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Erin O'Toole's residential school denial pointers really do deserve wide condemnation. Even though I'm not an expert on residential schools, I have some thoughts as a historian.
The residential schools were designed to forcefully assimilate Indigenous children, to break the bonds of family, language, culture, and territory. Whatever else happened in them was secondary.
When Duncan Campbell Scott made residential school attendance mandatory under the Indian Act, he said he would "continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department"
In the simplest of terms, the reason they were residential schools, rather than on-reserve day schools, was to remove the children from their parents and their community. To isolate them and force them to abandon their culture.
The term 'cultural genocide' didn't exist until after 1945, but if it had, it's not inconceivable that Canadian officials would have embraced it as the object of their policy. They were not at all shy about their aims.
I would think this would all be obvious, given that it's been extensively documented and acknowledged by every government in power this century. And yet here we are. So it guess it bears repeating, or at least underlying.
A second weird point Erin O'Toole makes that demands a response is the claim that Pierre Trudeau created the most residential schools of all Canadian PMs. This strikes me as probably wrong, though I'm not an expert. What bears noting is that...
Anybody with even a passing knowledge of 20th century Canadian history knows that Pierre Trudeau is responsible for the most explicitly assimilationist policy adopted by any post-1945 PM: the 1969 White Pap-er on Indian Policy.
There is no one outside of Erin O'Toole's sad imagination who would be shocked or offended at the idea that Pierre Trudeau had a bad track record on Indigenous issues. It's a known thing, not a gotcha at all.
But this reflex of saying "Actually, the Liberals were so much worse than the Conservatives," reflects an agonizingly shallow engagement with these issues. To O'Toole, the issue is whether cultural genocide is a win for their team's brand or for the other team's brand.
The Canadian state, for well over a hundred years, through many changes in government and political ideology, maintained a consistent policy of cultural genocide towards Indigenous peoples, largely with the support of Canadians.
There are no winners or losers in this fact, or in admitting its truth, or in reconciling with it. It's a fact. It's a central fact of Canadian history. Being clever or coy won't change it.
If you look at that long legacy of forced assimilation and, rather than feeling shame and regret and vowing to contribute to doing better, to making things right, you start to split hairs about which Canadians were more involved, you are not taking it nearly seriously enough. END
