RUBENSTEIN: Is Canada really a genocidal country?

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With no prior notice or debate, members of Parliament gave unanimous consent October 27, to a motion calling on the federal government to recognize Canada’s residential schools as genocide.

Leah Gazan, the NDP member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre whose father is a Holocaust survivor from the Netherlands, introduced the motion following Question Period. Gazan brought forward a similar motion in June last year which failed to receive unanimous consent.

Gazan’s motion reads as follows: “That, in the opinion of the House that the government must recognize what happened in Canada’s Indian residential schools as genocide, as acknowledged by Pope Francis and in accordance with article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

“It was historic,” said Gazan: “We moved the pendulum in quite an extreme way.”

Much of the moral authority for the motion’s unanimous consent seems to have come from the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, who described the schools as genocidal following a trip to Canada this summer, though he didn’t use the word during the visit.

“Yes, it’s a technical word, genocide. I didn’t use it because it didn’t come to mind. But yes, I described it. Yes, it’s a genocide,” Francis said in July on his trip home in describing what he earlier condemned as the forced assimilation of indigenous children.

Neither unanimous decisions nor moral authority prove genocide has occurred. Only the existence of certain facts can do so. Is Gazan’s accusation demonstrably true or has the pendulum moved so far “in quite an extreme way” that the definition of genocide has been rendered meaningless?

Is there any relationship, for example, between the government-funded and supported Indian Residential School attendance of some 150,000 students over the 113-year period — most of it voluntary as shown here and here — and generally acknowledged genocides?

As of June 2021, the government of Canada officially recognized eight genocides: the Holocaust (Second World War), the Armenian genocide (1915–1917), the Holodomor (1932–1933), the Rwandan genocide (1994), the Srebrenica massacre (1995), the genocide of Yazidis by ISIL (2014), the Uyghur genocide (2014–present), and the Rohingya genocide (2016–present).

Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as an intention to destroy “In whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” by “Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;” “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

No mass-murder of indigenous children or adults has ever taken place in Canada; not a single authenticated murder of a child by staff members has occurred at any Indian Residential School; though discipline and punishment were as harsh as at any other school, whether residential or not, any serious bodily or mental harm was haphazard at most and no different from its occurrence in the general population; most indigenous leaders and parents wanted their children to receive a Western-style education; there has never been an effort to physically eliminate the aboriginal population of Canada — in fact, saving indigenous lives has always been the norm; sterilization and forced adoption were standard practices for various ethnic and religious groups for identical reasons in earlier times; girls who became pregnant were expelled from their school; and forced attendance at a residential school, when it occurred, was mainly for social welfare reasons and not a permanent transfer of children from one group to another.

Conversely, no objective application of the UN criteria could deny what occurred in Rwanda in 1994 was genocide. Goaded by months of propaganda that denounced their enemies as cockroaches, the country’s Hutu army units, militias and packs of machete-armed civilians hunted, herded and swept through their country’s Tutsi minority. In less than four months, an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 Rwandans were killed, including about 70 percent of the Tutsi population, and 250,000 to 500,000 women were raped.

Fast forward to Canada in 2015 when the Final Summary Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission said the schools constituted “cultural genocide,” a phenomenon deliberately excluded from Article II of the genocide convention. A politically loaded term, cultural genocide can easily describe the ordinary enculturation of millions of Canadian residents, both aboriginal and immigrant, whose Western education resulted in the internalization of British — and French — based lifeways and beliefs, resulting in the loss of pre-existing ethnic languages and traditions over the generations.

But since 2015, many indigenous leaders and experts said “cultural genocide” was not a sufficient label rather than an erroneous one. Instead, they insisted boarding school attendance should just be called unqualified genocide, an assertion also supported by the Trudeau government, most clearly shown by its immediate acceptance of the conclusion of the 2019 inquiry into missing and murdered and Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) the residential school system and its ongoing legacy constitute genocide.

“I have acknowledged that I accept the findings of the report, and the issue that we have is that people are getting wrapped up in debates over a very important and powerful term. As I’ve said, we accept the finding that this was genocide.”

But is there any legal, moral, or factual basis for this assertion?

No there is not. None of the UN Convention’s features seem to readily apply to the IRS legacy of the disappearance or murder of 1,200 or so indigenous women and girls since 1980. The independent murders of indigenous females by numerous unconnected and mainly indigenous men, acting on their own, were certainly not “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a particular racial or ethnic group through the coordinated efforts of some other racial or ethnic group. Nor do the organization, causes, and consequences of these murders have anything in common with the genocides officially recognized by the civilized world.

The MMIWG Report rightly stressed not all genocides are the same. This is correct but for the wrong reasons.

The Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust, for example, could hardly be more different in key respects. The latter took place in numerous Nazi-occupied European countries as well as in Germany. It stretched over at least four long years from 1941 to 1945. It was held in secret to avoid outraging the rest of the world and perhaps, to limit opposition within Germany. It was minutely organized by the Nazi government, the SS, Gestapo, and other Nazi units. It employed multiple killing methods, ranging from mass shootings to medical experiments to the use of gas chambers. It murdered far more victims, including more than six million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other “undesirables.” And it was part of a larger extermination project that would take 14 million lives.

Despite the many differences and the varying definitions of genocide, there is one necessary and sufficient feature that distinguishes a genuine genocide: the murder of members of another group be deliberate, systematic and organized, as opposed to coincidental, unconnected and uncoordinated. This is why the United Nations General Assembly resolved in 1946 that, “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.” Translation: A lot of random murders, however heart-breaking and outrageous they may be, do not add up to a genocide.

Irwin Cotler, head of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, a former attorney-general of Canada and arguably the country’s most prominent international human rights lawyer said it best when he argued: “Perhaps they had to use a term like genocide in order to sound the alarm and people will take notice and finally action will result… But I think we have to guard against using that term in too many ways because then it will cease to have the singular importance and horror that it warrants. If we say everything is a genocide, then nothing is a genocide.”

Like all other nations, Canada has never been a perfect country. But it has never been a genocidal one. By almost any measure, no country has done more for its indigenous people.

Yet if this genocide is still ongoing, as the MMIWG report strongly asserts when it uses this word no fewer than 72 times in its first volume alone, and given the prime minister’s acceptance of this assertion, should not he and his government be charged minimally with a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court in the Hague?

Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology, The University of Manitoba, and editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues Newsletter.