Connect with us
[bsa_pro_ad_space id=12]

C2C Journal

They Would Call Me a “Denier” – Let Me Explain what I Believe about Residential Schools in Canada

Published

2 months ago

39 minute read

From The Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Originally posted in the C2C Journal by Rodney A. Clifton

In our largely “post-truth” society, the validity of a given statement is increasingly assessed based on who is making it. There are even those who believe that only some should be allowed to say certain things – while others should be scorned or even imprisoned for uttering the same words. This increasingly describes the discursive landscape concerning Canada’s Indian Residential Schools and whether Indigenous children disappeared from and/or were murdered there. Drawing on his lived experience as a onetime residential school employee, on his long academic record and, not least, on his personal courage in the face of those who wish to criminalize “denialism”, Rodney Clifton presents a humbly argued plea for Canadians to judge their country’s residential school record according to the truth – the actual, factual truth.

Over the last several years a new subspecies of Canadian has been named by some of our elites. They are called “deniers” and are said to be escalating a hateful, racially-motivated campaign to attack and denigrate Indigenous Canadians. The accusations have been numerous. One important recent example comes from Stephanie Scott, Executive Director for the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, who wrote, “Sadly…we see increased ugliness from those who deny our truths, experiences and oral histories as reality. Deniers will write their fringe blogs and substacks and leave their foul comments on social media challenging the documented experiences of Indigenous People, particularly residential school Survivors…They will say: ‘It didn’t happen,’ ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ ‘Some good came out of residential schools,’ or the most repugnant, ‘Children never died in those institutions.’”

Kimberly Murray (top), Canada’s Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites, deems Indian Residential School (IRS) “denialism” to be “violence” and “hate”, while Indigenous lawyer Eleanore Sunchild (bottom) calls for its criminalization in Canadian law. (Sources of photos: (top) The Canadian Press/Justin Tang; (bottom) Jason Warick/CBC)

The deniers are apparently so dangerous that mere vitriol, insult, accusation and denunciation such as Scott’s won’t be enough to contain them. They must be driven from the public square and silenced; if need be, they must be imprisoned. Last summer, prominent Indigenous lawyer Eleanore Sunchild suggested that “denialism” should be added to Canada’s Criminal Code, so that there are “consequences for people who are promoting hatred”. Not long thereafter Kimberly Murray, currently the federal government’s “Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools”, echoed that proposal. “Denialism is violence,” Murray intoned in one news conference. “Denial is hate.” The then-federal Minister of Justice, David Lametti, said he would explore the matter of criminalization, as has his successor, Arif Virani.

The anti-“denialist” campaign now appears self-sustaining. Barely a week ago as I was writing this essay, the federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh in a speech to Indigenous leaders accused a federal Conservative Party candidate, Aaron Gunn, of being a “residential school denier”. Also in the past week, the National Post’s Chris Selley reported that the RCMP now consider writing articles critical of the dominant residential schools’ narrative to be a potential threat to national security.

It is likely that Scott, Sunchild, Murray, Singh and perhaps our national police force would think that I too am a “denier”. By their standards, I suppose I am. But before you dismiss me as uninformed – or worse – let me explain what I actually believe. I am one of a number of informed Canadians who question some – but not all – of the claims about what happened to Indigenous children in Indian Residential Schools (IRS). If you must label us, call us “questioning critics”.

Were Children Missing and Murdered?

Questioning critics examine the claim that thousands of Indigenous children who lived in residential schools and hostels are missing and that this is because many if not most of them were murdered by their caregivers. These institutions were funded by the federal government from 1883 to 1996 and the majority were managed by five Christian churches: Roman Catholic (62 schools and hostels), Anglican (35), United Church (19), Mennonite (3) and Baptist (1); the 23 others were managed by federal, provincial and territorial governments (source of these figures is pp. 33-35 of this book).

The majority of Canada’s IRS were run by Christian churches; the claim that many children who attended the IRS went missing or were murdered has brought disgrace to the churches, which have not defended themselves against such accusations. Shown, (top) boys at play outside Fort Providence Mission Indian Residential School, N.W.T.; (bottom) children and nuns in front of the IRS in Maliotenam, Québec, circa 1950. (Sources of photo: (top) Library Archives, licensed under CC BY 2.0; (bottom) Library Archives, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

The claim that thousands of schoolchildren were murdered or otherwise went missing is therefore a direct attack on the churches. But these churches, surprisingly, have not defended themselves and their thousands of former employees. Instead, they have either tried to hide from view or have fallen over themselves with repeated apologies, confessions and gestures of contrition. The Catholic Church’s “Sacred Covenant” with the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation (legally, the Kamloops Indian Band), described in this C2C article, is one such recent event.

Even so, the accusations against the IRS are difficult to believe for at least four reasons.

First, the federal Department of Indian Affairs (its exact name has varied over the decades) paid a per capita grant to the school administrators to care for the children and, as part of its oversight, the government required quarterly reports from school administrators showing the number of days each child had been at the school during the quarter. School inspectors regularly visited the schools to ensure that the students were being cared for and were attending. Even if Canadians today can’t believe that these officials cared about Indigenous children, the federal government wasn’t going to pay for students who didn’t exist or had disappeared. Yet we cannot find any documents indicating that any children were missing during the IRS system’s 113-year history.

Questioning critics wonder why the extremely serious accusation of missing and murdered children – including some reportedly buried in schoolyards – was not included in the enormous, seven-volume report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published in 2015.

Second, many responsible people, Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous, regularly visited the residential schools: chiefs, band councillors, parents, church officials and bureaucrats, along with dentists, medical doctors, nurses and optometrists. If students were going missing, surely someone among these many people would have discussed it with colleagues, raised the alarm among parents, notified the media or reported it to the proper authorities. Yet we cannot find any reports about missing children from any of these people.

Third, many of the residential school employees were themselves Indigenous, and their own children as well as the children of relatives and friends lived in the schools. Is it reasonable to assume that these employees would watch (or hear about) children being mistreated, or worse, murdered, and not report the malfeasance to Indian agents, chiefs, band councillors or the RCMP? Again, we can find no documents of any such thing happening.

Right under everyone’s noses? Children at the IRS were regularly observed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous visitors including bureaucrats, doctors, nurses, parents and chiefs; the author finds it very difficult to believe that children would go missing unnoticed or unreported. At right, a schoolchild and his grandmother at the St. Barnabas Indian Residential School mission hospital, Sarcee Reserve, Alberta. (Sources of photos: (left) The Canadian Press/Library and Archive Canada/Handout, retrieved from Global News; (right) Anglican General Synod Archives in Toronto)

Finally, questioning critics wonder why the extremely serious accusation of missing and murdered children – including some reportedly buried in schoolyards – was not included in the enormous, seven-volume report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), published in 2015. It seems strange that among the report’s 94 Calls to Action (i.e., recommendations or demands), there isn’t one demanding a search for children who were claimed to be missing, murdered or buried in schoolyards. (Volume 6 has six calls, numbers 71-76, to search for unmarked graves in mission cemeteries lying close to residential schools, but any child who had been buried in a formal ceremony was obviously not missing or murdered.) Questioning critics also wonder why the mainstream media didn’t report on this obvious anomaly.

This whole issue seems to have sprung up recently and for still-unknown reasons. It seems reasonable to propose that if children were murdered in residential schools, that information would have been reported long before May 27, 2021, when Kamloops Chief Rosanne Casimir announced that a recent investigation had provided “confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”  The federal government sent almost $8 million to the band to investigate this claim but, so far, no excavations have even been initiated, let alone have any human  remains been exhumed.

Of course, informed Canadians know that bad, abusive and unacceptable things took place in residential schools. Neither I nor any other questioning critic whom I know denies this or tries to suppress it. No one, in fact, denies that some Indigenous children died while registered in some schools. Nor do I have any reason to doubt the statement by former Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief Phil Fontaine that he had suffered sexual abuse while attending an IRS, something that, undoubtedly, shocked the nation when he first said it in a TV interview in 1990.

Why now? The author finds it puzzling that the issue of missing or murdered children, such as the “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” erroneously claimed by Kamloops Chief Rosanne Casimir (top) in May 2021, did not arise years earlier, nor was mentioned at all in the seven-volume report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) published in 2015. (Sources of photos: (top) BC Gov Photos, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; (bottom) megan.mason, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Volume 4 of the TRC Report states that a total of 3,201 IRS students died (see pp. 33-35 of the linked document), mostly in the early years and mostly from infectious diseases like influenza and tuberculosis. Unfortunately, the Commission did not provide comparison data on the number of Indigenous children who died but were not in IRS, or the number of non-Indigenous children who died of the same diseases during the same period. Thus, the TRC Report leaves readers with the impression that residential school students died at much higher rates than children who did not attend residential schools. To verify this claim, more detailed analyses are needed.

