Senator censured for posting racist letters

OTTAWA — The Senate’s ethics officer says Sen. Lynn Beyak violated the upper chamber’s conflict-of-interest code by posting racist letters about Indigenous people on her website.

Pierre Legault said Beyak’s conduct did not uphold the highest standards of dignity required of a senator.

Nor did she perform her duties with dignity, honour and integrity or refrain from acting in a way that could reflect negatively on the Senate, as stipulated in the code.

Legault said he proposed that Beyak delete the racist letters from her website, post a formal apology and complete a cultural-sensitivity course with an emphasis on Indigenous issues, but she hasn’t done any of those things.

Beyak posted the letters to show that she had support for a speech she gave in the Senate in January 2018, in which she argued that Indian residential schools did a lot of good for Indigenous children, although many suffered physical and sexual abuse and thousands died from disease and malnutrition.

In a report released Tuesday, Legault concluded that five of the letters contained racist content, suggesting that Indigenous people are lazy, chronic whiners who are milking the residential-school issue to get government handouts.

Beyak was appointed to the Senate in 2013 by then-prime minister Stephen Harper.

She was kicked out of the Tory caucus last year after refusing to remove the letters from her website.