, a Manitoba school trustee, Paul Coffey, faced pressure to resign for publicly echoing what Senator Beyak had said a few years earlier.
These cases — and many others — clearly illustrate that no government official, no member of a provincial or territorial legislature, and few mainstream academics and journalists will defend contrary-minded “heretics” exercising their right to free speech, a right that is enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In fact, few mainstream news media outlets reported on these stories in a dispassionate and professional way. The CBC, for example, consistently emphasizes the “hurt feelings of the aggrieved,” making their outrage the focus of their reporting. In no media reports has the CBC mentioned the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, implying that Charter protected freedom of speech is no longer relevant in their reporting on Indigenous matters.
Hurt feelings, of course, are irrelevant to academics and journalists because the search for truth always involves controversies that hurt the feelings of some people.
Even more outrageous, the federal government has actively demonized Canadians who challenge misinformation about Indigenous people by proposing to make it a crime for people to engage in what it calls “residential school denialism.” As a result, people who care about the best interests of Indigenous peoples but have contrary-minded views, are afraid to speak up for fear of being called “denialists,” as if they were denying the European Holocaust.
Nevertheless, many Canadians believe that the proper way to advance reconciliation with Indigenous people is to phase out the dependency relationship that has grown since the Indian Act was enacted in 1876. Many also think that Indigenous peoples should be equal with other Canadians—no better, and certainly no worse.
Some Canadians even believe that Canadian governments should not support the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) that creates a strong “consult and accommodate” hammerlock on the development of Canadian resources. Similarly, many believe that the “nation to nation” relationship is polarizing citizens leading to ruinous economic and social policies for both Indigenous bands and Canadian society.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Canadians realize that it is best to keep thoughts like these ones to themselves.
Our elites have breached their fiduciary responsibilities to Canadians. It is a tragedy that they do not encourage other viewpoints. In this respect, Peter Wehner correctly says: “The truths to be discovered are complex and many-sided, and the only way to get to them is by engaging with contrary ideas in a manner approaching dialogue.”
It would be in the best interest of Canadians, if our elites shed their hostility towards those who disagree with them. But to do this, they need to develop the confidence and open-mindedness that the French philosopher Montaigne implied when he wrote: “When I am contradicted it arouses my attention, not my wrath. I move towards the man who contradicts me; he is instructing me. The cause of truth ought to be common to both of us.”
But in discussing Canadian Indigenous issues, the Canadian elites are inexplicably unwilling to grant to others the same Charter of Rights-free speech presumptions that they keep for themselves when they support “anti-Zionists” shouting obnoxious statements and insults. When they do this, they are dividing Canadians, losing our trust, and increasing the grave harm to all Canadians but especially to Indigenous Canadians.
Peter Best is a retired lawyer in Sudbury and the author of There is no Difference which argues that Canada’s laws should be changed to make all Canadians equal under the law, regardless of race.
Frontier Centre for Public Policy
UBCIC Chiefs Commit A Grave Error In Labelling Authors As Racist Deniers
![](https://www.todayville.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/tvrd-fcpp-aboriginal-protests-image-2024-09-06.jpg)
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Rodney A. Clifton
UBCIC Chiefs attempt to suppress open debate on residential schools.
Is anyone surprised that the Union of BC Indian Chiefs on Aug. 12 wrote to many provincial municipalities (Powell River, Kamloops, and Quesnel, for example) demanding they reject “Residential School Denialism”?
Their demand is in response to a book edited by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan, Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools). The authors of the 18 chapters include several well-known Canadian anthropologists, historians, political scientists, sociologists, and lawyers, many of whom have published extensively on Indigenous/non-Indigenous issues.
Even so, the organization of Chiefs call this book an “ardent dissemination of racist misinformation.”
Their letter to municipal leaders concludes with the following:
“The UBIC Chiefs Council stand with survivors and intergenerational survivors of Residential Schools and their families, as well as the children who never made it home and those who are harmed by the actions of those involved with the production and distribution of the book … and the deeply troubling trend of Residential School racist denialism and any unwillingness to accept facts and the work of experts.”
“We look forward to your response.”
As an author of a chapter in Grave Error, as co-author of two other chapters, and as a co-editor with Mark DeWolf of From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, I am pleased to respond to the Chiefs.
My recommendation to municipal leaders, and other concerned Canadians, is that before you respond to the Chiefs, you should read Grave Error and make up your up your own minds.
On Amazon, Grave Error has over 800 reviews, with an average rating of 4.6 out of 5. In fact, this book is ranked first on three Amazon lists, and it has been a best seller for many months.
One of the top Amazon reviews begins, “A well-researched, non-partisan and balanced approach to the hysterical outpourings of recent years.” Another review says, “There is not one whiff of racism or hatred in this book.”
As a contributing author to Grave Error, I will add a little of my history.
I lived for four months during the Summer of 1966 in the teachers’ wing of Old Sun, the Anglican Residential School on the Siksika (Blackfoot) First Nation in Southern Alberta. At the time, students were still in residence, and I was a 21-year-old university student intern working at the Band Office, where about half the employees were Siksika members. Also, most of the employed in Old Sun, where I lived, were Siksika.
In the fall of 1966, I became the Senior Boys’ Supervisor in Stringer Hall, the Anglican residence in Inuvik, NWT, where I looked after 85 mostly Indigenous boys in three dorms. About half of the employees in this residence were Indigenous.
I returned to the University of Alberta for the 1967-68 academic year, and in the summer of 1968, I was employed as the Beach Supervisor and Swimming Instructor in Uranium City, Northern Saskatchewan, where I taught swimming to many Indigenous children in a local lake.