My Experience with Indian Residential Schools

Questioning critics also suggest that some good things happened, at least in some schools. This would be one point of “agreement” with Scott, who as I explained above accuses “deniers” of (falsely, in her mind) asserting that some good came out of residential schools. I have had direct experiences that speak to this point.

I lived in an Anglican Church-run residential school, Old Sun (which like about 40 percent of the IRS bore an Indigenous name, in this case that of a famous Chief), on the Siksika First Nation (Blackfoot Reserve) in southern Alberta during the spring and summer of 1966. I was a university student intern working for the Band, and I had a room in the teachers’ wing at Old Sun. I saw what staff and students were doing and I heard the languages they were speaking. In fact, the Indigenous employees in the school and the Band Office were eager to teach me Siksika.

After the summer internship I got a job in the far north for the 1966-1967 school year, working as the Senior Boys’ Supervisor in Stringer Hall, the Anglican hostel in Inuvik, NWT. In that position, I managed the daily activities of 85 mostly Indigenous boys in three dorms, being on duty for 22 hours a day, six days a week. I kept notes about what I saw and what the children said and did.

As a living witness to life at two residential schools in the 1960s, the author recalls his overwhelmingly positive experiences at Old Sun Indian Residential School, Blackfoot Reserve, Alberta (top) and at Stringer Hall, Inuvik, N.W.T. (middle and bottom), of which he kept detailed records.

During my time at Old Sun, I met a young Siksika woman, Elaine Ayoungman. We fell in love and were married in 1968, and we’re still married today, 56 years later. Elaine attended Old Sun for 10 years. Her parents and most of her nine siblings also attended the same school, and over the years I heard many accounts of their experiences.

As a researcher, I have published several articles on the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. My first article on the integration of Dene, Inuit, Metis and non-Indigenous children in Stringer Hall was published in 1972, long before the current controversy about missing residential schoolchildren was in the news. Still, even with my experience and knowledge, and following a nearly 50-year-long academic and public policy research career, I am now to be considered a “denier”.

David Simailak spoke of his experience at residential school in Churchill, Manitoba, which ‘gave him…new opportunities.’ In the TRC report, he fondly remembers excelling in math and spelling competitions and travelling to Montreal for Expo ’67.

The TRC Report itself includes evidence of the positive experiences of some students, though no one would label Commissioners Murray Sinclair, Marie Wilson or Wilton Littlechild “deniers”. On page 140 of Volume 1, Part 2, the Commissioners wrote: “It is important to recognize that many students, both in memoirs and in statements to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, have spoken positively about the impact that specific teachers had on their lives.”
Eddie Dillon, for example, was a student in Stringer Hall, Inuvik, when I was the Senior Boys’ Supervisor, and he told the TRC that he was thankful for the education he received in Sir Alexander Mackenzie School. He specifically thanked his parents and the “government of Canada” for giving him valuable opportunities that enriched his life. Similarly, David Simailak spoke of his experience at residential school in Churchill, Manitoba, which “gave him…new opportunities.” On pp 98-99 of Volume 2, he fondly remembers excelling in math and spelling competitions and travelling to Montreal for Expo ’67.

“Many students…have spoken positively about the impact that specific teachers had on their lives,” admitted the TRC Report, which also contains happy reminiscences and quotations from former IRS students; anyone making similar statements today is quickly denounced as a “denier” – and some even want them criminally charged and imprisoned.

These are just two of the positive, even heartwarming statements recounted in the TRC Report. It is sad that more Canadians have not read these stories; I hope some of you do so while you still can. Scott, Sunchild, Murray and others not only want me prevented from writing and speaking on this subject, some of them would want me sent to prison – merely for repeating what I personally witnessed, physically experienced, noted in writing at the time, and which, in a number of instances, closely corresponds to what was formally recorded in the TRC Report.

What is it We Are Really Questioning?

Among the strangest aspects of the campaign to prevent questioning of the official IRS narrative is the recurring claim that critics “deny residential schools”, as if some people are pretending the IRS system never even existed. For example, in Murray’s call for “denialism” to be made a crime, she stated that one of the sanctioned offences would be “denying that residential [schools] happened.” Another instance came during the recent eruption in Quesnel, B.C. over the local mayor’s wife’s decision to share a controversial book with a few friends. One media account claimed the book in question, the best-selling Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools), “questions the existence of residential schools.”

This is utterly bizarre. Possibly it reflects seriously slipshod thinking and writing; perhaps it’s an attempt to make the critics appear plain crazy. But I know of no-one who denies that residential schools existed and operated for over a century. As for me, remember that I lived and worked in two of them and I married a woman who attended one for 10 years at a time when fewer than 30 per cent of Indigenous children were enrolled in residential schools and the average time they spent was less than five years (see pp 29-33 of this book).

I do, accordingly, question that 150,000 Indigenous children were torn from the arms of their crying mothers and forced to go to school against their parents’ wishes, as the current narrative constantly claims. Even in the early days, most parents signed admission forms to enroll their children in school. When I worked at Siksika First Nation, I travelled around the reserve registering children for school, and I cannot remember any parent who was reluctant to complete the registration forms or any child who did not look forward to going to school.

The author’s personal experiences call into question the widespread belief that Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families to attend residential school; on the contrary, it was common for parents to sign a school enrollment form. Shown at left, The Scream, by Kent Monkman, 2017; at right, the application by Susan Drever for admission of her daughter Neta Drever to the Birtle Indian Residential School.

When I asked my mother-in-law, Nora, what she learned in Old Sun, she replied, “I’m talking to you, aren’t I?” She meant that she was speaking English, which she learned from her residential schoolteachers. Nora also implied that, thanks to learning English, she was able to communicate with other Indigenous people who did not speak Siksika, her mother tongue.

Of course, my mother-in-law thought that going to school and learning to speak, read and write in English was an advantage. But I would not call her or my wife “deniers”. All members of the Ayoungman family spoke Siksika fluently and took part in many cultural activities. Their time in residential school did not wipe out or even weaken their Indigenous culture or identity – but it did prepare them to deal with and navigate in modern-day Canada. (There is a fuller account of my time working at residential schools in this C2C article.)

The above exchange occurred as we were driving back to Winnipeg from the 1993 National Native Convocation in which the Anglican Archbishop and Primate, Michael Peers, apologized to Indigenous people, many of whom had attended the 35 schools and hostels managed by the Anglican church. There were frank and open discussions during the conference, but no one suggested that hundreds, let alone thousands, of children were missing and probably buried in residential schoolyards.

In August 1993, Anglican Archbishop and Primate Michael Peers delivered an apology to the National Native Convocation; while the three-day discussion included many testimonies of former IRS students, none mentioned missing or murdered children. (Source of photo: The Anglican Church of Canada)

As well, informed Canadians and the questioning critics know that in southern Canada, many residential school students went home on weekends and during school holidays. If children were abused by other children or by residential school employees, some of them surely would have told their parents, who would have reported the abuse to Indian agents, chiefs or members of the band councils. But we have found no reports from these people.

Although the next thing will surprise and perhaps even shock readers who have only been exposed to the official narrative about residential schools, I swear this to be the truth: almost all the stories I heard about residential schools and hostels were about positive and humorous things that happened. These included the sports days, Halloween and Christmas parties, the tricks the children played on their supervisors (myself included), or the fact that the schoolkids tried to teach staff like me their native language.

My example illustrates that at least in some schools, the administrators supported the children under their care and held their staff to account. The TRC Report does not, unfortunately, tell us how many school administrators and supervisors acted honourably towards the children.

I did, however, hear from my parents-in-law about one case of abuse. Their oldest daughter, Rosella, who was about 9 or 10 at the time, had been forced by her residential supervisor to eat her breakfast cereal after she had thrown-up in the bowl. Rosella told her father, Arthur, about this incident when she was home for the weekend. When the family returned to Old Sun for Sunday church service, her father and grandfather, Anthony, met with the Anglican priest/principal, who listened to their complaint. Within a few days, the supervisor was fired.

Obviously, this quick action did not happen in all cases. And again: neither I nor any of the other questioning critics with whom I’m familiar denies that serious abuses occurred in residential schools, that these abuses were wrong, and that the abusers should have been more effectively investigated and punished. Nevertheless, my example illustrates that at least in some schools, the administrators supported the children under their care and held their staff to account. The TRC Report does not, unfortunately, tell us how many school administrators and supervisors acted honourably towards the children. Instead, it leaves the impression that all residential school employees, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous, treated the children as if they were sub-human (see Volume 5, pp 139-140).

