It’s one of those stories that should be filed in the already bulging folder entitled, “World Going to Hell in Politically Correct Hand Basket.”
A proposal for an installation of statues of Canada’s 22 prime ministers at Wilfrid Laurier University is being shot down by the school’s senate, among other opponents, as politically and culturally insensitive because the statues would alienate aboriginal and other marginalized groups.
I’d say that if you are attending a university and well on your way to the career of your choice you can hardly be considered marginalized. You are mainstream and living the Canadian dream, regardless of your ethnicity.
Nonetheless, Jonathan Finn, chairman of the communications department, says: “It’s disingenuous to make a commitment to indigeneity and recognize that land belonged to First Nations people and then go and erect statues of leaders who took the land away from them, and were responsible for policies of genocide.”
As the head of the communications department, Finn should recognize hyperbole when he hears it coming out of his own mouth.
There was no genocide in Canada. Genocide is the systematic, physical extermination of a people, with the goal of eliminating an entire race. The Armenians were victims of genocide from 1915 to 1917. The Holocaust was about genocide. So was Rwanda. No Canadian prime minister ever advocated or carried out the systematic killing of Canada’s aboriginals.
I’m surprised Finn and his fellow statue opponents aren’t also advocating the university change its name to avoid alienating not only current students, but also prospective students who might be traumatized by seeing the name of former prime minister Wilfrid Laurier on their university application forms.
Successive Canadian governments instituted racist policies, but the term “genocide” must be reserved for Google’s definition: “The deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.”
Synonyms include “mass murder, mass homicide, massacre; annihilation, extermination, elimination, liquidation, eradication, decimation, butchery, bloodletting, pogrom, ethnic cleansing, holocaust.”
None of that happened to aboriginals in Canada.
But, since opponents to the statues insist on abusing that word, let’s look at how genocidal some of the 22 prime ministers were. One has to wonder. I mean, Joe Clark and genocide don’t exactly belong in the same sentence. Kim Campbell and genocide, either. And how could Pierre Trudeau be accused of genocide when he ushered in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guaranteed equality to all Canadians?
You can’t simultaneously be pro-equality and pro-genocide.
One of the statues at risk of alienating aboriginal students would be that of former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, who, since leaving politics, has devoted his life to Canada’s aboriginals.
Have Finn and the other objectors ever heard of the Martin Aboriginal Education Initiative, founded by Paul Martin?
The group aims to “improve elementary and secondary school education outcomes for aboriginal Canadians.” Better outcomes mean more aboriginal kids will go to university — including to the very campus which scorns to put up a statue of the man whose initiative will help them get there.
The distribution of university degrees among the population, according to the organization’s website, is 5.1 per cent for Inuit, 8.7 per cent for First Nations, 11.7 per cent for Metis, and 26.5 per cent for non-aboriginal Canadians.
Perish the thought that there should be a statue on campus honouring Martin, who is doing something constructive about changing those abysmal statistics.
Not even Sir John A. Macdonald, who is pilloried for creating the residential schools, could be considered genocidal. As University of Calgary history professor emeritus Don Smith wrote in another newspaper in 2014, Macdonald fought for First Nations’ right to vote, working “to give all those adult male Indians in Central and Eastern Canada, who had the necessary property qualifications, the federal franchise — without the loss of their Indian status.”
The statues should go up. Given the quality of education in the schools these days, the students won’t know who they are anyway.
Naomi Lakritz is a columnist with the Calgary Herald.
The editorial pages editor is Gordon Clark, who can be reached at gclark@theprovince.com. Letters to the editor can be sent to provletters@theprovince.com.
