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Written by: Aidan Jonah & Adam Riggio

Download and read the full Truth and Reconciliation Report on Canada’s Residential School system for Indigenous children and teenagers. It’s free, your tax dollars paid for it, and you have a deep, powerful ethical obligation.

A paramount concern for any Canadian progressive is getting our fellow Canadians to understand and reckon with the legacy of our residential school network for Indigenous children. That is why the conservative whitewashing of what residential schools actually were and did is so concerning for anyone for whom justice matters. Because whitewashing genocide has become a strong attractor for nationalist extremism in Canada’s right wing.

It may not be in the regular headlines or trending topics today, consumed as the world is by a terrifying pandemic. But denying and erasing the truth of Canada’s cultural genocide is a keystone in advancing conservative nationalist ideology in this country. If we want Canada to become a country where everyone lives in justice and equity, we must delegitimize, in the mind of every Canadian, the notion that our residential schools for Indigenous children ever served any truly good or just purpose.

Simply Acknowledging Past Injustice Is a Bridge Too Far

Conservative Stephen Harper was the first Prime Minister to issue an apology to Indigenous people and peoples. This was a June 2008 speech in the House of Commons. Harper made subsequent apologies as public statements in a public reconciliation process that had largely stalled under his government anyway. After succeeding Harper as Prime Minster, Justin Trudeau has been consistent in continuing to stall reconciliation across many fronts.

However, it was under the frankly unreasonably demonized Trudeau that Conservative Party politicians and activists, as well as influential grassroots nationalist groups like the Proud Boys, began revising genocide out of Canadian history. The Proud Boys is famous now for their American chapters rampaging through the neighbourhoods of Washington DC and Portland, Oregon assaulting virtually anyone they see in the name of defending free speech and the re-election of Donald Trump.

But the Proud Boys were founded in Canada, as Western supremacists pumping out propaganda memes of British Empire nostalgia. That nostalgia for British North America was at the forefront of one of the first public Proud Boys actions: interrupting an Indigenous protest on Canada Day 2017 at a Halifax statue of Nova Scotia founder, British General Edward Cornwallis.

The Halifax government would remove the statue six months later, but the event itself was a success. They had aimed to overwrite the meaning of an Indigenous protest against the still-living legacies of the British Empire with the defence of imperial and colonial value. Contemporary Western nationalism was coming out of the closet.

The New Face of Canadian Racism Is a Small-Town Ontario Lady

But the most prominent Western nationalist voice in Canadian politics emerged months before the Proud Boys’ first anti-Indigenous demonstrations. Lynn Beyak was an otherwise unremarkable Conservative Senator until March 2017, a Harper appointee representing Ontario from her political home base of Dryden. Just under four years ago, Beyak announced in a session of the Senate that Canada’s residential school network brought great benefits to Indigenous people.

Her speech, which praised the good intentions of residential school teachers, staff, and the entire cultural re-education project itself, was a hijack of an entirely different discussion on the results of Senator Kim Pate’s inquiry on Indigenous women’s over-representation in Canadian prisons. It adds a layer of condescending insult that she would do so when Senator Murray Sinclair, a chief author of the Truth and Reconciliation Report and an Indigenous leader, was also present.

After this moment of open genocide denial brought her into the national spotlight, Beyak continued to use her platform as a Senator to promote racist stereotyping, as well as insult and humiliate Indigenous people. Over the rest of 2017, Beyak became infamous for posting on her official Senate website letters from her constituents that described Indigenous Canadians as over-sexed, gas-huffing alcoholics who deserved the violence they suffered as children in residential schools.

When she was rightly called out for giving a platform to vile racism, she defended herself as giving a voice to the free speech of her constituents. She described the letters as representing the “silent majority” of Canadians, and her amplifying them as support of true Canadians’ free speech. The Senate voted to suspend Beyak from her position, and sent her to sensitivity training.

Genocide Whitewashing: Residential Schools as Christian Places

When her fellow Senators asked her, after her first speech, why she would choose to defend Canada’s residential schools, Beyak’s first response was telling. “The people I spoke to were Christians,” she replied. The Indigenous people who she spoke for, a problematic enough stance, were Christian converts, people on whom John MacDonald’s re-education plan was successful.