The author’s personal recollections about residential schools are largely positive and many are light-hearted or even humorous. Shown at top left, Christmas presentation at Portage la Prairie Residential School, Manitoba, 1950s; at bottom left, Portage Residential School hockey champion team, Manitoba, 1964. (Sources of photos: (top left) UCCA, 1986.158P/59; (bottom left) UCCA, 1986.158P/62; both retrieved from The Children Remembered; (right) Library Archives, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

For all these reasons, I am skeptical of some – but not all – of the things being claimed about the church-run Indian Residential Schools. Increasingly, I’m hearing that other Canadians are skeptical too.

What Needs to be Done?

The questioning critics strongly believe that something needs to be done because this issue is festering and polarizing Canadian society, not only between the purveyors of the official narrative and ourselves (those they call “deniers”), but also between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians more broadly and, as I have heard, even within some Indigenous communities. A detailed poll of over 3,000 people by the Angus Reid Group late last year revealed deep (though uneven) divisions among Canadians on core elements of this issue. For example, while 19 percent think the “legacy of colonialism” is “a huge problem”, 17 percent think it is “not at all” a problem. While 55 percent believe Indigenous people do have and should have a special status, 45 percent think they should be treated like other Canadians. While 49 percent think the situation of Indigenous people as a whole has improved in the past 10-15 years, 38 percent think it has worsened. While 19 percent think Indigenous children were “purposely killed” at residential schools, 39 percent think any deaths were due to “neglect”, and 13 percent think they were due to “uncontrollable factors”. And on it goes. This stand-off is not serving Indigenous people, nor is it helpful in reaching an honourable and fair reconciliation.

Open wounds: Recent polling by the Angus Reid Institute revealed that Canadians are profoundly divided on issues related to the IRS’ legacy; the author believes that such division is not conducive to an honourable reconciliation. (Source of charts: Angus Reid Institute)

Let’s pretend for a moment that the Justin Trudeau government had actually made “denialism” a crime and consider the implications of enforcing it. Had that law been in place in 2021, it would become a crime to quote or reprint certain portions of the TRC Report. Technically, some of the statements by the commissioners themselves would be criminal. Then, as soon as Chief Casimir made her announcement referring to “confirmed” “remains” of “children”, it would have become a crime to (correctly) suggest that the ground-penetrating radar survey had merely shown subsurface “anomalies” that could just be disturbances from old excavations.

Let’s also say that a few reckless deniers said so anyway and were packed off to prison. What would happen when, three years later, Casimir suddenly started talking – as she has done – about “anomalies” while quietly dropping the other claims? Would she then join the other deniers in prison for “denying” the “facts” of the “mass graves”? Of course she would be spared. But what would happen to the imprisoned deniers? Now that the formerly criminal word “anomalies” suddenly reflected the official narrative, would they be quietly released in the middle of the night? And if they were, would they then get to sue the federal government for their mistreatment, and each collect a few million dollars in out-of-court settlements for the harassment and false imprisonment they endured?

Thousands of Canadians, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, worked in residential schools. For their sake, for the sake of the churches who managed most of the schools, for the sake of Indigenous people and, indeed, for all Canadians, it is time to conduct a proper investigation of the claim that children were murdered in residential schools.

This seemingly fanciful scenario-spinning reflects the absurdity of criminalizing residential school “denialism”. Because really, there is no such thing; all we have are differences of opinion over the meaning of the available evidence and disputes concerning the body of facts at hand. Thankfully, there is a way out of this seemingly intractable impasse. We need to get at the truth in a way that will satisfy everyone. As the TRC commissioners themselves said, reconciliation depends on uncovering the truth.

First, the federal government should appoint a blue-ribbon RCMP task force to investigate the accusations that children are missing and possibly murdered at residential schools. The task force must have the expertise, resources and legal authority, backed by the necessary political will, to conduct a thorough investigation to its conclusion. Unfortunately, Indigenous organizations have so far resisted such a thorough criminal investigation – like the abortive criminal probe launched soon after the Kamloops allegations, which was suspended within days. But it needs to be done.

Second, if this task force finds evidence of malfeasance, a forensic investigation should be conducted in the schoolyards where people think residential schoolchildren were buried. (It’s important to be aware that to date, the only human remains found have been in neglected cemeteries, not any of missing children in schoolyards or the basements of churches.) It is worth mentioning again that the investigation must be conducted by competent independent professionals and not by either the churches or the Indigenous bands.

Third, if this investigation finds evidence that children were murdered, the school employees who are still living, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous, should be questioned and if there is evidence that they were involved in abusing or murdering children, they should be criminally charged and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Also, the names of deceased employees who abused or murdered children should be published.

Finally, a report of the investigation should be tabled in Parliament and distributed to Canadians, just as the TRC Report was distributed.

Thousands of Canadians, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, worked in residential schools. For their sake, for the sake of the churches who managed most of the schools, for the sake of Indigenous people and, indeed, for all Canadians, it is time to conduct a proper investigation, including forensic analyses, of the claim that children were murdered in residential schools. This is the only way to address the accusation that some Canadians are “denialists” and to ease the polarization of Canadian society on this very important human and public policy issue.

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).
Related Topics:

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

More from this author
Alberta / 7 hours ago

Alberta court upholds conviction of Pastor Artur Pawlowski for preaching at Freedom Convoy protest

Opinion / 10 hours ago

Trudeau and Singh Scheme to Delay Election, Secure Payouts on the Taxpayer’s Dime

Health / 11 hours ago

Canadian Health Organizations Unite to Demand Truth on Vaccine Safety

C2C Journal

Mischief Trial of the Century: Inside the Crown’s Bogus, Punitive and Occasionally Hilarious Case Against the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, Part I

Published on November 1, 2024

By

From the C2C Journal

By Lynne Cohen
In his judicial review of the Liberals’ response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy protest, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that “there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable.” With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s draconian actions thus exposed as unnecessary and excessive – in other words, illegal and unconstitutional – what now awaits Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, who each face up to 10 years in jail for playing key roles in the protest? In the first of a two-part series, Lynne Cohen charts the lengthy and vindictive prosecution of the pair, from their first appearance in downtown Ottawa to their initial arrest and pre-trial treatment.
As the 13-month-long trial of Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber lurched into its final days at the Ottawa Courthouse, Assistant Crown Attorney Siobhain Wetscher reached for her highest dudgeon and broadest hyperbole. In making her closing arguments, Wetscher declared this to be an “overwhelming case” backed by an abundance of “significant evidence.” Attempting to draw the focus onto the assembled facts, she swatted away claims it was a politically-motivated prosecution. “The defendants are not on trial for politics,” Wetscher stressed. “They crossed the line, objectively. The smell, the noise, the harassment were not lawful!” Given the reaching tone and considering the actual weight of the evidence, it often seemed as if Wetscher was trying to convince herself as much as Ontario Court Justice Heather Perkins-McVey.

To back their case, Wetscher and fellow Assistant Crown Attorney Tim Radcliffe had prepared a PowerPoint presentation that was projected onto two screens in Courtroom 5 during their final arguments. Entitled “R. v. Christopher Barber & Tamara Lich: Closing Submissions of the Crown”, the 106-slide exhibit began by listing the various charges: committing mischief, obstructing a peace officer and blocking a highway as well as counselling others to commit mischief, obstruct, block a highway and disobey a court order (the last one against Barber only). It also offered a quick guide to dozens of previous mischief, obstruction and intimidation judgements considered relevant to the case.

An “overwhelming case”: According to the closing arguments of Assistant Crown Attorneys Siobhain Wetscher (top left) and Tim Radcliffe (top right) presented in the Ottawa Courthouse, the trial of Freedom Convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber was not about politics, but the fact the pair “crossed the line” during the protest. (Source of bottom photo: CTV News)

Beyond a useful summary of the charges and case law, the Crown’s slideshow was also meant as one last reminder of the “significant evidence” arrayed against the Freedom Convoy pair. It thus contained numerous exhibits already submitted during the 45-day trial, including maps of the protest area, snippets from TikTok videos, transcripts from press conferences, witness testimony and interrogations as well as court orders, texts, letters, handbills, emails, Facebook posts and so on. As such, it serves as a kind of multimedia scrapbook for the entire three-week-long protest in Ottawa during January and February 2022.

And as is usually the case with scrapbooks, there were also plenty of photographs, presumably selected for the same reason as all the other evidence – because they bolster the case against Lich and Barber. In particular, the pictures are meant to provide proof of their close partnership in leading an unlawful protest and convincing others to break the law. But there’s a problem with this plan: none of the photos show either doing anything other than participating in an entirely peaceful, apparently constitutional and often quite-joyous-looking protest.

Slide 61, for example, shows the duo in winter gear hugging each other with big grins on their faces. Slide 76 has a smiling Lich explaining on TikTok that the protest is “like Canada Day on steroids.” Slide 100 is a screenshot of Lich on the verge of being arrested telling her Facebook supporters that, “I pray and hope that you will make your choices from love…we can only win this with love.”

