O’Toole walks back his words on residential schools amid backlash
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole is walking back comments on the original mission of residential schools after social-media backlash and searing criticism from First Nations leaders, New Democrats and Liberals.
In a video posted to the Ryerson University Conservatives Facebook group last month, O’Toole said the government-sponsored schools aimed initially to educate Indigenous children but later devolved into harmful practices.
He said modern Conservatives have a better record on the schools than Liberals, with Tory prime ministers having closed the last of them and apologizing formally for the harm they did.
Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde accused O’Toole of using the tragedy “to score meaningless political points.”
“No political party can claim the high road on that tragic piece of Canadian history. I look forward to sitting down with Mr. O’Toole in the new year to help him better understand how First Nations are continuing to grapple with the lasting effects of a policy that was wrong from the start and made worse by decades of political mismanagement and indifference,” Bellegarde said in a statement Wednesday morning.
O’Toole reversed his position several hours later, stressing the schools’ “terrible stain on Canadian history” and their sweeping impact on generations of Indigenous people.
“In my comments to Ryerson students, I said that the residential school system was intended to try and ‘provide education.’ It was not. The system was intended to remove children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures,” O’Toole said in a statement.
He stopped short of the apology called for by NDP and Liberal MPs, who characterized his remarks as corrosive.
The top Tory’s walk-back came after the hashtag #ResignOToole began trending on Twitter Tuesday night, with New Democrat MP Leah Gazan calling on him to step down.
“Time to silence ignorant racist voices that claim founders of residential schools were trying to educate Indigenous children,” the Winnipeg MP and member of the Wood Mountain Lakota Nation said in a tweet.
Christian churches and the federal government launched the boarding schools in the 1880s and kept them going for more than a century, seeking to convert and assimilate Indigenous children, who suffered widespread physical and sexual abuse at the institutions. Thousands died in them.
NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus told reporters Wednesday it is “false” and “disgraceful, revisionist race-baiting” to suggest that education was the prime goal of the school system, of which Ryerson University namesake Egerton Ryerson was a key architect.
“We are talking about policies that set out to destroy families, to destroy identities, to literally ‘kill the Indian in the child,’ ” Angus said, citing a phrase associated with the system’s expansion in the early 20th century. “This is really cheap, cheap stuff from him.” Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett said she was “disappointed” to see O’Toole turn the legacy of residential schools into a “partisan game.”