Canada: : Aboriginal slaughter grounds

For a long time, Canada has claimed to be a “model student of human rights” and has been obsessed with lecturing l and remarking on other countries’ human rights r conditions. Ironically, Canada itself is far from a model example of upholding human rights.

Canada has grossly violated the human rights of its indigenous peoples, the latest such case to be discovered being in May.

The remains of 215 indigenous children were discovered in a former residential school, the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, which is believed to have housed 500 indigenous Canadian children. The youngest of the deceased was only 3 years old, and no information on the deaths of these children was recorded, according to Reuters.

Observers noted that this incident is another reminder of Canada’s historical crimes of the brutalization of indigenous people and the extermination of indigenous culture. Statistics revealed that an estimated 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly separated from their families and put in the care of “residential schools” in what a historic 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission described as a “cultural genocide” targeting Canada’s indigenous people, where at least 4,000 children died unnatural deaths, NPR reported.

Canada has also used a reservation system to violate the rights of Aboriginal people. The Canadian government set up the reservation policy in the 1880s to force Aboriginal groups to move from resources- rich areas to remote and economically disparate areas through fraud and coercion.

According to data issued by Statistics Canada, currently more than 600 Aboriginal groups living on more than 3,000 small, scattered reserves, where the live conditions are harsh and nearly isolated, and where drug addiction, alcoholism, murder, and violence are rife.

With no future or hope in sight, the suicide rate among Aboriginal people living on reserves is eight times higher than the national average for Canada.

It is alarming that crimes against the rights of Aboriginal groups continue to this day in Canada. In 2018, the UN Committee against Torture adopted its concluding observations on Canada’s seventh periodic report, expressing concern about the widespread forced or coerced sterilization of Canadian Aboriginal women and girls. A 2019 report released by Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls also found that between 1980 and 2015, thousands of indigenous women and girls went missing or were murdered, 12 times more than any other group in Canada and 16 times more than white women.

At the same time, people of Asian and African descent are also subject to severe racial discrimination and unwarranted violations of immigrant rights in Canada. According to a 2020 survey conducted by Statistics Canada, 55 percent of minorities in Vancouver, 36 percent in Montreal, and 31 percent in Toronto believed that incidents of discrimination and harassment on the basis of race are on the rise.

Observers noted that although racism is considered a “red line” by all levels of the Canadian government, it is largely a case of “more talk, less action” and a lack of substantive initiatives to protect the legal rights of minorities.