And then there’s slide 106. The presentation’s last slide pairs a quote from Wetscher and Radcliffe with yet another picture of Lich and Barber. The text reads, “The Crown respectfully requests that the court find Mr. Barber and Ms. Lich guilty of all counts as charged.” The photo shows them together once more – again smiling broadly. This time they’re standing with Mike Stack, another protester, in front of Barber’s truck “Big Red”. If the point of this photo is to prove once and for all that Lich and Barber were engaged in a dangerous, insurrectionist conspiracy, it fails miserably.

The Crown’s 106-slide closing presentation served as a multi-media scrapbook of the three-week-long Freedom Convoy protest, inadvertently highlighting the event’s joyousness and peacefulness. Of note, the final slide (bottom) shows a smiling Lich, Barber and fellow protester Mike Stack – while Barber’s dog Zippy enjoys the view from the driver’s seat of Barber’s truck “Big Red”.

And hilariously – as a close inspection reveals Barber’s dog Zippy sitting in Big Red’s driver’s seat, mouth agape in a wild doggy smile, looking down upon the trio as if to say, “Look at me. I’m driving the truck!” For a criminal case that threatens Lich and Barber with a decade in jail for allegedly imperilling the very foundation of public order across Canada, and has consumed more than a year of precious court time, Zippy’s photo-bomb doesn’t answer the question of guilt, it raises an entirely different one.

Is this really the best the Crown can do?

Freedom’s Just Another Word for Long-Haul Trucking

On January 23, 2022, the Freedom Convoy began rolling out from Canada’s West Coast towards Ottawa, while other smaller groups of vehicles streamed westward from Quebec and other points. Three months earlier, the Government of Canada had unexpectedly announced that cross-border truckers who had not received a course of Covid-19 vaccination would have to isolate for up to two weeks when crossing the U.S.-Canada border, overturning an earlier exemption for the trucking industry. Despite furious pushback, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refused to relent and the mandate came into effect on January 15.

‘What kind of country had Canada become?’ Lich would later write about the impact of mandatory vaccine requirements. ‘We had governments who seemed far more obsessed with promoting vaccines…than they did with the reality and the struggles of the Canadian people. Someone had to stop it.’

Tweet

In response, thousands of truckers and others in cars and pickup trucks from all over the country joined the procession to make their feelings known, while thousands more waved them on from freeway overpasses and small towns along the way. Lich and Barber were involved in this movement from the beginning – creating social media accounts, setting up fundraising efforts and building an internal support structure – although the convoy itself defied organization. Lich and Barber may have been instrumental, but they were not almighty.

Let those truckers roll, 10-4: In January 2022, thousands of vehicles from across the country converged on Ottawa to protest a dramatic change in the federal government’s Covid-19 vaccine policy for cross-border trucking. (Sources of photos: (top) Andrei Filippov/Shutterstock; (bottom) GoToVan, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Lich was born in Saskatoon to a Métis family and adopted as an infant. She has lived a varied life on the Prairies, working mainly as an administrator in the energy services sector and raising three children. She currently lives in Medicine Hat, Alberta with her husband Dwayne, who farms. She’s proud of her native heritage and also boasts of being a singer in a garage rock band. Lich has been politically active for many years, typically drawn to a robust defence of Western Canada’s political interests and consistently opposing the current Trudeau government. In 2018 she joined the “Yellow Vest” movement, and has also been a member of the Alberta Wildrose Party and the federal Maverick Party.

But it was the federal Liberals’ draconian response to the Covid-19 pandemic that pushed her activist inclinations into overdrive. “What kind of country had Canada become?” Lich would later write about the impact of vaccine mandates. “We had governments who seemed far more obsessed with promoting vaccines…than they did with the reality and the struggles of the Canadian people. Someone had to stop it.”

As for Barber, he hails from the small southwest Saskatchewan city of Swift Current. The 49-year-old married father of two children owns and operates a trucking firm, C.B. Trucking Limited, which specializes in long hauls of agricultural equipment. His popular TikTok account @bigred19755 provided him with a platform to complain – often impishly – about the impact of government regulation on the trucking business. As would be expected, the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic had a major impact on his business. Barber got the vaccine shots as required, but disagreed with how they were imposed.

By the time they got to Ottawa: Lich (left, with husband Dwayne) of Medicine Hat, Alberta, and Barber (right, with Big Red) of Swift Current, Saskatchewan, found themselves leading the Freedom Convoy as a result of their shared opposition to federal Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

“I was at risk of losing all that hard work [building my company] to not being able to cross the border anymore,” he explained to True North News. As his frustration with Covid-19 rules grew, Barber leveraged his status on social media to become a leading voice for truckers’ outrage over vaccine policy, which in turn spurred him to help launch the Freedom Convoy. “I was angry, very angry,” Barber later explained. “The provincial mandates, the federal mandates…it seemed like it was an over-reach.” From 30,000 followers prior to the convoy, Barber’s TikTok account grew to 170,000 by the time the truckers rolled into Ottawa.

When Lich, Barber and the rest of the original convoy reached Ottawa in late January, numerous other groups and individuals unaligned with the initial organization had joined the protest for their own reasons, and with their own objectives, timelines and standards of behaviour. What most participants had in common was a deep antipathy towards the Trudeau government and a desire to make this known in the heart of the nation’s capital. Their right to do so peacefully was initially acknowledged by the Ottawa Police Service (OPS). As they arrived, OPS officers met the truckers, showed them where to park and took steps to allow them to store provisions. For the first week or so, Lich and Barber worked closely with the cops to keep emergency routes open and relations cordial. This congenial situation eventually soured, however, as the protesters lingered.

Just over two weeks later, on February 14 the federal government took the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act based on the Liberal Cabinet’s assertion that the protest constituted a Canada-wide “public order emergency” that could not be dealt with under existing laws and which involved threats of “serious violence against persons or property.” This essentially criminalized the Freedom Convey and all its supporters. Riot police then moved to physically clear the protest area, and 196 protesters in the immediate area were arrested. Another 76 individuals were arrested elsewhere in Canada at around the same time for attending other protests, including blockades at three border crossings in Ontario, Manitoba and Alberta.

Crushing the “insurrection”: Initially accommodated by the Ottawa Police Service, the Freedom Convoy protest was later deemed a national “public order emergency”. Shown at top left, police circulate throughout the protest on February 9; top right, police hand out notices to protesters on February 17; at bottom, police confront and arrest protesters on February 18. (Sources of photos: (top left) The Canadian Press Images/Lars Hagberg; (top right) The Canadian Press/Justin Tang; (bottom left and right) Michel Elzo/Shutterstock)

The federal Liberals also bullied Canada’s chartered banks into freezing the bank accounts of many people connected to the protest. Lich and Barber had their personal finances locked and both were later arrested. Lich’s single, initial charge was for “counselling to commit the offence of mischief”; Barber was charged with counselling mischief, as well as obstruction and ignoring a court order. While half-a-dozen other charges were later added to the pair’s alleged offences, mischief was the common thread that connected them to the vast majority of other protesters arrested during the crackdown.

This prevalence of mischief seems a rather surprising fact. Amidst what was supposedly a massive and violent breakdown in public order, mischief – or counselling others to be mischievous – turned out to be the most serious crime the police could detect. In Ottawa there were no assaults, no murders, no guns or bombs, no fraud or extortion, no rioting and looting, no treason. Nothing, in other words, that might have signalled that an actual (as opposed to imagined or media-manufactured) insurrection was underway or imminent.

There was, however, one criminal act that provably did occur in Ottawa during the protests. Two men attempted to set an apartment building’s entryway alight and then sealed the doors shut. This appalling and dangerous act was immediately attributed by some to the protesters. Ottawa mayor Jim Watson, for example, stated it “clearly demonstrates the malicious intent of the protesters occupying our city.” Police soon established, however, that the fire had no link to anyone connected to the Freedom Convoy.

Legal Mischief

While the term conjures up images of a misbehaving toddler, section 430 of the Criminal Code of Canada defines mischief very broadly as the willful destruction of property or interference with others’ lawful enjoyment of their own property. It should not be taken too lightly, cautions Michael Spratt, an Ottawa criminal lawyer. “Yes, mischief can be something very minor, for example drawing graffiti on a public space, or chalking a sidewalk,” Spratt says in an interview. “But mischief can also include very serious offences, for example, occupying and blockading the national capital and inflicting extreme harm on its residents, businesses, and communities.”

It seems doubtful the entirety of the chaos caused by the Freedom Convoy can be laid at the feet of Lich and Barber. Plenty of other participants deserve a large share of the blame, Velloso said, pointing especially to the police.

