Let’s skip the sideshows
Among the scores of largely reasonable recommendations in the Truth & Reconciliation Commission Report released Tuesday, there is one very relieving absence. In a recent interview with the Toronto Star, Justice Murray Sinclair, chair of the TRC, suggested Canada ought to have a law stipulating that “you cannot deny the fact of residential schools and the abuse that occurred.”
“There are laws in place that say you actually can’t deny the Holocaust,” Justice Sinclair argued. A similar law on this dark chapter in Canadian history “would certainly move this conversation into a better framework,” he said.
If that was ever in the running for a recommendation, thank goodness it didn’t make it. There are indeed specific laws in place that say you can’t deny the Holocaust — in Germany and Austria, for example — but not in Canada. It would be ridiculous and offensive to memorialize the forced institutionalization of thousands of children with a law restricting free speech.
Such a law would not “move this conversation into a better framework.” It would start a whole other sideshow conversation. Many would object to the basic comparison, and quite rightly: likely more than 60 per cent of European Jews perished during the Second World War, by official design; something like one in 25 residential school students perished, not by official design (though needless to say with plenty of official indifference, at best).
In any event, the basic facts of the matter really aren’t much in dispute: the Canadian government stole thousands upon thousands of children from their parents in a misguided (at best) attempt to drain their culture out of them, with devastating immediate and long-term knock-on effects that likely should have been predictable at the time and which today seem inevitable.
So while we’re dispensing with sideshows, let’s nip in the bud the potentially incendiary discussion over whether the disastrous aboriginal schools experiment constituted “cultural genocide,” as the TRC report alleges. It’s understandable, as I say, that some who know of genocide first-hand or through family history would viscerally object to the G-word being associated with something other than deliberate mass slaughter. They are free to object — though the United Nations definition of genocide does contemplate “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
But the facts not being in dispute, it would be a waste of energy to get bogged down in that debate. The express purpose of the residential schools was to “take the Indian out of the child.” It was an attempt to kill a culture. If anything is cultural genocide, surely that was cultural genocide. Words matter, but not more than deeds.
The mother of all sideshows, of course, is the demand for an inquiry into mis- sing and murdered aboriginal women. There are good arguments against prioritizing it: it’s doubtful it would produce any recommendations capable of getting at the meat of the problem that haven’t already been recommended a dozen times. But arguments against holding it at all achieve nothing so much as prolonging the sideshow. The only way to get past it is to hold the inquiry. So hold it already.
One of the most encouraging aspects of the TRC recommendations is their focus on collecting and reporting hard data. They call for annual reports “on the number of aboriginal children … who are in care … as well as the reasons for apprehension”; on “educational and income attainments of aboriginal peoples”; on health indicators such as infant mortality, suicide, injuries and chronic illness; on the overrepresentation of aboriginal Canadians in custody; and on criminal victimization, to name just a few.
It’s tough to exaggerate the extent of the hole this would fill. Statistics Canada reports some of these indicators, but in many cases only every five years through the General Social Survey. And much of it is hopeless: if you want to know the number of aboriginal children in care, prepare for a dizzying hodgepodge of incomparable data from the provinces — only some of which even report on ethnicity. Suicide? Well, there’s a study from 2007. Incarceration? There’s Statistics Canada data from 2010 … which excludes British Columbia, home to Canada’s second-biggest aboriginal population. Criminal victimization? Good luck. We’re in the midst of a national debate about that, and the RCMP refuses to release detailed data on missing and murdered aboriginal men.
So many of the TRC recommendations are long hauls — utterly daunting tasks. And data collection is no fun in this benighted country either. But establishing indicators of success and a framework for measuring and reporting them is an altogether critical step that can and should begin right now. We debate the issues facing aboriginal Canadians with words; we’ll measure its solutions — and they will come — with numbers.
There is a lot to like in the TRC report. We just need to avoid stupid arguments about how to characterize what happened