I was brought up in the United Church, switched to Anglican and eventually became an agnostic.
However, there is a difference between doing something and not stopping something from being done which you may not know about or which is tangential. I am not excusing people who deserve blame, but without Macdonald there is no Canada. Allegedly, some 70% of Canadians still support Macdonald and 11% of Canadians do not. Regardless of the truth of these figures, there is a case for assigning blame where it belongs on the basis of evidence and not on uninformed opinion.
Canada still needs to move forward from this. The first steps are acknowledgement, investigation, education and fulfilling the requests made by the reconciliation commission when this is feasible. Many more graves will be found. The idea that enough compensation has already occurred, or that covering up tragedy instead of acknowledging errors is wrong. It is at odds with current thought and with the experiences of many countries.
I concur.
The people who set up the system knew the children were being kidnapped. They knew they were at seriously increased risk of dying. At least some of them knew they weren’t getting enough to eat, and others hadn’t checked or set up a system to make sure that they were.
Even if we assume that the people who set up and those who actively perpetuated the system didn’t know the children were being raped (though the rapists certainly knew), and even if we assume they thought the children weren’t being beaten any worse than they beat their own children: I still think there’s a significant problem with saying that the only thing they did wrong was to be in error about their ends. They are also responsible for the means. And they either accepted those means, or didn’t bother to check on the results of what they were doing enough to realize that they were happening.
It’s entirely possible for the same people to do terrible things and to do excellent things. Happens all the time. It’s very difficult for many people to accept that being good about x doesn’t mean that the same person may not be, yes, evil about y. We need to be able to acknowledge both of those things; and to acknowledge that they may indeed occur in the same people.
Apologies - I wrote my post before scrolling to the bottom and seeing your note.
Oh yes, it seems that perhaps one of the major causes for the conditions is that the Canadian Government was cheap. They were not giving the schools enough money to properly feed & house the kids- and they knew that damn well at that time. Not only that in 1910 Canada (just like the USA) was rife with corruption, fraud and mismanagement. So, let us say it would cost $2 cdn in 1910 to feed and house the kids, the govt only sent $1.5 (these are not real numbers, use for comparison) and fraud, graft etc cut that to $1 cdn. No wonder the kids were having issues being sickly and what not.
So even if the Government had good intentions, they didn’t follow through with enough funds.
And of course there was deliberate mistreatment also.
If you think “goons” is a harsh word, you’ll hate what I call them. Here’s a hint, it rhymes with “Ersatzpuppen”
Please drop this hijack. This terminology discussion already sparked it’s own thread, and it is not appropriate to derail this one by bringing it up again.
DrDeth, the term “cultural genocide” has been defined by the posters in this thread and it’s a proper term to use in this thread and you should stop complaining about it. If you do it again you will be banned from the thread.
Everyone else please don’t engage with him on this, and report him if he does it again.
Oops, the flag was still up. Sorry to double mod.
My moderation comment stands, however.
I have seen it come up more than once that these things happened too long ago for anyone to face justice. Bearing that in mind:
The tribunal ruled the federal government was required to pay compensation worth C$40,000 to each child removed from his or her home – the maximum allowable under the country’s human rights act.
You post came the very day of Canada’s first official National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a holiday for the federal government Trudeau’s government created to remember this very sort of thing. Critics said it was an empty gesture that would just be used by the few people who get the day off to take a vacation. Trudeau scoffed at such things. Then, rather than going to any number of things to remember the suffering of indigenous people on September 30, he went on vacation.
So just in case you wondered if we’re a serious country about this problem yet, we aren’t.
Agreed. I was disappointed (but not overly surprised) at what a bone-headed move that was on Trudeau’s part. Does he not have advisors that would have told him how idiotic that was? Did he not see the invitations from the Kamloops First Nation group? That should have been a no-brainer for him to be present with them on that day.
What an idiot.
I don’t know. Presumably the PM gets hundreds of invitations every day. The problem, arguably, was not belatedly accepting the invitation that is much in the media. The problem was probably not going on vacation - Trudeau is no Trump; though this is not the first vacation deemed questionable.
The problem was perhaps that he should have been seen to do something meaningful at the place he was going to vacation; taking that into account when choosing the spot. Secrecy was perhaps not the best course. Again, this affair is a very low degree of scandal - but he knows better. Does it say a lot about his priorities?
I’m confident he has the budget to sort the wheat from the chaff.
I think it does, yes, or at least demonstrates that there is a very substantial gap between his actual values and what his reputation is. Trudeau is, of course, well regarded for being a super progressive guy, but in all honestly I don’t get the sense he much cares for such things. The impression I get from him is that he is both colossally egotistical and (probably unconsciously) elitist, and that his pronouncements on such things are made solely to advance himself as opposed to a genuine commitment to them.
I am sure in his head he thinks he’s very progressive - he is almost exactly my age, and everyone my age thinks they are. But there’s a big, big difference between THINKING you’re an open minded, liberal person, or paying lip service, and actually, actively behaving in a way consistent with that. Just not telling racist jokes or whatever is easy; altering your behaviour from self-interest, making inconvenient or difficult choices, that’s a horse of a different color. A person’s true values are not what they say they are. A person’s true values are shown by action and commitment.
Getting past the popular opinion or media narrative can be hard because we form ideas in our heads of what these people are based on narratives. If Stephen Harper had done exactly the same thing he’d have been crucified for it, I mean, just dragged ten times worse. (Never mind the blackface thing; people have been hounded out of public service entirely for that sort of thing.) I’m not bitching about that, it’s just how it is, but when one spends a sober moment thinking about Trudeau I think it’s worth asking oneself what really substantive evidence there is that he is a meaningfully progressive individual.
I can tell you with certainty that Trudeau was a genuinely progressive person, before he entered politics. This does not mean that he could not also be elitist or egotistical.
I do not know what Trudeau’s reputation even is because ten Canadians would each give you a different answer. Trudeau is a skillful politician, underestimated by his opposition, and whatever actual values a politician has often become sublimated (transformed from a solid to a gas) by what is practical, possible, pragmatic, political, popular…. but also with more knowledge and advice from interested stakeholders. To me this is bad optics, for sure, but I do not begrudge leaders any vacation. Time will show what he does; indeed the attention may push him to do more than he intended. Time will tell.
Relevant, I think, though there may not be any graves involved (they’re not sure and have found none so far, but among the things they’re doing is checking the grounds for graves):
A reckoning: St. Benedict nuns apologize for Native boarding school
Earlier this year, Susan Rudolph, prioress of St. Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph, Minn., acknowledged that connection when she sent a two-page letter to the White Earth Nation, apologizing for the religious order’s role in the boarding school located there for decades.
Children, she wrote, were forcibly taken from their families and placed in mission boarding schools with an “intentional plan to root out” Native ways . “The ripple effect of that wound lingers in the memory, the culture, and the documented history of your people for all time.”
A tribal official said it was one of the first direct apologies from a religious order to a tribal nation in the United States.
Pope Francis plans to visit Canada. The question is, will he offer a formal apology on behalf of the Church?
Washington Post, but should be a gift link:
Pope apologizes for ‘deplorable conduct’ of some Catholics in residential schools
The Pope apologized, and is planning to visit Canada this year.