Tweet

As an indictable offence, mischief carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. Since lawyers for Lich and Barber readily admit that mischief occurred during the protest, Spratt says the only legal issue to be decided in court is whether the pair were at fault “either as a party, a participant, an encourager, an abettor or a leader of the convoy who bears some responsibility for it.” In other words, Lich and Barber could be found guilty even if they didn’t commit any mischief themselves. That would, however, require crafting a rather elaborate theory to explain a rather mundane crime.

Not every legal observer is convinced mischief best fulfills the government’s claim that it was facing an incipient violent insurrection, as is required by the Emergencies Act. According to University of Ottawa law professor Joao Velloso, most mischief charges in Canada are actually quite minor and usually punished without any jail time. Reliance on what he, unlike Spratt, views as a rather insignificant crime as the means to punish Freedom Convoy protesters seems like “a safe, bureaucratic choice for the police,” Velloso explained to The Canadian Press, adding it is “a less demanding choice in terms of police work.”

Much ado about mischief: While Ottawa criminal lawyer Michael Spratt (left) says mischief can include “very serious charges”, University of Ottawa law professor Joao Velloso (right) observes that most mischief charges in Canada are minor and punished without any jail time. (Sources of photos: (left) Michael Spratt; (right) Errol McGihon/Saltwire)

Plus, it seems doubtful the entirety of the chaos caused by the Freedom Convoy can be laid at the feet of Lich and Barber. Plenty of other participants deserve a large share of the blame, Velloso said, pointing especially to the police. “The seriousness of the mischief during the protest was produced by lack of policing,” he asserted. This echoes the February 17, 2023 findings of the Public Order Emergency Commission chaired by Justice Paul Rouleau, which also concluded that “policing failures” – in particular, inviting the truckers into the downtown area without any long-term plan to remove them – “contributed to a situation that spun out of control.”

In deciding whether the mischief charges faced by Lich and Barber are a big deal or not, it helps to consider the fate of other Freedom Convoy protesters faced with the same charge, many of whom have been represented by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF). Steven Vardy, for example, was arrested while driving in downtown Ottawa after the Emergencies Act had been imposed and charged with obstruction. The charge of mischief was added after police discovered Vardy had narrated a video about the protest. The Crown dropped the obstruction charge before trial, and after two days in court the judge determined the mischief charge was equally untenable, and it too was dismissed.

Christine DeCaire, another JCCF client, was arrested while standing alone on Nicholas Street in downtown Ottawa as police moved to enforce the Emergencies Act on February 18. She was acquitted at trial, a result recently confirmed after the Crown appealed. JCCF client Ben Spicer was charged with mischief, obstruction and weapons offences after police grabbed him off the street during the protest and found a pocket knife and bear spray in his backpack. Spicer was then secretly recorded in a police van. After a six-day trial, all charges were dropped because he’d been arrested unlawfully. Evan Blackman, yet another JCCF client, was charged with mischief and obstruction, and had three bank accounts frozen. Drone footage later showed Blackman holding back protesters in order to de-escalate the situation. And just before he was arrested, he could be seen singing “O Canada”. The judge dismissed all charges after a one-day trial because of evidentiary weakness; the Crown is appealing.

Feeling mischievous: Police arrested 196 protesters in Ottawa after the Emergencies Act’s invocation, charging many with mischief and obstruction. Most had their charges later dropped or were found not guilty at trial, with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms playing a key role in these successful defences. (Source of photo: The Canadian Press/Justin Tang)

Not every mischief case has collapsed in calamitous fashion, however. Publicity-seeking protester Tyson “Freedom George” Billings, who was not represented by the JCCF and had no direct link to Lich or Barber, pleaded guilty to counselling others to commit mischief. The other charges against him were dropped and he was sentenced to time served, about four months. And Pat King, who also garnered ample attention during the protest, is still awaiting the verdict of his mischief trial, which lasted three weeks. King and Billings were notable for their confrontational and often uncooperative relationship with the police during the protest, in sharp contrast with Lich and, for the most part, Barber.

Another exception to the raft of failed cases is the fate of the so-called “Coutts Four”. Separately from the Ottawa protest, Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick, Chris Lysak and Jerry Morin were among the most hard-line of hundreds of participants at a tense, weeks-long standoff at the Coutts, Alberta border crossing. On February 15 the four were arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder police officers as well as other weapons and mischief offences, upon which the whole protest disintegrated. Meanwhile, up to 100 other protesters at the site were charged with provincial regulatory offences.

Mischief ignored: The “Coutts Four” – (left to right) Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick, Jerry Morin and Christopher Lysak – were found guilty of serious crimes arising from a tense blockade at the Coutts, Alberta border crossing. While Olienick and Carbert were also found guilty of mischief, their six-month sentences for this crime are to be served concurrently with their other, longer sentences. (Source of montage: CBC)

This past February, Lysak pled guilty to possession of a weapon in an unauthorized place and Morin pled guilty to conspiracy to traffic firearms – clearly serious offences, but a vast reduction from the potential life sentences they faced. Both were sentenced to time served. More recently, Olienick and Carbert each received sentences of six-and-a-half years for various weapons offences. As for their mischief charges, each received an additional six-month sentence to be served concurrently with the other, more serious convictions. Finally, an Alberta law firm recently announced that of nearly 50 clients facing provincial charges for participating in the Coutts border protest, all either had their cases dropped or resolved for a nominal fine of $1 each.

At this point, Lich and Barber appear to be the only remaining major participants from the entire national saga who are still available to punish.

“Prosecutorial Vendetta”

While outcomes have varied, a clear pattern emerges from a survey of mischief charges laid during the Emergencies Act. Most have been dismissed or returned with a not guilty verdict after only a few days in court. A few – such as Billings’ guilty plea – have resulted in a minor sentence befitting the minor character of the crime itself. For Olienick and Carbert, their guilty verdicts for mischief had no impact on their overall jail time; they faced much more serious charges, and their mischief was essentially ignored. And the mischief trial for Pat King, who is still awaiting his verdict, was completed in three weeks.

‘There is no question whatsoever that this is a political trial,’ Goldkind states emphatically in an interview.

Tweet

By comparison, the trial of Lich and Barber stretched into a 13-month epic, comprising 45 trial days. All for a collection of rather modest mischief and obstruction charges. Why would that be?

The answer, according to Ari Goldkind, a high-profile Toronto criminal defence lawyer, lies in the exact thing Wetscher tried so hard to wave away during her concluding statement: politics. “There is no question whatsoever that this is a political trial,” Goldkind states emphatically in an interview. For the Trudeau government to justify its suspension of Canadians’ civil liberties through the Emergencies Act requires an identifiable villain or two. Lich and Barber fit that bill. The length and unprecedented vigour with which the Crown has pursued the pair – Lich especially – as well as the manner in which the trial has dragged on, argues Goldkind, suggest there’s a “prosecutorial vendetta” against them.

“Prosecutorial vendetta”: Referring to Lich and Barber, high-profile Toronto criminal defence lawyer Ari Goldkind says, “There is no question whatsoever that this is a political trial.” (Source of photo: Lorenda Reddekopp/CBC)

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Lich herself arrived in Ottawa, the diminutive, then-49-year-old Métis grandmother quickly became the public “face” of the protest. At a February 3 press conference, for example, she was introduced as “the spark that lit this fire and the leader of this organization.” And while she claims in her book Hold the Line: My story from the heart of the Freedom Convoy that such a description “wasn’t accurate,” she nonetheless admits she filled a necessary role. “I guess I found a talent I didn’t know I had before,” she writes, speculating that her time spent on stage with her band might have prepared her for all the attention. “But I mostly feel like it was guided by God,” she adds.

While the Freedom Convoy was essentially ungovernable, comprised as it was of many disparate groups and publicity-seeking, independent-minded individuals, Lich tried her best to put her own calm and reasonable stamp on the proceedings. Throughout the protest, Lich’s efforts were observably peaceful and without any apparent mal intent. One of her first acts was to set up an independent group of accountants to handle the flood of donations financing the protest to prevent any suggestion of financial impropriety. In her dealings with the police, she always tried to find common ground – a fact readily acknowledged by police witnesses during the trial. Sergeant Jordan Blonde of the OPS protest liaison team, for example, noted in his testimony that Lich was always “polite” in his dealings with her, and that the protest itself was comprised of “many different groups and factions… [and] unattached people” who were not “aligned with anybody.”

In her own interactions with the protesters, over whom she had no real control, Lich repeatedly stressed the protest’s peaceful nature and worked tirelessly to rid the movement of disreputable or hateful characters. She even cobbled together a deal with Ottawa mayor Watson to move some trucks out of the downtown area; ironically, that deal went into effect on the same day as the Emergencies Act was invoked. As her lawyer Lawrence Greenspon observed in a brief courthouse lobby interview, “She is a genuine, very pleasant person, and almost a throwback to the peace-and-love days. She was preaching all along that ‘we only wanted a peaceful, non-violent demonstration.’”

