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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

It seems we are far too Canadian; Yet not Canadian enough

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Susan Martinuk 

Oh, Canada. You have been too nice.  Too kind.  Too silent. For too long.

And now a noisy minority is undermining our country’s values, laws and institutions.

Protestors have taken over many university campuses and they are fomenting hatred toward Jews and Israel. Few Canadians are speaking out. We seem incapable of responding to bigotry and hatred – even when it is occurring right in front of us.

Our silence has allowed (what at one point were) 15 pro-Palestinian encampments (tent cities) to be established in universities across Canada. It’s as if students no longer have to study or find a summer job to pay for tuition.

Instead of doing something productive, they are protesting against Israel’s war against Hamas (the Palestinian government that is also a designated terrorist group). But, in doing so, they have pushed aside the academic tenets that call for a free exchange of ideas and respectful debate on issues.

They are outright demanding that the universities divest any funding that has ties to/or support for Israel.  Some groups are even demanding that they sever ties with Israeli academics and their institutions.

Negotiating divestments? Asking for a change to financial policies hardly seems like it could lead to hate-filled invective.

It is always a challenge to know where to draw the line between free speech and hate speech. But nasty words can lead to even worse actions and, in this case, it wasn’t long before the protests took a long jump across that line.

Tensions quickly escalated at McGill University when senior administrators were followed and harassed by masked protestors at their homes and offices. Others hung an effigy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a striped outfit resembling the uniforms that Jews were forced to wear in concentration camps – you know, where Nazis deliberately killed six million Jews. Yet the police would only act when protesters stormed the admin building. Fifteen were arrested.

Other blatant displays of anti-Semitism popped up on campuses – chants of “Go back to Europe” and “Zionists are terrorists.” Some Jewish students received threats of “We will find you” on their social media accounts.

Can you imagine the response of Canadians if such slogans targeted aboriginals or homosexuals? What if they were chanting “All Muslims are terrorists”?

The outcry would be immediate and in no time at all the protest camp would be shut down. That can be said with certainty because our twisted and biased sense of morality has already reared its ugly head.

At the University of Toronto, a small group of pro-Israel students tried to establish a camp to counter the anti-Jewish vigil. But they were immediately whisked away by police — because of the huge security risk they posed.

Back at McGill, the tent city is now hosting a “revolutionary youth summer program” and even advertised it with an image of terrorists wearing keffiyehs (black and white scarves), covering their faces and clutching machine guns. It was a picture from decades ago but that doesn’t negate its power to incite fear and violence.

Jewish students told a House of Commons committee that they no longer feel safe and are forced to hide their identities. The University of Waterloo had to tell students making complaints of anti-Semitism that they could no longer do anything about it because there were too many complaints to investigate!

McGill University’s president says, “none of this is peaceful protesting. It is designed to threaten, coerce and scare people.” The president at U of T told MPs that “anti -Semitism has been a growing presence recently in our university.”

As tensions have escalated, very little action has been taken. The police don’t seem to want to act, and administrators are too busy wringing their hands. The primary criticism against taking action is that it would be seen as too ‘authoritarian’ to shut down free speech. After all, this is Canada.

Of course, having to hide your ethnicity and Semitic identity in public doesn’t exactly smack of Canadian values either.

Canadians have been silent as we witness the fragmentation of our civil society. It brings to mind a famous poem entitled “First They Came.” It was written by a German who was initially a Nazi supporter but changed his views when he was imprisoned for speaking out against Nazi control of the churches.

“First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist;

Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist;’

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

 This week, as we celebrate Canada and Canadian values, take some time to think about the things we are willing to stand for and the things which we must stand against.

Susan Martinuk is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and author of the book, Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health-care Crisis.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Another Mass Grave?

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No. One outrageous lie was quickly discounted, yet another lives on, to the detriment of everybody involved.

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Giesbrecht

The  Kamloops claim didn’t come out of the blue. The TRC’s well-publicized “missing children” wild goose chase thoroughly indoctrinated indigenous communities. It convinced foolish people, like Casimir, Leah Gazan and Kimberley Murray, that thousands of “missing children” had been secretly buried  all across Canada.

“My brother Rufus saw them take all those children and stand them up next to a big ditch, and then the soldiers shot them all and they all fell into that ditch. Some of the kids were still alive and they just poured the dirt in on top of them. Buried them alive.”

This mass murder happened in 1943 — not in Nazi-held Europe, but in Brantford, Ontario.

So, there you have it — the personal story of a residential school “survivor” describing the day the Canadian Army lined up 43 Indian children in front of a residential school at Brantford, Ontario, shot them and dumped their bodies into a mass grave. The May 27, 2021 announcement that the remains of 215 former students of the Kamloops residential school wasn’t the first time that a claim  about sinister residential school deaths and clandestine burials had been made.

This Brantford story is obviously untrue. Any reasonably well-informed person with a lick of sense would know that at a glance.

But that didn’t stop the claim from making the social media rounds for years. According to the fact-check tens of thousands of people have read this bogus claim over the years, and many appear to have believed it completely. In fact, despite the fact checks proving that the claim was entirely false it continues to circulate today.

