Conrad Black: The Carney government’s Canada Day conundrums

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We should not be subjected to the shame of political leadership that imagines that more votes lie in indulging the bigotry of a minority of one minority over a separate minority, rather than recognizing that the majority of Canadians of all ethnicities seeks the fair treatment for everyone.

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This brings us to another subject of national shame, involving the treatment of Indigenous people, specifically the defamation of this country with the slowly crumbling narrative of the surreptitious disposal of wrongfully deceased Indigenous children who were pupils in so-called Indian residential schools and were supposedly buried in unmarked graves. No such graves have yet been identified despite the orgy of national self-petrification the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau inflicted upon us, and now even the Globe and Mail, long a standard-bearer of this narrative, is in full retreat. This did not deter for a moment the acceptance of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal to conduct a sham trial on this subject in Montreal from May 25 to May 29. According to an account written by Skw’akw’as Dunstan-Moore and published on the David Suzuki Foundation’s website, this was the brainchild of Na’kuset, executive director of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal (NWSM), who sought to produce “the closest thing to a Nuremberg trial.” The tribunal’s initial scope, according to Dunstan-Moore, was expanded on the advice of Kimberly Murray, who served as Canada’s “special interlocutor” for missing children and unmarked graves.

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This monstrous outrage has been indirectly supported by federal government funding to both the “special interlocutor” and the NWSM. As the redoubtable Nina Green of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy wrote in her Substack newsletter last week: “Parliament must get to the bottom of this. The federal government knows, from its own files, that there are no missing or disappeared Indian residential school students. The federal government can no longer allow the Canadian public to be deceived with claims of thousands of missing children and nefarious unmarked burials when it knows those claims are not true, and it cannot allow the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal process to continue based on that false pretext.” Canadians are entitled to know when the federal government will debunk this appalling falsehood.

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There is another tenuously related point that has arisen lately, not involving anyone’s rights but Canada’s seriousness as a country. All of the G7 countries (except Germany) — as well as Russia, China, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates — have extremely skilled demonstration aerobatic jet teams that perform in air shows and are a matter of pride to their air forces and to the people of all these countries. Ottawa has announced that following this season, Canada’s Snowbirds, which have impressed and delighted Canadians and others for over 50 years, will be grounded until the 2030s at the earliest, if they come back at all. This must not be allowed to happen. As Winston Churchill said,  “An efficient and a successful administration manifests itself equally in small as in great matters.”

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If Canada wishes to be taken seriously as a country, it has to behave like a serious country.

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National Post

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