“A throwback to the peace-and-love days”: According to her lawyer Lawrence Greenspon (at left centre, in barrister’s robe), Lich was a source of calm and grace throughout the protest and “only wanted a peaceful, non-violent demonstration.” (Source of photo: The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

Perhaps it’s this “peace-and-love” attitude that has provoked such spite towards her. Whatever the reason, the official animosity has been painfully obvious. While the physically-imposing Barber was released on bail less than 48-hours after his arrest, Lich spent 18 days awaiting bail. At her first bail hearing, Ontario Justice Julie Bourgeois claimed Lich posed such a risk to the “physical, mental and financial health and well-being” of the people of Ottawa that she denied her application outright. Only after a bail review hearing several weeks later was Lich finally released pending trial. As Goldkind points out, many extremely violent and/or repeat offenders in Canada spend no time at all in jail following their arrest. This, as many critics observe, is the result of the Liberals’ 2019 bail reform package widely derided as a “catch-and-release” policy; it apparently doesn’t apply to Lich.

When she was finally set free, Lich returned to Alberta saddled with a long list of bail conditions, including that she neither publicly support the protest nor have any contact with other protest organizers unless a lawyer is present. “After weeks of fighting for Canadians’ right[s] and freedoms, I was losing so many of mine,” she laments in Hold the Line. It was because of these efforts, however, that in June 2022 it was announced that Lich had been awarded the annual George Jonas Freedom Award, sponsored by the JCCF. Naturally enough she wanted to go to Toronto to accept the honour in person. But before she could, the Crown came after her yet again.

At her next bail hearing, the Crown argued that the decade of prison time Lich faced made her a flight risk and that she should be kept in jail until her trial was over – a move that would have resulted in several years of imprisonment, regardless of the verdict.

Tweet

At a court hearing necessitated by the award (since her bail conditions also banned her from setting foot in Ontario), Crown prosecutor Moiz Karimjee argued that simply by accepting the honour, Lich had violated the terms of her bail and should be locked up again. Such an absurdity was quickly brushed aside by the presiding judge, who ruled she could travel to Ontario to attend the celebration, provided she abided by the remainder of her bail restrictions. While there, however, Lich was photographed standing beside another convoy participant, Tom Marrazzo.

The fateful photo: When she went to Toronto to accept the 2022 George Jonas Freedom Award at a gala presentation, Lich was photographed beside fellow protester Tom Marrazzo (second from right) with lawyers standing just off-camera. This led to a Canada-wide warrant for her arrest and another 31 days in jail. (Source of photo: CBC)

 

 

 

 

 

As she recalls in her book, “Lawyers were standing just outside the frame” when the picture was snapped, in fulfilment of her bail conditions. No matter. When the lawyer-less picture began circulating on social media after she’d returned home, Karimjee issued a Canada-wide arrest warrant in her name. Two homicide detectives were then dispatched from Ottawa to pick Lich up in Medicine Hat; the two burly detectives slapped her in leg shackles for the trip to the Calgary airport. You can’t be too careful with grandmothers.

At her next bail hearing, the Crown argued that the decade of prison time Lich faced made her a flight risk and that she should be kept in jail until her trial was over – a move that would have resulted in several years of imprisonment, regardless of the verdict. To this request, Superior Court Justice Andrew Goodman asked Karimjee if he could name a single mischief case in Canada that had resulted in a 10-year sentence. When Karimjee demurred, Goodman set Lich free once more.

In his ruling, Goodman offered his own expert opinion on the fate awaiting Lich. She “is charged with mischief and obstructing police-related offences, not sedition or inciting a riot,” the judge pointed out. “It is highly unlikely that this 49-year-old accused, with no prior criminal record and questions regarding her direct participation in the overall protests…would face a potentially lengthy term of imprisonment.”

Even if she’s found guilty, Goodman concluded, she’ll probably be sentenced to no more than time already served. All told, that amounts to 49 nights in jail. Says Goldkind: “That’s 49 nights longer in jail than someone who is caught driving three-times over the legal [alcohol] limit would likely face.” Had Karimjee gotten his way, however, she’d still be in jail – a term of 28 months and counting.

In an effort to explain the Crown’s extreme hostility towards her, Lich reveals in her book that prosecutor Karimjee has donated over $17,000 to the federal Liberal Party since 2013 and that his generosity has merited an invitation to at least one “donor appreciation” event with Trudeau himself. Similarly, Bourgeois, the judge who initially denied Lich bail, was once a Liberal candidate in an Ottawa-area riding during the 2011 federal election. In her journey through the courts to that point – a case the Crown argues is not political in any way – it was Karimjee and Bourgeoise, both with longstanding and very public Liberal sympathies, who had been the gatekeepers of a legal system intent on holding her to account for leading a massive political protest against the Liberal government. As Lich writes, “I didn’t stand a chance.”

“I didn’t stand a chance”: According to Lich’s book Hold the Line, Crown prosecutor Moiz Karimjee (top right) made substantial donations to the Liberal Party of Canada beginning in 2013, while the judge in her initial bail hearing, Justice Julie Bourgeois (bottom right), ran as a Liberal candidate in the 2011 federal election. (Sources of photo: (top right) True North; (bottom right) juliebourgeoisgpr/YouTube)

Part II of “Mischief Trial of the Century: Inside the Crown’s Bogus, Punitive and Occasionally Hilarious Case Against the Freedom Convoy’s Tamara Lich and Chris Barber” will appear on November 5.

Lynne Cohen is a journalist and non-practicing lawyer in Ottawa. She has published four books, including the biography Let Right Be Done: The Life and Times of Bill Simpson.

Source of main image: The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld.

Continue Reading

C2C Journal

The Indigenous “Land Back” Movement: A Land Mine for Canadians

Published on October 26, 2024

By

From the C2C Journal

By Michael Melanson
Amidst the litany of grievances levelled by Indigenous organizations it is easy to overlook the genuine progress made by some First Nations. Democratically elected native governments have negotiated additional rights, expanded their lands and gained control over natural resources and major projects, creating a sustainable economic base. But that apparently isn’t the course desired by a vocal subset of politically charged Indigenous North Americans. They’re unsatisfied with incremental progress or compromise. They are all grievance, all the time. And they want it all. Michael Melanson examines the emergence of the Indigenous “Land Back” concept, its evolution into militancy and potential violence, and its recent metastasis into some of the darkest crevices of the human psyche.

At a recent in-service for Manitoba teachers on the subject of Indigenous education, attendees were told by guest speaker Christopher Emdin that “resistance to colonialism is not terrorism” – the words splashed across a giant display screen. The American author and educational theorist was alluding to the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attack against Israel, but he was also making a general statement about lands “occupied by settler colonialists” – i.e., ordinary non-Indigenous Canadians. Emdin had been hired because “settler colonialism” has become a source of pedagogical angst in the Winnipeg School Division. In trying to do its bit to effect Indigenous Reconciliation, the division – like others across Canada – has come to regard settler colonialism as the historic yet current oppressor. Emdin’s message conveyed an essential subtext: Indigenous people have a right to resist colonial occupation by any means necessary in order to get their land back.

Land Back is a political sentiment originating among Indigenous thinkers and activists in the United States that is now flourishing in Canada. Land Back is fundamentally revanchist: it seeks a return of lands considered to have been possessed by North American Indigenous peoples before contact with Europeans. As such, virtually all of North America can be regarded as former native territory if “possession” is defined loosely enough. It is difficult to characterize Land Back as a political movement because it lacks the associated cohesion and formal organization. Its core impulses are a combination of mysticism, grievance, aspiration and ideology. But its goals are unquestionably political – often fiercely so.

“Resistance to colonialism is not terrorism,” Christopher Emdin recently told a gathering of Winnipeg teachers; the American educational theorist was speaking in reference to Hamas’ terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 (right) but also as a general condemnation of “settler colonialism”. (Sources of photos: (left) The Brainwaves Video Anthology/YouTube; (right) AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

Definitions of Land Back (also sometimes spelled Landback, LandBack or #LandBack) vary among professional and grassroots activists, opinion-leaders and other adherents. Jesse Wente, the journalist and current Chair of the Canada Council for the Arts, says Land Back is “about the decision-making power. It’s about self-determination for our Peoples here that should include some access to the territories and resources in a more equitable fashion, and for us to have control over how that actually looks.”

Ronald Gamblin, an Anishinaabe from Manitoba who is National Learning Community Coordinator of the 4Rs Youth Movement, states that the term “encompasses a complicated and intergenerational web of ideas/movements. When I hear Indigenous youth and land protectors chant ‘Land Back!’ at a rally, I know it can mean the literal restoration of land ownership. When grandmothers and knowledge keepers say it, I tend to think it means more the stewardship and protection of mother earth. When Indigenous political leaders say it, it often means comprehensive land claims and self-governing agreements.”

