Much to learn for O'toole as leader

Defend Ryerson, but not to score partisan points

Egerton Ryerson, Upper Canada's pioneering advocate for public education and also an early architect of Canada's residential school system for Indigenous children, is in the news this week thanks in part to Erin O'toole.

The Conservative leader hosted a Zoom call last month with members of Ryerson University's young Tory faction, which posted part of it on Facebook, discovered this week by partisan NDP news outlet Press Progress. On the call, O'toole defended Ryerson's legacy against those who would deface or remove his statue on the downtown Toronto campus, or rename the university outright.

“It was meant to try and provide education,” O'toole said of the residential school system. “It became a horrible program that really harmed people. We have to learn from that. … But we're not helping anyone by misrepresenting the past.”

Not surprisingly, this was poorly received. At a certain point in the history of a universally acknowledged humanitarian disaster, insisting upon the good or benign or even non-disastrous intentions of those who set the disaster in motion becomes a very fraught undertaking, yielding meagre returns. There were well-meaning eugenicists, too.

Forcibly removing children from their parents isn't much more understandable, even as a historical policy artifact.

O'toole is entirely correct that it matters what actually happened, though. And it matters when things happened. His political foes are playing fast and loose on that point.

“Even PM Harper said (the schools) were made to remove Indigenous children from their families and cultures and to assimilate them,” Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller indignantly tweeted. “Anyone who thinks the intention was good should spend time listening to survivors.”

“Assimilation and the destruction of culture were its goals. Not education,” Liberal MP Nate Erskine-smith chimed in, noting Duncan Campbell Scott's stated determination with the Indian Act “to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.”

Ryerson's contribution to the disaster is a six-page memo to George Vardon, the assistant superintendent general of Indian Affairs, in 1847. Vardon had requested Ryerson's input after the previous year's Conference of the Narrows in Orillia, Ont., where ( per the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report) “most of the chiefs present … made a commitment to donate one-quarter of their annuities to support these (new) schools.”

“Within a decade, many had come to regret their decision,” the report notes.

But this all predates Confederation, and thus the Indian Act, by 20 years. Scott wouldn't assume Vardon's equivalent position for 73 years. Ryerson had been dead for 12 years before amendments to the Indian Act made attendance at residential schools mandatory, which is when the atrocity really kicked into gear.

You certainly can't say Ryerson's report has aged well. (“It is a fact established by numerous experiments that the North American Indian cannot be civilized or preserved in a state of civilization (including habits of industry and sobriety) except in connection with … religious instruction and sentiments.”) But it does indeed recommend providing Indigenous children with a good and useful education: “reading and the principles of the English language, arithmetic, elementary geometry … general history, natural history and agricultural chemistry, writing, drawing, and vocal music, bookkeeping … religion and morals.”

To be fair, he didn' t think much of the European- sourced hoi polloi either: “Even in ordinary civilized life, the mass of the labouring classes are controlled by their feelings as almost the only rule of action,” he wrote to Vardon. And he certainly doesn't recommend snatching Indigenous children from their parents against their will. Hundreds of very important people had ample opportunity not to make the worst of his recommendations, and failed.

All in all, Ryerson makes an excellent subject for a sober discussion about how we should think of imperfect historical figures and adjudicate their legacies.

The real problem with O'toole's musings isn't that he dared suggest Ryerson wanted to provide Indigenous children an education, though that's what made the headlines. The real problem is that he tried to weaponize the issue for partisan effect. “Who closed that program? Mulroney. Who apologized for it? Harper,” he says. “So Conservatives, when it comes to residential schools in the modern era, have a better record than the Liberals. That shocks the hell out of the woke crowd.” He suggests the campus Tories might lay waste to their campus Liberal opponents by pointing out that Pierre Elliott Trudeau “opened more residential schools than Egerton Ryerson.”

These are not the words and thoughts of a serious, sensible leader — something many quite understandably think Erin O'toole can be — let alone those of a “champion for reconciliation,” as his office dubbed him on Tuesday. They are the words and thoughts of a garden-variety partisan trapped inside a political snow globe with his opponents.

“Cancel culture,” free speech on university campuses and related issues are remarkably major obsessions within the Conservative base. But I have to wonder how many other Canadians even know what “cancel culture” or “woke” even mean. Most Canadians do have at least some idea what the residential school system was, though, and they know it is a national shame. A man boasting that his party was the one to finally apologize for it might not make the most compelling replacement prime minister.

THESE ARE NOT THE WORDS AND THOUGHTS OF A SERIOUS, SENSIBLE LEADER.