Finally, in September 1968, Elaine Ayoungman, a young Siksika woman I met in 1966, and I were married in the Anglican Church in Strathmore, Alberta. Elaine had been a student in Old Sun for 10 years, and this September, we will celebrate our 56th wedding anniversary. We are still married, and, no doubt, surprisingly to the BC Chiefs, we are still in love.
By now, readers will realize that I strongly reject the UBCI Chiefs’ claim that I, or any of the other authors with chapters in Grave Error, are “racist deniers” of the reality of Indian Residential Schools.
In short, my message to the BC municipal leaders is to resist echoing the opinion of the UBCIC, me, or the opinions of over 80 percent of the reviews on Amazon who awarded the book a 4 or 5. My message is simple: Read Grave Error and make up your own mind. Likewise, my message to Canadians who want to know more about Indian Residential Schools is to listen to the survivors and Chiefs but also read the Truth and Reconciliation Report and then read both Grave Error and From Truth Comes Reconciliation.
Rodney A. Clifton is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. His most recent book, with Mark DeWolf, is From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (Sutherland House Press, 2024). The book can be preordered from the publisher.
Frontier Centre for Public Policy
A letter to five Canadian Churches
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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Two years ago, Eric Metaxas, the conservative Christian American author wrote a short, but important, book addressing the American Church. He was concerned the churches were forsaking their Christian principles in not speaking out against the anti-Christian ideologies and practices occurring throughout the U.S.
My letter is limited to admonishing the Canadian churches involved with Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. These churches have not spoken out in support of the missionaries they commissioned to work in these schools, people who poured their lives into their work, and who have been wrongly accused of abusing and murdering residential school children.
Obviously, those employees who are guilty should be condemned and punished, but those who are innocent should not be falsely accused of perpetrating horrific crimes.
Between 1883 and 1996, there were 143 Indian Residential Schools included in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, a complex agreement between various Indigenous groups, the federal government, and the churches that managed residential schools.
The Roman Catholic Church managed 62 (43.4%) of the schools, the Church of England (Anglican) managed 35 (24.5%), the United Church (including the denominations that joined together in 1925) managed 19 (13.3%), the Mennonite Church managed 3 (2.1%), and the Baptist Church managed 1 (0.6%) residential school. The federal and territorial governments managed the remaining 23 (16.1%) schools.
There are four historical points to be reviewed.
First, in May 2021, Rosanne Casimer, Chief of the Kamloops Band, announced that ground penetrating radar (GPR) had found 215 unmarked graves of children in the residential schoolyard.
Surprisingly, this was the first public report suggesting that children buried in residential schoolyards had been murdered. There is, however, no credible evidence of murdered residential school children in the 3,500-page Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Report which was published 6 years earlier.
Second, despite being absent from the TRC’s “Calls to Action,” the federal government has awarded almost $8 million to the Kamloops band to excavate part of the schoolyard, and set aside over $300 million for other bands to search for soil anomalies or presumed graves.
Third, as expected with such strong incentives, many other bands have claimed that they too have graves of missing and presumed murdered children buried in the schoolyards on their reserves.
Finally, in an impressive gesture of support, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau knelt beside a grave in a well-known cemetery with a teddy bear in his hand decrying the genocide perpetrated by the churches. Later, he had the Canadian flags at government buildings around the world flown at half-mast for 6 months so that both Canadians and citizens of the world would mourn this Canadian tragedy.
Since the spring of 2021, almost 100 Christian churches have been vandalized, desecrated, or set on fire, supposedly because of the “genocide” that had taken place at the sites of Indian Residential Schools. Sadly, some of these churches, the Lutheran and Orthodox churches, for example, did not manage any of the schools.
No doubt, most Canadians are thankful there is no forensic evidence that children have been murdered and buried in schoolyards. Of course, there are children’s bodies in parish cemeteries that are often close to the schools, but most of them died of communicable diseases like influenza and TB, and they have been given proper funerals.
My concern is that over the last three years, the five churches that managed Indian Residential Schools have said little or nothing to defend themselves or the staff they commissioned to work in the schools.
In a time of need, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Christians stepped forward to care for children living in residential schools. But the churches have not stepped forward to defend their staff in their time of need. These people are getting old, and they need support now. Instead, the churches have abandoned, or worse, condemned their faithful employees for abusing children.
Equally surprising, no church leader has supported the fundamental principle of Canadian law: individuals (and churches) are considered innocent until they are proven guilty.
It grieves me, and the few other living residential school employees, that our churches have not publically supported their innocent employees. Surely, they have a moral obligation to ensure that truth and justice prevail.
Eric Metaxas has tried to awaken American churches by pointing out where they have gone wrong. Should we not try to awaken Canadian churches to defend their involvement in Indian residential schools?
Is it too much to suggest that the church leaders think back to lessons learned from Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who stood up for Christian principles against the evil practice of dehumanizing people—Blacks in the U.S. and Jews in Europe?
Not only will these churches be judged by the moral and ethical lessons they preach, but, more importantly, by the principles they live by. Canadians will see the true values of church leaders in their actions, especially concerning those they commissioned to work in their schools.
Rodney A. Clifton lived for 4 months in Old Sun, the Anglican residential school on the Siksika (Blackfoot) First Nation during the summer of 1966, and he was the Senior Boys’ Supervisor in Stringer Hall, the Anglican residential hostel in Inuvik during the 1966-67 school year. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. His most recent book, with Mark DeWolf, is From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report. The book will be out on November 5, and it can be preordered from the publisher.
Rodney A. Clifton is a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He lived for four months in Old Sun, the Anglican Residential School on the Blackfoot (Siksika) First Nation, and was the Senior Boys’ Supervisor in Stringer Hall, the Anglican residence in Inuvik. Rodney Clifton and Mark DeWolf are the editors of From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (Frontier Centre for Public Policy, 2021). A second and expanded edition of this book will be published in early 2024.
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