No single definition: Canadian arts journalist Jesse Wente (bottom left) describes Land Back as being “about the decision-making power”, while for Ronald Gamblin (bottom right) from 4Rs Youth Movement, the meaning depends on the person using it. Still others say it includes having the Sioux tribe gain control over the iconic U.S. Presidential Memorial at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota (top). (Sources of photos: (top) Dean Franklin, licensed under CC BY 2.0; (bottom left) Royal Ontario Museum/YouTube; (bottom right) 4Rs Youth Movement)

From its general beginnings around 2010 or even earlier, Land Back’s first explicit expression came in 2018, according to Wikipedia, when Arnell Tailfeathers, a member of the Blood Tribe in Alberta, used it in the protests demanding the reversion to Sioux tribal control of the world-famous U.S. Presidential Memorial at Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Versions of Land Back now are also found in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Mexico.

Though it is hard to pin down precisely – as the varying descriptions above make clear – generally speaking Land Back is a militant iteration of aboriginal nationalism. Proponents often disavow the legitimacy of Canada and the United States and frequently express hostility to their citizenry, whom they label “settler colonialists”. As in virtually all expressions of ethnic and racial nationalism, an autonomous sovereign territory is sought by some Land Back proponents.

This article on the website of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (not to be confused with the High River, Alberta newspaper of the same name) attempts to instruct “white” readers in the Land Back movement’s virtues – and is therefore instructive in another way. It defines “land ownership” as merely a tactic “that keeps wealth and power in white families” (Hispanic and blacks apparently being uninterested in owning land), equates police with “violence”, lays essentially all of North America’s current ills at the feet of Europeans, suggests “Western colonizers” are “evil”, and talks about “so-called” civilization.

While the sentiments of Land Back are most commonly expressed at the populist levels of social media and public events, the initial success and popularity of early Land Back activists prompted composition of a formal manifesto in 2019: Land Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper. It is written in the spirit of the 1970 Citizens Plus “Red Paper” by Harold Cardinal of the Indian Association of Alberta, which had been issued to angrily counter the Pierre Trudeau government’s preceding White Paper (formally, the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969).

Although the 1969 White Paper recognized the clear problems arising from ‘the policy of treating Indian people as a race apart,’ it nonetheless did not call for the complete disassembly of the reserve system or the erasure of Indians’ separate status, but recommended something closer to what Quebec nationalists would later famously term ‘sovereignty-association’.

Tweet

The new Red Paper makes it clear that Land Back aims to rationalize aboriginal sovereignty and, as it states on page 48, assert “fulsome Indigenous jurisdiction”. The 65-page document proposes a radical departure from liberal-democratic norms. It seeks to override the non-Indigenous nation-state and privilege a minority on the basis of ethnic/racial origin. The authors appear well-aware of what they are doing. They seek to justify a cultural exception to our ostensibly universalist liberal-democratic creed by using the assimilationist caricature of the 1969 White Paper as their theoretical foil.

Despite being widely if not universally portrayed as such – including by the authors of both Red Papers – the 1969 White Paper was not in my opinion concerned about cultural assimilation, but actually sought a third alternative to Canada’s historically fluctuating and often contradictory Indian policies of segregation and assimilation. Unfortunately, the White Paper only vaguely outlined this third alternative, as in the following passage from page 13: “For many years Canadians believed the Indian people had but two choices: they could live [in effective segregation] in a reserve community, or they could be assimilated and lose their Indian identity. Today Canada has more to offer. There is a third choice – a full role in Canadian society and in the economy while retaining, strengthening and developing an Indian identity which preserves the good things of the past and helps Indian people to prosper and thrive.”

A 2019 official manifesto of Land Back activists (top left) advocates for “fulsome Indigenous jurisdiction” and a radical departure from Western liberal-democratic norms; their argument is based on a common critique of the Pierre Trudeau government’s 1969 Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, aka the White Paper (top right).

Although the White Paper recognized the clear problems arising from “the policy of treating Indian people as a race apart,” it nonetheless did not call for the complete disassembly of the reserve system or the erasure of Indians’ separate status, but recommended something closer to what Quebec nationalists would later famously term “sovereignty-association”. As the paper states: “Frustration is as great a handicap as a sense of grievance. True co-operation and participation can only come when the Indian people are controlling the land which makes up the reserves.”

The failure of the White Paper as a new policy direction resulted in a continuation of the frustration and grievance of the failed reserve system and, half a century later, Land Back activists like the Red Paper authors are trying to redeem the added years of misery. “Our times, too, are revolutionary,” the document states on page 6. “While tragically little has changed since 1968-1970, there are also emerging debates to reflect on and work through together. We continue to grapple with federal and provincial bureaucrats and/or industry on rights, title, and jurisdiction, but we are increasingly turning inward and are having productive conversations about what reclaiming land and water might look like, for all of us.”

“Citizens plus”: The 1970 “Red Paper” challenged the principles of universalism and racial equality, demanding special rights and thereby giving rise to the notion of “Indigenous exceptionalism”. Shown, Harold Cardinal (standing), 25-year-old leader of the Indian Association of Alberta, addresses Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his cabinet during a Parliament Hill meeting, June 4, 1970. (Source of photo: CP PHOTO)

This is a disingenuous remark on the post-White Paper stasis, because that state of affairs was itself largely promulgated by the aboriginal nationalists of the day (and their white academic supporters), who fiercely denounced and resisted any civil reforms that might have resulted in Indians becoming like other citizens of Canada. This stance would have profound consequences.

The 1970s and 80s gave rise to the idea of Canada’s Indians becoming “citizens plus” – as the original Red Paper’s formal title suggested – meaning they would have the same rights as other citizens but also held additional rights by virtue of being aboriginal people. This is also when a notion of “Indigenous exceptionalism” arose and began to challenge the principle of universalism – the liberal-democratic ideal that every citizen should be equal and none should be discriminated against on the basis of race or ethnicity, and which had otherwise come to inform social and government policy in Canada. The great Mackenzie Valley Pipeline debate crystallized and amplified these elements, as well as birthing the Canadian version of the “decolonization” movement, as chronicled in this C2C article.

Forty-six years after Pierre Trudeau’s White Paper, his son was articulating just how far the idea of Indigenous exceptionalism had progressed in Canadian political discourse. During the 2015 federal election campaign, Justin Trudeau said that his government would “renew the nation-to-nation relationship with aboriginal people.” Then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper neglected to press Trudeau on just what he meant by that promise, unfortunately so, because it is a highly dubious statement. What nation-to-nation relationship, never mind what happened to it that necessitated renewal?

The relatively recent concept of universalism fundamentally rejects distinctions in law and governance on the basis of ancestry. The large exception being made for aboriginal people is based mainly on historical grievance: as the Indigenous people of Canada, they suffered from the colonization of their homelands by foreign nations and therefore deserve special considerations of redress.

Tweet

Land Back can thus be seen as an accelerant to that fuzzy notion of renewing intra-national relationships (given there are at least 630 First Nations, there are potentially hundreds of nation-to-nation relationships in need of renewal), something that would guarantee years if not decades of grinding political negotiations, with all the frustration, disappointment and anger that would surely entail, leading to still more strife. The new Red Paper’s authors suggest what this might mean when they hint at the inherent militancy of Land Back on page 56: “[Another], and perhaps more direct, type of assertion revolves around physical reclamation or occupation of lands and waters.” If negotiations fail, in other words, we have other tactics at the ready.

Gamblin is explicit about this: “When you look at it, as Indigenous peoples and nations, we come from the land. The land is our home, our mother, our caregiver, it’s what makes us Indigenous,” he writes on the 4Rs Youth Movement website. “Considering this, non-Indigenous folks need to understand that land back is about much more than land. You need to understand that when you hear youth scream ‘LAND BACK’, when you see land protectors stand off against the RCMP, when elders make prayers for the land, and when political figures sit in land negotiations, Land back is about Indigenous peoples confronting colonialism at the root. It’s about fighting for the right to our relationship with the earth. It’s about coming back to ourselves, as sovereign Indigenous Nations.”

The implications of “Indigenous exceptionalism”: Shown at top, graphic art recently posted to social media (at left) and spraypainted on a walkway (location unknown, at right) carrying violence-inciting messages; at bottom left, protesters unload a truck full of tires as they fortify a rail blockade in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, Belleville, Ontario, February 2020; bottom right, Ontario Provincial Police arrest a protester at the same blockade. (Sources of photos: (top right) dav, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; (bottom left) The Canadian Press/Lars Hagberg; (bottom right) The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

The existential association of being with land has been common if not ubiquitous among Indigenous peoples worldwide throughout history. It has been widely romanticized and is typically regarded as essentially harmless, or at least understandable. But when viewed unsentimentally, it is clear that it is ethno-centric and exclusionary if not explicitly racist. In perhaps its worst expression, the Nazis harnessed this atavistic impulse in their racist doctrine of Blut und Boden (which means “blood and soil”): since they are from the land, they are of the land and, as such, have more right to the land than someone who came to this land from elsewhere.

