More truth bodes well for greater reconciliation

National Post, 30 September 2023

A more balanced view of Canada’s shame and promise might yet emerge

The third observance of the federal National Day for Truth and Reconciliation today offers some indications that increasing attention is being paid to truth, which bodes well for reconciliation.

Recall how the federal holiday came to be. The discovery of potential unmarked graves at a former residential school site in Kamloops in May 2021 set off a summer-long international frenzy, with many media outlets falsely reporting that claims had been made of “mass graves” in Canada, implying mass murder. Such claims were driven primarily by the media, not Indigenous groups.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lowered Canadian flags to half-mast for months, from sea to sea to sea and beyond, our embassies and high commissions from Warsaw to Wellington included. There were commemorations and marches.

Dozens of Catholic churches were burned or vandalized, disturbingly noted with muted dismay by many, even when they were churches where Indigenous Catholics worshipped. By summer’s end, Catholic bishops had announced a series of new apologies, funds and a papal visit for 2022. The federal government established the new holiday, which the prime minister observed by going surfing in Tofino. It appears that will not be his traditional observance.

So it seemed that the events of 2021 marked a more widespread, deeper ratification of the main charge of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in its 2015 report: The history of Canada should be viewed through the prism of the residential schools. The entire Canadian project was a racist, brutal, criminal assault on Indigenous peoples, and the Canadian state was best understood as an agent of genocide.

That was a startling claim and rather unexpected turn for the TRC, charged with investigating residential schools, not proposing an alternative story of Canada’s founding. The TRC report coincided with the election of the Trudeau government, which immediately said that it accepted the entire report. It proved congenial to the federal Liberals, who had been promoting for decades the view that Canada really began in 1965 with Pearson’s new flag, or even better, in 1982 with the Charter of Rights of Trudeau père. If Canadian history really moved from ignominy to infamy, all the better to move on to more recent innovations.

This was a step much too far. The injustice of the residential schools, which caused such genuine and prolonged pain, is an undisputed, dark chapter in Canadian history. That it is the whole story of the time, let alone of Canada, was not established, even by the voluminous TRC report itself (read by precious few). After the summer of 2021, it seemed that there was no walking back from the step too far.

It is remarkable then that there is now a reconsideration of the more expansive charges of the TRC process, and that a more balanced view of Canada’s shame and promise might emerge. There are three contributing developments.

First, it has now become possible to discuss what was actually discovered in 2021. Careful observers have long known that it was not certain that the potential unmarked graves were evidence of any previously unknown crimes, much less mass murder. Yet prominent voices remained mute.

This summer the Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba was the first to do actual excavations. The “anomalies” were not graves. That made it possible to discuss what has and has not been found elsewhere.

Second, the visit of Pope Francis in 2022 was significant. Most attention was paid to his apologies, dramatically made from a wheelchair on what he called a “penitential pilgrimage.” Yet the apologies were not really the news, insofar as they were not new. The religious order that ran most of the Catholic schools, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, issued a comprehensive four-page apology in 1991 — not only for abuses in the schools but for the schools themselves — long before most Canadians were familiar with the story. Numerous other apologies followed, including from Pope Benedict XVI in 2009.

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