Is Canada really a genocidal country?

The following opinion piece written by yours truly was originally published on October 31, 2022.

It directly confronts the immorally libellous misappropriation of the genocide label to describe Canada’s generally benevolent though patently paternalistic treatment of its indigenous people.

I was compelled to write this piece, borrowing on previous writings such as this one, following the unanimous albeit extra-legal assent of Parliament on October 27, 2022 to a motion calling on the federal government to recognize the operation of Canada's Indian Residential Schools as constituting genocide. This motion was presented with no prior public notice, no presentation of evidence, and no debate, an outrageous misuse of the moral influence of our elected politicians.

The motion, presented by NDP member Leah Gazan whose father is … wait for it … a Holocaust survivor, read:

“That, in the opinion of the House that the government must recognize what happened in Canada's Indian residential schools as genocide, as acknowledged by Pope Francis and in accordance with article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

My counter to this motion, presented in detail below the paywall, is that there is not a shred of evidence, legal or historical, of anything remotely resembling genocidal activity against Canada’s first settlers.

In a just published Frontier Centre for Public Policy essay, Dr. Jacques Rouillard, Emeritus Professor, Department of History, University of Montreal, also dealing with Gazan’s motion, argued that:

The distinction between physical and cultural genocide was, in fact, debated in the UN General Assembly in 1948. Because of the objection of several nations, the term cultural genocide was not used in the UN Genocide Convention, nor in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 1994. That is probably why the TRC Report distinguished between physical and cultural genocide, and uses cultural genocide to explain what happened in the IRS system. The policies of the Canadian government and the church s that managed most of the schools were clearly aimed at assimilating Aboriginal peoples into Canadian society.

University of Saskatchewan professor emeritus and 2010 Canada Research Council Gold Medal recipient, J. R. Miller, who has dedicated thirty years of his career to examining the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people wrote in the National Post (January 2021) that “the government's goal was assimilation, not extermination.”

He has also written that:

“… no Canadian government’s statements or unpublished government documents have ever been produced that contain evidence of an intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

He rightly added “if Canada had wanted to destroy First Nations, it would not have spent so much effort trying to turn them into Euro-Canadians.

To read my take on this issue, please continue below.