Canada: A serious conversation for a serious country

by Conrad Black

Someone was dragooned into the National Post last week to respond to my comments on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report on the Indian residential school system. Having assured his tiny number of Twitter followers that my approach was “hopelessly racist,” his rebuttal was piffle. The metal tools from 6000 BC (in the midst of an ice age) that were discovered around Lake Superior, for example, had largely disappeared from North American Indigenous society by the time the Europeans arrived 7,500 years later, and there has never been any evidence that they used smelting, melting or casting in the production of metal objects. I have been a militant racial egalitarian all my conscient life. People and races are equal, but civilizations are not. He asserted that: “Europeans no more brought civilization to the Americas than they discovered it,” and alleges that civilizations of equal levels of development met each other and that “something like a slow-motion genocide occurred here.” This a monstrous falsehood for which there is not a shred of believable evidence. The European explorers and settlers were emissaries of the civilization of Shakespeare, Descartes, Michelangelo and Leonardo to a splendidly agile civilization of woodsmen who largely lacked any form of written language or advanced technologies such as wheeled transportation and metal tools and most other appurtenances of contemporary European life.

This unedifying assault on our history is indicative of the miserable condition of public policy discussion in this country. (This is not to say that the state of public discourse in other major Western democracies is particularly elevated; the United States has a government of lies that is now in full complicity with the Mexican drug and slave gangs in generating a humanitarian disaster on its southern border while it is systematically insulted by China. The greatest power in Europe, Germany, has a chancellor, Angela Merkel, who is about to surpass all of her predecessors for longevity in that office except Otto von Bismarck, and who has been reduced to public self-flagellation for mismanaging the COVID crisis, after reducing Germany to energy dependence on Russia and admitting over a million destitute Middle Eastern refugees to Germany.)

Canadians should consider much more seriously than they have the implications of the charge against us and our forebears of genocide against Indigenous people. It is the most heinous charge that can be made and there is no evidence whatsoever that any Canadian authority ever advocated or imposed any policy on Natives or anyone else that was designed to eliminate or shorten lives or truly eliminate their culture. As I’ve written here before, the Native victimhood industry, pushing on an open door and frequently incited and echoed by self-hating English- and French-Canadians, has propagated the implicit notion that the presence of the Europeans in Canada was an intrusion and occupation that was morally almost indistinguishable from Hitler and Stalin’s subjugation of Poland in 1939, though not as violent. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples recommended in 1996 that approximately one-third of all of Canada be carved out and given to the sovereign rule of the four per cent of Canadians who qualify as Indigenous people, without any burden of taxation, to be sustained for all eternity by the taxpaying residents of this country. To call things by their rightful names, this would be national suicide.

The former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Beverley McLachlin, in accepting a humanitarian award from the Aga Khan several years ago, took it upon herself to confess on behalf of this country that it had practised “cultural genocide” against Native people and that “slavery was not unknown” in Canada. Every application of the suffix ”cide” means the physical killing of a living organism, from homicide to pesticide. Cultural genocide is nonsense, sophomoric pyrotechnics to elicit unmerited shame and what is meant is deculturation or cultural deracination, which have never been a priority of any Canadian government. There were never very many slaves in Canada in the English and French communities and there were none after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. Canada generously received more than 40,000 fugitive slaves from the United States in the 30 years prior to the U.S. Civil War, and one of Canada’s greatest statesmen, Gov. Guy Carleton, refused to hand liberated American slaves back to Gen. George Washington at the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783. The former chief justice should be ashamed of herself, but more importantly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has accepted on behalf of this country the guilt of Canada on the charge of cultural genocide. This is an unauthorized and inexcusable profession of false guilt; the prime minister has arraigned this country for anti-humanitarian crimes it has never committed. Such a monstrous collective self-defamation morally disqualifies him from holding his great office. Unless he retracts and apologizes for this falsely imposed blood libel on all of us, he should be dismissed.

Essentially the same unrigorous reasoning afflicts our entire policy debate. Throughout these Trudeau years, there has been no exploration of innovative policies in the principal areas of government, but excessive vapid concentration on insubstantial questions of gender, climate and First Nations. There are only two sexes, and all people are free to sort out their own sexuality, without coercion or harassment of anyone else. These are personal matters. Anything that is not actively sociopathic, destructive of the rights of others or an offence to public decency is acceptable. No group has any right to prescribe for anyone else a vocabulary in which they must be addressed, such as trans-gender people notoriously attempted to inflict upon my distinguished friend, Prof. Jordan Peterson, at the University of Toronto several years ago. People can change sex, but not by just declaring that they identify otherwise than how they were born.

The climate issue has been the biggest fiasco of all. The old left, after its defeat in the Cold War, piled onto this bandwagon, which had been led by earnest conservationists, as a new method for exploiting virtue-signalling eco-faddishness in attacking capitalism from a new perspective. It became an ironclad fashion, and those who produced the negative economic miracle in Ontario, under the former Liberal government, are now in Ottawa, falsely representing climate as Canada’s greatest challenge. Canada’s carbon emissions are too trivial to be of any relevance to the world. The government has terrorized the country with this gas-lit horror story that has been wildly exaggerated for decades, and is strangling the oil and gas industries. Meanwhile, the federal Conservatives are stumbling. They can’t get farther out on this specious subject than the Liberals; they should stop trying to compete with Liberal hysteria. It is pitiful to see the Conservative leader plead that climate is important, but somewhat refreshing to see the party membership vote that it is not. Trudeau’s promise of a green COVID government “reset” is a terrifying idiocy as a sequel to his insane, lugubrious and authoritarian bungling of the COVID problem.

Until we know if we are having a (cynical and redundant) election, I will make some policy proposals in this space in coming weeks. We simply have to show the philistines and charlatans the door and take governing this country at least somewhat seriously, at last.

First published in the National Post.