Both the Kamloops and Brantford claims came basically from the same place — the strange mind of a defrocked United Church Minister, Kevin Annett. It was Annett who created the bogus Brantford claim. In a strange twist, the picture at the top of the page — said to be from Brantford — is actually a photo of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, as it looked in the 1920s. 

And it was Annett who inspired the TRC’s misguided “missing children/unmarked graves” wild goose chase that, in turn, inspired Chief Rosanne Casimir to make the Kamloops claim. Both claims were equally and obviously false: The Kamloops claim was that the “remains of 215 children were found.” In fact, only radar blips (anomalies) were detected- blips that turned out. to most likely be from previous excavations, and not graves. Casimir and Annett both knew that they were making false claims.

Annett’s bogus claims come from his imaginative reworking of stories of “survivors” that he publicized in his blogs, books, interviews and movies.

His most famous movie is Unrepentant. This movie has been viewed by tens of thousands of Canadians, particularly in indigenous communities, such as the Tk’emlups community at Kamloops.

It has won awards, and been praised by eminent people, such as Noam Chomsky. Despite being every bit as false as the claim that the Canadian army shot 43 indigenous children, it actually convinced Member of Parliament, Gary Merasty, that it was accurate history. It is nothing short of amazing that this highly suggestible MP  was then able to convince the equally gullible, and newly appointed TRC commissioners that there were many thousands of such “missing children”, as Annett alleged.

The TRC commissioners then launched their “missing children/unmarked graves” campaign despite having no mandate from the federal government to do so. (Independent researcher, Nina Green, describes this in detail here.)

You see, the  Kamloops claim didn’t come out of the blue. The TRC’s well-publicized “missing children” wild goose chase thoroughly indoctrinated indigenous communities. It convinced foolish people, like Casimir, Leah Gazan and Kimberley Murray, that thousands of “missing children” had been secretly buried  all across Canada. 

Indigenous people became hooked on these stories.

Annett’s most famous book is his 393 page opus, “Hidden No Longer.” That book introduced the idea that the deaths of these thousands of “missing children” (his estimates range from 50,000 to 250,000, depending on the telling) constituted  genocide. It is absolutely shocking that our MPs actually voted to condemn Canada of genocide based essentially on Kevin Annett’s bogus claims.

Based on those same bogus claims Annett was hired by the Brantford Mohawk community in 2011 to dig up the graves that he claimed existed in the apple orchard area of their residential school. According to Annett, these were the graves of indigenous students who had been secretly killed and buried in the apple orchard at the school, with the forced help of fellow students. 

Sound familiar? It should. That was essentially the same grisly tale repeated by Chief Rosanne Casimir years later in Kamloops. (See above.)

Except that the wiser folks within the Brantford Mohawk community twigged on to Annett’s tricks. And when Annett was found on the streets of Toronto, waving around chicken bones, and pretending that they were the bones of children he had unearthed at Brantford, the Mohawk elders came together and publicly denounced Annett as a fraud at a community meeting.  They then banished him from their community. 

Unfortunately, Casimir became a useful idiot for Annett — just as the gullible TRC commissioners did — and no such leadership has yet come forward from the wiser elements within the Kamloops indigenous community. Those folks are silent, while the more vocal contingent are still sticking to their story that the  soil anomalies are the “remains of 215 children,” and not what they almost certainly are — 1924 septic excavations. 

So, the questions should be asked: Is the claim that the Canadian army shot 43 indigenous children, and dumped them in a mass grave, any more or less believable than the claim that priests killed and secretly buried 215 children at Kamloops, (or any of the copycat claims that followed it?)

What is it about that Mohawk claim that gives it appeal to only the most gullible among us, while the equally improbable Kamloops claim is still taken seriously by so many people?

On the surface, both claims are outrageous, and have no real evidence to support them. Quite the contrary, every Canadian history book ever written is cogent evidence  that both stories are false. But the Mohawk claim was dismissed as the nonsense it obviously was, while the Kamloops claim lives on.

At least part of the answer to those questions appears to be in the response of the government in power, and the media to the claims. If the Brantford claim had been met by a prime minister who immediately ordered that flags be lowered, and offered hundreds of millions of dollars to any other indigenous communities who wanted to make similar claim, no doubt that Brantford claim would have been taken seriously.

Or, if the Brantford claim had been made in a time when a highly ideological CBC would ask no questions, and blindly promote the claim, the results might have been entirely different. As it is, the Brantford claim died a merciful death, while the equally specious Kamloops genocide claim still languishes like a stinking albatross around the neck of every Canadian.

Although the international community is increasingly broadcasting the obvious fact that the Kamloops claim is bogus Canada’s media remains asleep. That is not likely to change until leadership changes in Ottawa, and at the CBC. Pierre Pollievre, when questioned on this topic, stated clearly that he stands for historical truth, accuracy, and a full investigation into all questions pertaining to claims about residential school deaths. Hopefully, that means that excavation and a full inquiry will follow.

