Conrad Black: Trudeau owes us all an apology

By Conrad Black

A very well-informed friend of many years, a contemporary of mine, wrote me the other day that “The blood libel against Canada of this monstrous fiction of thousands of secretly buried Indigenous victims of residential schools may be the single worst injustice this country has suffered in our lifetimes. It is now a conspiracy of silence involving both federal and provincial governments, the RCMP (shameless and useless as ever), and the media, and ‘let’s be frank,’ (quoting a Soviet diplomatic many years ago whom we both always found rather entertaining in the utter nonsense he used to recite at international meetings), a large section of the public, which knows this to be a falsehood but chooses to side with the silent forces.“

Almost all readers will be aware of the tidal wave of self-mutilating hysteria that inundated this country when, on the basis of apparent anomalies detected by underground radar close to a former Indian Residential School site at Kamloops, British Columbia, a couple of years ago. Immediately, the theory took hold that thousands of native children in those schools had died because of negligence or outright homicide, were buried secretly in unmarked graves, their deaths never recorded and no account given to their families. There is no evidence to support this, yet the prime minister led the nation in an almost medieval circular mass pilgrimage of self-flagellation. In order to impress upon ourselves and the entire world the profundity of our self-humiliation, all official Canadian flags everywhere were lowered to half-mast and maintained in that condition for an unheard-of period of six months.

Parliament voted to spend $27 million to conduct the excavations necessary to verify or otherwise the existence and extent of these graves. This work could have been accomplished by a small group for a few thousand dollars, but the suggestion of actually establishing what happened set up the customary cacophony of complaints about the sacred untouchability of burial grounds, even though it was not clear that there was burial ground at the Kamloops site, and if it was it was rank speculation about who might be buried there if it was. It is not conceivable to me that the country could dress itself out in sackcloth and ashes and flay the flesh off its own back before the bemused or astonished eyes of the entire world and then produce no evidence whatever of the unspeakable outrages that allegedly occurred and gave rise to this conduct, and then simply lapse into Sphinx-like incommunicability: a pristine silence of perfect ambiguity followed a near-terminal St. Vitus dance of window-rattling ululations of national guilt, shame, and self-hate.

Various parts of this macabre fable have been precisely and publicly put to rest: children in residential schools were not buried secretly and records were not destroyed; residential school students were accounted for and if they died while at the schools the reason was typically provided and it was almost invariably as a result of illnesses that were not as well treated in those times, and particularly tuberculosis. Beyond that, there has been silence: the febrile allegations of hideous wrongdoing vituperatively hurl(”) has been taken down from public buildings, statues of him overturned or removed, and effigies of him burned at festivities of confected righteous anger from coast to coast; all just mysteriously stopped. It is a sonic version of the celebrated poem by Shelley about the fallen monument of a once great King: “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the loan and level sands stretch far away.”

Our national shame, our brief comradeship of wickedness with Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot and their henchmen, with the mass murderers of Armenia, Rwanda, and Darfur and other perverted beasts in the catalogue of human infamy simply ended, without retraction, correction, apology, or any comment at all. As a nation, we simply, briefly were induced to lose our heads, behave hysterically, rend our garments, gnash our teeth, proclaim our hatefulness and then lapse into a silence that is merciful but completely inadequate after such an orgy of self-defamation. Where are these accusers now? Where are their apologies? To what diminutive audience has the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, expressed his regret at shaming this country before the entire world on a false charge?

The distinguished public intellectuals, C. P. Champion and Tom Flanagan, last year produced an excellent book on the subject that was comprised of learned contributions from a number of specialist historians and researchers entitled ‘Grave Error.’ (They kindly invited me to contribute a preface. It is published by True North) My National Post colleague Barbara Kay wrote an endorsement on the back of the book, concluding that “In a more sane cultural era, this (will be) a valuable resource for historians and journalists … (and) will stand as a testament to our era as a shameless abandonment of intellectual integrity in the service of the divisive, anti-science, hate-laundering principal of ’decolonization.’” So it will.

The town council of Quesnel, B.C., unanimously condemned the book Grave Error because it took issue with the charge of cultural genocide, (which is assimilation, not genocide at all, and did not occur as native children were not discouraged from retaining familiarity with their native culture). The wife of the mayor of Quesnel was distributing the book and the controversy pushed its sale up to the third most popular book sold by Amazon for a time. But the legacy media except for the National Post and Le Devoir have completely ignored this vital and rigorous study. There are long waiting lists at public libraries that acquired the book and it is an absolutely necessary and accurate correction of the public record in this appalling fraud that has been perpetrated by the most egregious operators in the native victimhood industry and their useful idiots in the media and political communities. Grave Error has done extremely well given the systematic effort to stifle it.

In addition to the proper analysis that Parliament has called for and funded on the issue of these so-called graves, the more elusive and potentially dangerous subject of why Canada raced with such alacrity to condemn itself and then withheld even from itself the vital and unconditionally just information that it is in fact innocent of the charges its government has levelled against it, also requires examination. Why are the politicians, even those who stand to gain from the revelation of what has happened, silent? And as on so many other subjects and occasions, where are our media-the CBC-the Globe and Mail, all of them except the National Post and to a slight extent Le Devoir? Where are our media and what do they think they do for a living? Canada wants to know.

First published in the National Post