Everyone's already toeing the line on residential schools — no gag law required
National Post, 23 June 2023
It doesn’t require a law to prevent speech from people who would rather keep quiet
The fiasco of the “independent special rapporteur on foreign interference” may well have distracted Canadians from the work of the “independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian residential schools.”
Kimberly Murray was appointed to that mouthful of a job in June 2022, and released her interim report last week. Murray begins by stating that her role is “not to be neutral or objective,” but to be a “fierce and fearless advocate,” even if that “conflicts with my responsibility to function independently and impartially, in a non-partisan and transparent way.”
Strangely enough for an “interlocutor,” Murray says that “civil and criminal sanctions” should be applied to those she considers “deniers” of residential school abuses. The interlocutor wants to shut up some of the locutors.
How broad this “denialism” is remains unclear, but it would likely include those who suggest that residential schools were anything other than an enormous genocidal enterprise, and anyone who raises questions about claims surrounding unmarked graves. That would certainly include some Indigenous people.
Despite the obvious unconstitutionality of such a measure, Justice Minister David Lametti was enthusiastic about the possibility of enforcing the official consensus through the law.
Surely an early target of any such law would be my colleague Terry Glavin, who wrote a detailed report in May 2022 about how much of the media coverage of the “mass graves” in Kamloops, B.C., in May 2021 was flat out wrong. In that careful analysis, Glavin reasonably explored what the truth really was.
Other historians, again in careful explorations of what can be established, have proposed ways of determining what exactly has been, or can be, found. Canadian media have long since adopted the phrasing “potential unmarked graves” as a more accurate description.
Behind the scenes and off the record, there is no shortage of government and church officials who have serious doubts about the potential graves. Murray’s report is an indication to them that they ought to keep quiet.
In her interim report, the special interlocutor aspires to be the sole locutor, no “inter” about it. Disagreements and different points of view are “denialism” and should be made illegal. Glavin himself has critiqued this attempt to arbitrarily determine what can be known, what can be said and, perhaps, what can be thought.
Murray’s attempt to declare illegal any other reading of history other than her own seems superfluous. Is there any subject on which a more strictly observed official consensus reigns in Canada than on residential schools?
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