Beyak fights the bad fight
The clash in the Senate over racist letters posted to the website of Lynn Beyak is not about free speech, as the senator claims, but about ensuring the Upper House is not used as an instrument of hate.
The Senate should support a recently tabled motion to remove immediately the offending comments from taxpayerfunded servers at least until an ethics probe into Beyak’s conduct concludes its work.
The letters in question were written in defence of Beyak’s long-standing crusade to, for some reason, rehabilitate the image of the Indian residential schools system. In particular, they support a backward and muddled speech Beyak gave last March in which she argued that there was plenty to love about the schools. Residential schools offered clean clothes and good meals, she said, “and, of course, there were the atrocities as well.” Clean clothes, atrocities — a mixed bag.
One of the letters suggests that Indigenous people “should be very grateful for the residential schools.” Another characterizes First Nations as “a culture that will sit and wait until the government gives them stuff.” For the most part, they express the same sort of unsavoury mix of tacit and explicit prejudice that has become Beyak’s signature.
For her part, the senator insists her supporters’ letters are “not racist or hateful in any way,” but “compassionate and kind.” Indeed, if the views expressed are “considered racism,” Beyak says, “then our society is in serious trouble.”
But they are considered racism — and a particularly dangerous form in this moment of reconciliation.
“No matter how you cut it,” said Independent Sen. Murray Sinclair, former head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “most of those comments are racist in nature.”
Some, he went on, are so offensive that they “will instigate people to do and believe things against Indigenous people that we all have to be concerned about.”
Beyak’s ideological allies, too, were disturbed. When the letters were brought to light in January, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer denounced them as “simply racist” and called on Beyak to remove them from her site. When she refused, he kicked her out of caucus. Meanwhile, her colleagues in the Senate launched a probe into whether her questionable web curation violated her duty to “uphold the highest standards of dignity inherent to the position of the senator.”
A parliamentarian should not be allowed to use her elevated position to promote hateful views. Beyak does not dispute this. The question for the ongoing probe is whether the letters on her website are indeed hateful. Reading them, it is hard to see it any other way. It is also hard to imagine how the promotion of such views does not bring into disrepute the already embattled institution Beyak represents, thus violating the code of ethics and justifying some form of censure.
In the meantime, the motion now before the Upper House, tabled by independent Senator Kim Pate, to remove the letters from parliamentary servers pending the results of the ethics probe makes perfect sense. This is not a subversion of process but a balancing of harms. State-sanctioned hate surely poses a greater danger than the temporary removal from a Senate website of letters that can also be found elsewhere.
Beyak will no doubt continue to cry free speech. But, yet again, the infringement she perceives is merely the constraint that comes with being a senator. Parliamentarians are quite rightly held to a higher standard — one to which Beyak, now removed from all committees and from her caucus, has so often struggled to rise. Perhaps she would be more comfortable if she were liberated from the strictures of parliamentary discourse, freed to say whatever she wanted as a private citizen. Certainly we would be.
The clash over racist letters posted to the website of Lynn Beyak is not about free speech