It made her ideology clear. To Beyak, and the people for whom she spoke, the good of residential schools lay in their purpose of forced religious conversion. She saw an institution of Christian schools, for whom Canadian government agents kidnapped Indigenous children from their families to convert them, and she saw that this was good.

Residential schools spread Christianity to heathen savages, this was their purpose, and this purpose was good.

Politics By Gaslighting

Since then, she has shaped her public communications around gaslighting Indigenous activists and leaders, and bullying anyone who attempts to define her advocacy of forced Christian conversion as univocally good for Indigenous people for the racism that it is.

Beyak was so antagonistic toward her instructors that she was turfed out of sensitivity training. Her confrontation even included a hilariously false claim of Métis ancestry, prompting angry disavowals from the heads of actual organizations for Métis Canadians. Outrage among her fellow lifetime-appointed legislators caused her second suspension from the Senate.

Her son, Dryden city councillor Nick Beyak, doubled down on the claim that their racism represents a silent majority of Canadians when he gaslit Perry Bellegarde, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, after his appearance on This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Beyak the younger accused Bellegarde of indifference to Indigenous Canadians, using the feud with his mother for his own self-aggrandizement: “His people are starving, they are raped and living in horrible conditions and he has the time to go on TV and make fun of Sen. Beyak?”

Upon her second return to the Senate, Beyak was then ejected from the Conservative caucus for her inconvenient refusal to offer even token apologies for anything other than having triggered oversensitive leftists. Beyak now sits as an independent, but supports the fascistic nationalist People’s Party of Canada, and donated Cdn $1000 illegally to Donald Trump’s Presidential re-election campaign.

What Was the Point of O’Toole’s Video Anyway?

Beyak’s official ejection from the Conservative Party, and her implied affiliation with racist agitator Maxime Bernier, would make it appear that her Christian nationalist genocide denial is a political dead end. But genocide denial in the name of Christian extremism has become a vibrant energy animating current Conservative Party activism.

Current Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole’s video address to the Ryerson University Conservative Club was initially private, but you can today be certain that any videoconference you join is potentially a public document. This being a video call of Toronto-area Conservative Party activists with the federal party leader, O’Toole would have known that anything he said would soon be shared. Indeed, it was, in a proud announcement in their social media groups calling to “Defend Egerton Ryerson!” a central architect of the residential school system.

Yet at the same time, the private nature of the video call in the moment does confer an air of intimacy, the feeling of privacy if not its substance. So it gives a viewer a sense of how people who share the same general ideology of conservative Canadian nationalism really think and talk among themselves. They are relaxed, not bothering to hone their words for an audience beyond their activist comrades.

Egerton Ryerson himself was an extremist Christian of Victorian vintage. As a Methodist leader, Minister Ryerson partnered with Indigenous Christian converts to design how the different Protestant and Catholic Churches would contribute to the kidnapped children’s religious re-education. If Prime Minister MacDonald justified the residential schools on racist and colonial terms, Minister Ryerson justified them as missionary institutions.

When they do not hone their language for more sensitive ears, as in their video meeting with O’Toole, the young conservatives of Ryerson are unapologetic about treasuring Canada’s program of forced Christian re-education for Indigenous children.

A Legacy of Genocide that Can No Longer Be Hidden

The campus Conservatives consider themselves as defending Minister Ryerson from attack by their cartoon villain images of socialists, progressives, diversity activists, and liberal elites. But who is actually attacking Egerton Ryerson?

Over 2017, Ryerson University’s student union began a Colonialism 150 campaign, which called for, among other things, the removal of the statue of Minister Ryerson in the centre of the campus. By 2018, the university administration had compromised by installing an informative plaque next to the statue that explained, in politically defanged language, Minister Ryerson’s role as a central architect of the Canadian Indigenous Re-Education Prison Camps.