But Tk’emlups indigenous elders better wake up, like the Mohawk elders did. You are not doing your communities a favour by letting politicians and journalists treat you like children, by pretending to believe your bizarre claims. These false claims are already doing great damage.

Fortunately, there are many thoughtful indigenous people who do not blindly accept the claims about murderous priests and secret burials.

Here is one such wise indigenous person. He is a priest, and he is willing to do what our federal government and our CBC failed to do from the beginning namely to intelligently discuss the issue.

Thoughtful people like this need to be involved in a full investigation that will clear the air about the Kamloops claim, and get Canada back on track.

Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Hungarian Revolution of 1956: A Valiant Effort to Overthrow Communist Rule

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Civilians wave Hungary’s national flag from a captured Soviet tank in Budapest’s main square during the anti-communist uprising of October 1956. AP Photo

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Gerry Bowler

For a time, Moscow seemed willing to accept change in Hungary, but when Nagy announced that his country would leave the Warsaw Pact and become neutral in the Cold War, that was a bridge too far for Khrushchev.

After World War II ended in the summer of 1945, the Soviet Red Army found itself to be in possession of Eastern Europe. In the next few years, the USSR extinguished the young democracies in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, while imposing Stalinist governments on autocracies such as Bulgaria and Hungary. With Marxist regimes taking over in eastern Germany, and Albania and Yugoslavia as well, Winston Churchill spoke truly when he said that “from Stettin the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

In many of these countries, there was considerable resentment over the Russian occupation. In the Baltic republics, Romania, Croatia, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine, doomed anti-Soviet guerilla movements with names like the “Forest Brothers,” the “Cursed Soldiers,” or “Crusaders,” fought underground wars that\ lasted for years. In June 1953 in East Berlin, workers rose up in protests against their communist masters, sparking a short-lived rebellion that spread to hundreds of towns before being crushed by Russian tanks. The most serious of these insurrections was the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. By 1956, there were stirrings of discontent in the Hungarian People’s Republic. Under the state control of industry, forced agricultural collectivization, and the shipping of produce to the Soviet Union, the economy was in bad shape. The supply of consumer goods was low and standards of living were dropping. Secret police surveillance of the population was harsh, while many Hungarians resented the suppression of religion and the mandatory instruction of the Russian language in schools. As news leaked out about Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in the so-called “Secret Speech,” hopes grew that reform of the communist system was possible.

Marxist intellectuals began to form study circles to discuss a new path for Hungarian socialism, but their cautious proposals were suddenly overtaken by demands for change by young people. On Oct. 22, 1956, students at the Technical University of Budapest drew up a list of demands for change  known as the “Sixteen Points.” They included free elections, a withdrawal of Soviet troops, free speech, and an improvement in economic conditions.

On the afternoon of the next day, these points were read out to a crowd of 20,000 who had gathered at the statue of a leader of the Hungarian rebellion of 1848. By 6 p.m., when the students marched on the Parliament Building, the crowd had grown to around 200,000 people. This alarmed the government, and later that evening Communist Party leader Erno Gero took to the radio to condemn the Sixteen Points. In reaction, mobs tore down an enormous statue of Stalin.

People surround the decapitated head of a huge statue of Josef Stalin in Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Daniel Sego (second L), who cut off the head, is spitting on the statue. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

On the night of Oct. 23, crowds gathered outside the state broadcaster, Radio Budapest, to demand that the Sixteen Points be sent out over the air. The secret police fired on the protesters, killing a number of them. This enraged the demonstrators who set fire to police cars and seized arms from military depots. Army units ordered to support the secret police rebelled and joined the protest. The government floundered; on the one hand, they called Soviet tanks into Budapest; on the other hand, they appointed Imre Nagy, seen as a popular reformer, as prime minister.

As barricades were being erected by protesters and shots were being exchanged with secret police units, Nagy was negotiating with the Soviets who agreed that they would withdraw their tanks from the capital. Over the next few days, the rebellion spread; factories were seized, Communist Party newspapers and headquarters were attacked, and known communists and secret police agents were murdered. The new prime minister released political prisoners and promised the establishment of democracy, with freedom of speech and religion.

For a time, Moscow seemed willing to accept change in Hungary, but when Nagy announced that his country would leave the Warsaw Pact and become neutral in the Cold War, that was a bridge too far for Khrushchev. Fearing the collapse of the entire Soviet bloc, he made plans for an invasion of Hungary. By Nov. 3, the Red Army had surrounded Budapest, and the next day heavy fighting erupted as armoured columns entered the city. Some units of the Hungarian army fought back, joined by thousands of civilians, but the end was predictable. After a week of battles, with over 20,000 dead and wounded, resistance crumbled. A new Soviet-approved government under János Kádár purged the army and Communist Party, arrested thousands, and executed rebel leaders including Nagy.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled, many of them settling in Canada and the United States. World condemnation of the USSR was strong; critics of the Soviets included many communists in the West who resigned their party membership. Not until the collapse of the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe in 1989 did Hungarians get another taste of freedom.

Published in the Epoch Times.

Gerry Bowler, historian, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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