Open Letter to My MP, Leah Gazan (Wpg-Centre; NDP)

NDP MP Leah Gazan (credits: Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press).

September 27, 2024

As a constituent of Winnipeg-Centre, I am writing to express my disagreement and dissatisfaction with your introduction yesterday of a Private Member’s Bill (C-413) to amend the Criminal Code “to create an offence of willfully promoting hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada through statements communicated other than in private conversation.”

Like your motion to have Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS) declared a genocide, this bill is an effort you have conceived of without any apparent attempt to canvass your constituents for either their approval or any concerns we might have about your proposed bill. As one of your constituents, I am not satisfied that you are truly representing the wishes of your constituency.

Speaking about your bill, you said: "The residential school system was a genocide designed to wipe out Indigenous cultures, languages, families and heritage. To downplay, deny or justify it is cruel, harmful and hateful."

The residential school system was deemed a genocide by characterization, not by trial. Technically, the Rome Statute rules out any prosecution for events prior to July 1, 2002. This means that the case of IRS genocide can only be tried in the court of public opinion which you are now trying to proscribe by criminalizing any public discourse on the question of whether or not the IRS constitutes genocide by international legal standards.

Will it soon be criminal for me to ask what evidence you have to prove the IRS was designed with genocidal intent? Will it become illegal to point out that there are examples where the schools helped preserve Indigenous cultures and languages?

Will Tomson Highway, for one, become a criminal for having written a memoir that looks back fondly on his years at residential school?

Tk’emlups First Nation recently corrected its May 27, 2021 claim of 215 children remains being found to just being “anomalies.” Will they soon be guilty of downplaying the harms of residential schools?

While C-413 may well be juridically useless since no one can be convicted of ‘denialism’ if “the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds they believed them to be true,” the effect of passing this bill will be a profound chill well beyond what now exists socially.

Since the claim of an IRS genocide was validated by the passing of your genocide motion, many people, often Indigenous, have confabulated on the genocide trope. Some people now believe it to be true that: “Anytime a child became pregnant by a priest, the baby was thrown into the crematorium to burn ALIVE,” (actual comment found on Facebook; emphasis in the original).

Will socially corrosive atrocity propaganda like that soon have the hammer of criminal sanctions to smite anyone expressing disbelief at such claims outside of themselves?

If the intent of such law is to spare IRS survivors further harm, what unnecessary anguish do they suffer and will suffer the more these lurid tales of residential school horror spread without due contention? For that matter, is characterizing former IRS students as ‘survivors’ fair to those many students who, like Tomson Highway, thrived because of that education? Will former students have to question their own experiences or silence themselves in dread of opposing the populist mob that demands only one assessment of residential schools as tantamount to a death camp? How is that not cruel or harmful and will I become an outlaw for even asking?

C-413 is a noxious affront to reason and reconciliation if Canadians cannot freely determine the truth of residential school history and must accept, under threat of criminal prosecution, an utterly degrading characterization of Canada and its history. I urge you to withdraw your bill.