From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Rodney A. Clifton

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.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Paul Driessen

Government agencies, billionaires and pressure groups put world’s poor, hungry families last

Elite billionaire organizations and foundations, government agencies and activist pressure groups are funding and coordinating a global war on modern agriculture, nutrition, and Earth’s poorest, hungriest people. Instead of helping more families get nutritious food, better healthcare and higher living standards, they’re doing the opposite, and harming biodiversity in the process.

The World Economic Forum wants to reimagine, reinvent and transform the global food system, to eliminate greenhouse gases from food production. Central to its plan is alternatives to animal protein: meal worm potato chips, bug burgers instead of beef patties, and meat loaves and sausages made from lake flies, for instance. Fixing the WEF’s toxic workplace is apparently a low priority.

A UN Food and Agriculture Organization report advises that turning “edible insects” into “tasty” food products can create thriving local businesses and even promote “inclusion of women.”

Created to alleviate global poverty, the World Bank has decided the “manmade climate crisis” is a far greater threat to impoverished families than contaminated water, malaria and other killer diseases, hunger, or even two billion people still burning wood and dung because they don’t have reliable, affordable electricity. It has unilaterally decreed that 45% of its funds – an extra $9 billion in FY2024 – will be shifted to helping the poor “better withstand the devastation of climate change.”

Of course, most of the better and lesser-known environmental pressure groups are also deeply involved in food, agriculture and energy policy campaigns: Greenpeace, Sierra Club, EarthJustice, Friends of the Earth, Pesticide Action Network, Center for Food Safety, La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way), Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, and countless others.

Like the rest of the “agro-ecology” movement, they deride and malign modern agriculture as a scourge inflicted by greedy mega-corporations. They oppose fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides and biotechnology. They extol “food sovereignty” and the “right to choose.” But their policies reflect top-down tyranny and bullying, with little room for poor farmers to embrace modern agricultural technologies and practices.

In addition to WEF, FAO and World Bank support, these hard-green organizations have the ideological, organizational and financial backing of the US Agency for International Development, EU agencies, and a host of progressive and far-left American, European and other foundations.

The US-based AgroEcology Fund was created by the Christensen Fund, New Fields Foundation and Swift Foundation. Its funding and programs are overseen by the New Venture Fund, which helps “charitable” and “educational” organizations direct funds to programs that align with what many characterize as neo-colonialist and eco-imperialist goals.

Other major players include the Schmidt Family Foundation, Packard Foundation, Ford Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and Ben and Jerry Foundation.

This is serious money – hundreds of millions of dollars per year in food, agriculture and climate change funding. It completely overshadows the piddling $9,000 that Kenyan farmer Jusper Machogu raised via donations to his “climate realism” website – much of it given to neighbors, so they could drill water wells, buy tanks of propane or get connected to the local grid.

And yet Mr. Machogu incurred the wrath of the BBC’s “Climate Disinformation Officer.” (Yes, the Beeb actually has such a position.) The CDO attacked him for “tweeting false and misleading claims” about climate change and saying Africa should develop its oil, gas and coal reserves – instead of relying entirely on intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar. Even worse, the farmer had the temerity to accept donations from non-Africans, including “individuals with links to the fossil fuel industry and groups known for promoting climate change denial.”

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors is another major donor to agro-ecology outfits. It’s part of the legacy of guilt-ridden oil money from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. corporate trust – an inheritance that includes nearly 1,000 climate-related institutions, foundations and activist organizations.

As Canada’s Frontier Centre put it,

“Every time you hear a ‘climate change’ scare story, [the person writing it] was PAID. He is a Rockefeller stooge. He may not know it, but his profession has been entirely corrupted.” Far worse, I would add, the writer and his (or her) organization are complicit in perpetuating global poverty, energy deprivation, hunger, disease and death – because the fear mongering drives destructive energy and food production policies.

Alone or collectively, these policy corrupters must not be underestimated in this war to preserve and expand modern energy, agriculture and global nutrition. Thankfully, there is increasing pushback. Many families simply do not want to be trapped in poverty, disease, mud-and-thatch huts, an absence of educational opportunities for their children, and a future of backbreaking, dawn-to-dusk labor in little subsistence-farming fields.

That’s especially so when films, news stories and cell phones present American and European farming equipment and practices – and the crop yields, wealth, health, homes, leisure time and opportunities that accompany those modern agricultural systems.

Poor farmers also see China, India, Indonesia and other countries rapidly industrializing and modernizing by using oil, gas and coal. They see rumblings of change in many countries that are intent on charting their own courses, with fossil fuels as the energy foundation for that growth. They’re rejecting the eco colonialism and eco-imperialism that wealthy Westerners seek to impose on them.

They are getting the message that humanity has faced climate fluctuations and extreme weather events throughout history … and survived them, dealt with them, adapted to them, prospered. That there is no real-world evidence that man made greenhouse gas emissions – especially the trivial amounts generated by agriculture – have replaced the powerful natural forces that caused past climate changes.

They increasingly realize that organic and subsistence farming requires vastly more land – which would otherwise be wildlife habitats – than modern mechanized farming, to get the same yields. Plowing those habitats would decimate plant and animal diversity.

That locking up fossil fuels, and relying instead on biofuels and plant-based feed stocks for thousands of essential products, would require even more acreage. So would mining for massive amounts of metals and minerals to manufacture wind, solar and battery technologies.

Most importantly, they understand that humanity today has far greater wealth, far more knowledge, far better technologies and resources than any past generations.

To suggest that we cannot adapt to climate changes, or survive and recover from extreme weather events, is simply absurd. To suggest that farmers should revert to … or remain stuck in … ancient farming practices and technologies – to save the world from computer-generated manmade climate disasters – is eco-imperialism at its most lethal.

South Africa’s electricity minister recently said his country will not be “turned into a guinea pig for a worldwide Green New Deal.” Hopefully, all developing countries will soon apply that same attitude to anarchists who would use the world’s poor as guinea pigs in global agricultural and nutrition experiments.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.