Canadians will tire of disruptions, and Indigenous people will suffer - Conrad Black,
National Post, 28 February 2020
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad ... ill-suffer
Opinion in this country is tiring of this endless and grating campaign of abuse and provocations being conducted by some fringe leaders
... This brings us to the outrageous treatment of Sen. Lynn Beyak, from Dryden, Ont., an area with a large native population; she has had extensive experience with Natives all her life. She spoke out against the air-tight group-think of the Canadian official, media, academic and Native victim industry communities, in early 2017, when she publicly dissented from the rigid, self-hating Canadian orthodoxy that denounced the Native residential schools as centres for the pursuit of cultural or even physical genocide. The so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commission (which published many untruths and was not in the least conciliatory) encapsulated this view in the statement that “For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the treaties … and cause Aboriginal people to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada.” The residential schools were specifically identified as ”a central element of this policy of … cultural genocide.” Sen. Beyak was correct to dissent from this view and did so with explicit respect and compassion for the Native peoples and while acknowledging that there had been many mistakes and that the Natives had many just grievances.
She uttered the heresy that some good came of the residential schools and was almost universally denounced in the media and Parliament. In late 2017, she posted on her Senate website some unexceptionable supportive messages she had received, but among them were a couple that were gratuitously hostile to Natives and were offensive, and she mistakenly declined to remove any of these letters, but protested her positive intentions. She was ejected from the Conservative Senate caucus and then abruptly suspended from the Senate, physically conducted from the chamber, and locked out of her office and required to take “Indigenous Cultural Competency Training.” This was a Maoist concept of coercive official brainwashing and included the order to follow the internet course of Indigenous Awareness Canada, and then to attend courses at the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres in Toronto. Staff there rejected her participation, saying that she was “not open to learning” and her presence made the environment “unsafe.”
The training co-ordinator of the course eventually wrote to the Senate ethics officer, Pierre Legault. This week, with no due process, by voice vote, the Senate suspended Sen. Beyak again for the balance of this session, to allow her to complete the program she already tried to attend. Sen. Beyak has apologized profusely for any offence she conveyed. This entire process is a disgrace. There has been no adjudication; there has been no identifiable offence; Sen. Beyak, no enemy of Indigenous peoples, has been singled out for exemplary humiliation, in the manner of totalitarian states.