The relatively recent concept of universalism fundamentally rejects distinctions in law and governance on the basis of ancestry. The large (and ever-growing) exception being made for aboriginal people is based mainly on historical grievance: as the Indigenous people of Canada, they suffered from the colonization of their homelands by foreign nations and therefore deserve special considerations of redress.

Turning again to Gamblin, who provides a routine example of this mindset. “The architects of Canadian colonial policy,” he writes, “knew that if they wanted access to the lands in order to generate wealth and power, that they would need to separate us from this relationship. So, they used tactics such as forced relocation away from our homes and onto reserves (Canada’s apartheid system), introduction of patriarchal governance (Indian Act Chiefs), starvation of traditional resources (such as buffalo massacres), breaking family units and knowledge transfer through Indian Residential Schools, targeting women and children with violent policies, limiting our access to on the land cultural practices, and even making it illegal for us to fight in the Canadian legal framework for stolen land. These were systematic tactics intended on destroying our relationship with our mother.”

Among the Canadian “colonial” government’s “systematic tactics intended on destroying our relationship with our mother”, Gamblin names “targeting women and children with violent policies” and “buffalo massacres”, yet verifiable historical facts contradict his accusations. Shown at top, Indigenous children receiving medical examination; at bottom, a pile of bison skulls in the United States, 1892. (Source of bottom photo: Burton Historical Collection/Detroit Public Library)

Space does not permit a thorough parsing of Gamblin’s litany of grievances, but none of what he writes should be taken at face value. Although superficially factual at first glance, each phrase is loaded with emotionally charged adjectives and adverbs, exaggerations or falsehoods. The intent appears to be to convince by sleight-of-hand and emotion rather than historical accuracy.

Two quick examples by way of illustration. First, to Gamblin’s accusation of “targeting women and children with violent policies”. Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, saw to it that every native Canadian was vaccinated against smallpox – in some cases, receiving inoculation even before the local white population. Second, “buffalo massacres” as a “systematic tactic” of “Canadian colonial policy”. It is established that well over 90 percent of the eradication of North America’s up to 50 million bison occurred in the United States. Of the rest, much of this was done by Indian and Métis buffalo hunters and, of that portion, nearly all of it took place before the newly formed Dominion of Canada gained legal control over the Prairies in 1870. The Government of Canada inherited a tragedy; it did not bring it about.

The new Red Paper’s academic tone is an exception to standard aboriginal activist discourse, but it too resorts to emotional hooks. “The stakes of these struggles are immense,” the authors state on page 64. “Of course, while Indigenous land and life are the focus here, the life of our species and of the planet are at risk from the type of economic philosophy and practices of (sic) perpetuated by colonialism and settler colonialism…So the matter of land back is not merely a matter of justice, rights or ‘reconciliation’; Indigenous jurisdiction can indeed help mitigate the loss of biodiversity and climate crisis…Canada – and states generally must listen.”

Having used decolonization ideology as a springboard to investing Indigenous-led solutions with the capacity to save the world, the Red Paper portrays the nation-state as posing a barrier to such an Indigenous-led global salvation. It portrays the UN as “an organization of states that first and foremost defends the territorial integrity of sovereign states,” which “means that states are the primary vehicle to address climate change and loss of biodiversity.” And so, the paper laments on page 65, “Even while the UN recognizes the harms states perpetuate against Indigenous people (including denying consent), they cannot imagine non-state Indigenous-led solutions that may threaten the state system.”

A global saviour in our midst: The Red Paper lays the blame for the world’s climate and biodiversity crises on settler-colonialism and calls for expanding the Land Back movement’s scope to one that offers “non-state Indigenous-led solutions” for the whole world. (Source of photo: Backbone Campaign, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

The Red Paper authors appear to be suggesting that Indigenous organizations (to be determined) be given supra-jurisdictional authority. As grandiose and unrealistic as it sounds, it seems that they think aboriginal people should rule the world because they know what is best for the world and they know that because they are of the world in a way that non-Indigenous people are not; Mother Earth has given them her blessings as a birthright.

The continuing and in some ways worsening Indigenous/non-Indigenous dichotomy is a bane of humanity; it is antithetical to humanism because it presumes to determine who belongs here the most and who the least. If humanity matters most, it cannot matter who was here first. Some of the more sophisticated Indigenous exceptionalists are now staking their global campaign for jurisdiction on an issue of convenience: the fears of an existential peril – climate apocalypse – underpinned by the belief that they are somehow imbued with knowledge, skills and a force of origin that ordinary mortals do not possess. It is of course preposterous, and surely tempting to laugh off such presumption. But it needs to be taken seriously, for it is ultimately a mythos of race that justifies dominance of a sort that, in my view, has genuine and deeply disturbing parallels to Nazi “blood and soil” mysticism.

A new iteration of “Blood and Soil”? Land Back’s fundamental ethno-centrism mushrooms into overt racism among some of its extremist adherents, reminding the author of Nazism’s Blut und Boden doctrine, which held that only the racially pure local Volk had rights to the land. Shown at left, logo of the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture; at right, farmers in Innsbruck, Austria wave swastika flags to salute German soldiers, March 1938. (Source of right photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2005-0923-505, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 de)

Transposed to dullards and maladapts, the sentiments of Land Back become a surly revanchism that does not balk at the potential for barbarism. A disturbing number of Indigenous activists have, for example, come out in support of Hamas, grotesquely refashioning the October 7 atrocity as an act of decolonization. The Idle No More movement hosted a webinar barely a month after the massacre called “From Turtle Island To Palestine”, and a month after that Red Nation in the U.S. staged a teach-in on the same subject. “Palestine is actually doing a Land Back,” declared Sioux activist and academic Nick Estes, who spoke at both events. “They’re actually doing what we think we want to do but we haven’t gone there yet. Palestine is just doing it now…and for me, that was beautiful. I just want our resistance to be so strong, our fire as a people so strong that we just take back what is ours.”

Like Land Back, ‘decolonization’ is a term without fixed definition holding the potential to signify insurrection or violent, racially targeted civil strife. At the very least, in their ambiguous current states of definition, both are programs for which anyone with a chip on their shoulder can ‘write code’.

Tweet

Thankfully, there are courageous and notable Indigenous voices calling out such twisted opportunism. Noting that in Israel, it is Jews who are the Indigenous people, Chris Sankey, a businessman and former elected councillor of the Lax Kw Alaams Band near Prince Rupert, B.C., roundly condemned both the Hamas massacre and the attempt to distort its meaning to serve Canadian Indigenous activists’ decolonization agenda. “What has troubled me the most has been the frequency with which my peoples’ struggle for reconciliation has been invoked to justify the bloodshed, often by so-called ‘experts’ in the academy,” Sankey wrote in the National Post. “This is an absurd and, frankly, offensive comparison, as Indigenous-Canadians and Palestinians stand worlds apart.”

Like Land Back, “decolonization” is a term without fixed definition holding the potential to signify insurrection or violent, racially targeted civil strife. It can never be said often enough: “decolonization” is a foreign idea, developed in the context of wars of independence in Africa by trained Marxists who advocated organized violence from the start. It is itself hateful and racist.

Speaking in support of the Hamas atrocities, Sioux activist Nick Estes (top right) praised the Palestinian attackers for “doing a Land Back” and called for the same behaviour among his own people; Chris Sankey (bottom right), a member of the Tsimshian community of Lax Kw’ Alaams in northwest B.C., replies that “Indigenous-Canadians and Palestinians stand worlds apart.” Shown at bottom left, members of Samidoun (subsequently designated a terrorist organization) burn a Canadian flag on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, October 7, 2024. (Sources of photos (clockwise starting top left): Appalachians Against Pipelines/Facebook; @nickwestes/X; Conservative Paty of British Columbia; Jarryd Jaeger)

At the very least, in their ambiguous current states of definition, both are programs for which anyone with a chip on their shoulder can “write code”. Some of those defining those terms are brooding nationalists informed by a colossal ledger of grievances against “settler colonialism” who are self-propelled with an existential sense of moral and mortal imperative and have come to regard themselves as a higher order of the human species. This is real: the Indigenous campaign to force the changing of the name of Powell River, B.C., has featured one aboriginal leader repeatedly referring to white Canadians as “subhuman”.

We should take caution. Between the pity, reverence and romanticization of Indigenous peoples and ways, there is a blind spot in which a ruthless racialist ideology can continue to grow.

Michael Melanson is a writer and tradesperson living in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Source of main image: The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette.

Continue Reading

Trending

X