This almost laughably too-reasonable compromise was eventually inadequate to atone properly for Egerton Ryerson’s legacy of cultural mass-eradication. After all, no matter how solemn the language on the commemorative plaque, it still sits next to a statue lionizing a genocide architect. This is likely why the plaque was powerless to prevent another bucket of happy pink paint landing all over Minister Ryerson’s statue in a July 2020 incident. Even the commemorative plaque required cleaning.

Wider social pressure from activists has also driven a campaign for an even more radical transformation than a forklift can provide. This is the campaign to rename Ryerson University itself, a change that, while reflecting justice, would require changes to the provincial legislation establishing the university, as well as an even more radical change in the university’s brand marketing.

Anti-Indigenous Christian Extremism Updates Right-Wing Student Union Activism

Yet even toothless language denouncing Egerton Ryerson’s mass incarceration project to Christianize and Westernize all of Indigenous nations is too strong for the modern conservative. This is because, like Beyak, modern Canadian conservatives consider the destruction of our country’s Indigenous cultures and their people’s assimilation into Christianity is a straightforward good. The enemies of such extremist missionary anti-Indigenous ideology are, therefore, enemies of the conservative movement.

The campaign to remove Minister Ryerson’s statue or rename the university was never all that successful among the Ryerson student body. According to alumnus and well-known journalist Nora Loreto, the campus culture has long been, for the most part, apolitical through general apathy or depoliticized through a narrow life focus. This apathy has been a key condition in the last twenty years of campaigns in student unions around Canada to orient campuses in right-wing directions.

Stereotypes of student politicians as over-earnest progressives and ideological socialists has persisted since the American student movement of the 1960s provided such impactful imagery. But young conservative activists have been organizing on university campuses across Canada since this century began to capture student unions, and use their institutional power to provide platforms for fascists, racists, and similar extremists.

Since Ryerson’s broadly apolitical student culture has little investment in anything other than finding a good job for oneself as an individual in our increasingly atomized, mutually hostile society, young nationalist and religious extremists face little opposition establishing themselves as the true voice of young Canadians. That progressive organizers have failed to maintain power over student political mobilizing is yet another failure on our part.

The “Indian Problem” Must Become Indigenous Sovereignty

Stephen Harper, the conservative movement leader whose ideologies set the conditions for his successors to rise today, considered John MacDonald one of Canada’s greatest leaders. His apologies for the impacts of residential schools papered over MacDonald’s role as the architect of a final solution to what he saw as Canada’s ‘Indian Problem.’ In the same way, the brand of Ryerson University and the statue of its namesake, sober memorial plaque included, still blinds too many of us to the horrors Egerton Ryerson unleashed in the name of Christian supremacy over all the people of North America.

We progressives must instead unite with Indigenous nations, in a positive political vision whose nobility and justice outshines the darkness of the bogs of curdling evil in which Canada’s Indigenous genocide has long rested. We settlers, from old stock to new immigrants, must end anti-Indigenous racism and promote solidarity with Indigenous nations. We must rebuild our economies to sustain and enliven our ecologies to live harmoniously with the Earth as Indigenous nations once did and still work toward achieving again.

Perhaps the most difficult task in real reconciliation will be the constitutional reform necessary to achieve true Indigenous sovereignty. The federal government must step back from its most essential role as MacDonald set it out: as the paramount authority over all the land of Canada. There must be many lands where Canada’s federal government and its police have no authority over political, economic, and social life: the lands of Indigenous nations. Indigenous peoples in those lands and who live in settler-dominated communities will be citizens of Canada and their Indigenous nation. And all our peoples, whether Indigenous or settler, will share this land and its wealth for the benefit of everyone. Our task, as progressives, is to convince everyone else in our society that this truly is the best path for us all.

That Indigenous vision of sovereignty is a concept best suited to the cultural revolution we must undertake for the land of Canada to restore the original Iroquois meaning of its name: our home where we all live together.

Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news site founded in 2019. He has written about Canadian imperialism, federal politics, and left-wing resistance to colonialism across the world. He is a second-year Bachelor of Journalism student at Ryerson University, who was the Head of Communications and Community Engagement for Etobicoke North NDP Candidate Naiima Farah in the 2019 Federal Election.

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