Lessons from Canada’s teacher

If an artist had been on site, it could have been a stunning, historic portrait. Framed in the gleaming and sleek downtown Toronto offices of Deloitte, independent Senator Murray Sinclair stood quietly last week at a conference presented by the UN’s Global Compact of Canada. The focus was on the empowerment of women and girls.

Sinclair, already a larger-than-life figure, is on track to be one of the country’s legends, as future generations are taught what many of us were not. They will learn about the great harm caused by the policy of assimilation (“kill the Indian in the child”) practised by our government.

Following the apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools by former prime minister Stephen Harper in 2008, Sinclair and his fellow commissioners on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission spent six years listening to grim testimonies from more than 6,000 survivors of residential schools. The final report in 2015 was colossal; volumes of work with 94 calls to action, all divided into coherent subject matters.

The scope and sweep of his work incorporates not only past lessons, but future visions, which was why the multigenerational audience of 250 leaders and activists drawn from business, civil society and government sectors were anxious to hear from him.

As he waited for his turn to speak, perhaps the senator was wondering what he could add to the conversation.

Young girls (one who was 8 years old) had captivated the audience as they demonstrated their entrepreneurial interests in both STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and STEAM (add the arts!) startups.

A spirited exchange on the issue of diversity had just occurred between Premier Kathleen Wynne and Farah Mohamed, the respected CEO of Girls20 who will soon take up her new position as CEO of the Malala Fund in London. Michael Kaufman, the cofounder of the White Ribbon Campaign, had explained the growing and welcome trend of the engagement of men on behalf of women’s rights, a trend thoroughly embraced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

But now it was Sinclair’s turn to add his thoughts after an introduction by the popular president of the Global Compact, Helle Bank Jorgenson.

Caught in the middle of a firestorm caused by Senator Lynn Beyak, who had spoken out on isolated acts of “good” within the system of residential schools, Sinclair must have been feeling the sting of her remarks as he walked to the stage. If so, it did not show.

He looked at the audience with his trademark half smile. But before he could say a word, the entire room was on its feet, applauding with heartfelt enthusiasm, in a poignant, spontaneous gesture that spoke volumes.

No one was being “politically correct” as Beyak alleges in her press release upon her banishment from the Senate aboriginal affairs committee. Instead, the reaction was a genuine recognition from individuals of different ages, backgrounds and, no doubt, different opinions, that Sinclair has carried a very heavy burden on behalf of the survivors, the government and the country.

In his soft-spoken way, he began his remarks by noting the matriarchal structure of indigenous communities before the rules and laws of Confederation changed lives. He spoke of mothers, aunties and grandmothers as the first educators. He spoke of the sexual abuse to women in the residential school system. He spoke of the women who had had their children taken away in the Sixties Scoop, from the 1960s to the ’80s, when aboriginal kids were taken from their homes by child-care workers and placed in foster homes. He spoke of the forced sterilization. He spoke of the high incarceration rates. He spoke of the missing and murdered indigenous women. But he also spoke of the courage of female leaders, especially in times of crisis. And he noted the inspiring statistic that indigenous women have outperformed every other group in the Canadian labour force since 2007. His words were educational as they highlighted the challenges ahead for the goal of gender equality — women who face discrimination; women who are stereotyped into certain jobs as unconscious bias and tokenism often steers decision makers; women who have the skills, experience and education but who nevertheless lag behind on corporate boards and in management positions; women who are paid less than their male colleagues for equal work; and women who still suffer from harassment and violence.

But challenges are nothing new. They are simply odds to be overcome. A good teacher will point that out. Murray Sinclair is that teacher — Canada’s teacher. Let’s trust we learn his lessons well. Penny Collenette is an adjunct professor of law at the University of Ottawa and was a senior director of the Prime Minister’s Office for Jean Chrétien.

But challenges are nothing new. They are simply odds to be overcome. A good teacher will point that out. Murray Sinclair is that teacher