Opinion
After announcing he was seeking the leadership of the Liberal party in January, Mark Carney met with former Progressive Conservative MP Douglas Roche, who defeated his father (and Liberal candidate) Robert Carney in Edmonton South during the 1980 federal election.
Roche, 96, comes from a different era of Canadian conservatism. He is anti-war, pro-United Nations, and served as Canada’s Ambassador for Disarmament.
As Roche met Carney, he told him he was sorry the “best man didn’t win” in that election 45 years ago.
“Oh yeah, the best man did win,” Carney responded.
Carney has become the subject of attention in Indigenous circles after it came to light his father, who died in 2009, was the principal of Joseph Burr Tyrrell school — a federally run Indian day school in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories.
Operating similarly to residential schools, the federal government ran about 700 Indian day schools across the country in which Indigenous students were forced to endure assimilating curriculum and assaults on their identities and cultures for nearly 150 years.
Not all Indian day schools operated the same, of course, but survivors of the Tyrrell school have called for it to be torn down due to its history with trauma and colonialism.
If Robert Carney didn’t oversee abuse of Indigenous students there, however, he definitely would have after his appointment as NWT’s chief of school programs in 1971.
After moving the family to Edmonton, Robert Carney worked for a short time at the University of Alberta before becoming acting director of the province’s Department of Indian Affairs in 1976 — a job that would have brought him into consistent conflict with First Nations over land, resources and rights.
His career would eventually culminate in becoming a tenured educational history professor at the U of A, where he would make his most lasting contributions on his time working with Indigenous communities.
Here, he published numerous essays condemning research into residential schools, arguing that former students and academics focused too much on trauma and not enough on the positive results of Canada’s residential school system.
Robert Carney is a residential school “denialist.”
These are individuals, as defined by my academic colleagues Daniel Heath Justice and Sean Carleton, who use “common contortions” to “undermine the overwhelming documentary and testimonial evidence of widespread, multi-generational, systemic and ongoing violence of the Indian residential school system.”
Robert Carney is, in the end, a man defending his problematic legacy with Canada’s systemic mistreatment of Indigenous peoples.
He is also the father of Canada’s Prime Minister.
Now, fathers are not sons. Take, for example, Justin Trudeau’s positive legacy with Indigenous communities versus his father Pierre Trudeau’s atrocious one.
In a review of the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples — the largest Indigenous-led study of Indigenous experiences in Canadian history — Robert Carney complained that the conclusions in the report were problematic because “Aboriginal residential schools are invariably cast in an unfavourable light.
“Whenever the schools are mentioned, they are found almost without exception to have failed to provide either acceptable care or education,” Carney said. “This is clearly a slanted account of these institutions, and therefore should be viewed cautiously because, to cite one of its problems, it tells only part of the story.”
To Robert Carney, a Catholic himself, clergy who ran these institutions are unfairly characterized and did as much good as bad.
As he wrote in a review of Celia Haig-Brown’s 1988 book Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School, the author presents an “unidimensional view of the work of missionaries” that focuses too much on “traumatic events” and lacks “levels of ambiguity and contradiction found in boarding school alumni interviews.”
In a statement that has aged horribly, Carney ends the review by saying: “Surely those who have been associated with the Kamloops Indian Residential School… deserve a better account.”
Some 200 potential unmarked graves were found at the former Kamloops residential school in 2021.
I could keep going.
In his brief time in office, Mark Carney hasn’t spoken much about Indigenous peoples. He also has generally avoided Indigenous media outlets, like APTN.
Perhaps this is unsurprising considering the legacy of his father.
If he’s going to gain Indigenous votes in this federal election, he is going to have to address his dad’s words.
Maybe, in a way, he has.
In his 2021 book Value(s), Carney argues Canada’s “approach to sustainability should draw on the wisdom of Indigenous people” and particularly the fact that “Indigenous traditions teach that we are not apart from nature but are integral to it.”
He then immediately says something almost antithetical to the legacy of his father.
“I have learned from my experiences of Canada’s north,” Mark Carney writes, “that we are just a small — and humble — element of an integrated ecosystem. We have to earn our right to take from our environment, while always respecting and nourishing it.”
These are not the words of someone defending a system that denied, harmed, and sought to eradicate Indigenous knowledge and people.
These are better.
niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca
Niigaan Sinclair
Columnist
Niigaan Sinclair is Anishinaabe and is a columnist at the Winnipeg Free Press.
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