1 week Ago By Christopher Dummitt
Article content Watching Liberal friendly commentators try to explain away the whole issue of Mark Carney’s father and his status as a teacher of Indigenous kids in the North is a lot like watching the new Captain America movie. Not to give away any spoilers — but a lot of the fun in the movie comes from watching the new American president (played by Harrison Ford) try to suppress the anger that’s welling up inside. We know he’s an angry guy (we get lots of clips showing him losing his cool from the past).
But he’s turning over a new leaf — he’s a new man. If only people wouldn’t keep doing stupid things — things which make him very angry — because he must not lose his temper. Yeah, it doesn’t go well.
Except with the Robert Carney story (that is, Mark Carney’s father), the Harrison Ford character is being played by a cadre of leftist radicals who now need to suppress their inner urge to call out what they see as wrong think. Over the last several years a large group of radical academics — largely historians and Indigenous studies specialists — have been insisting that there is only one line to take on the history of residential schools and Canada’s policies towards Indigenous peoples in the past. There was how it used to be done — which we are to call genocidal — and then there is how it must be done now, decolonization and nation-to-nation relations.
Academics, like University of Manitoba “settler historian” Sean Carleton, even created whole new terms like “residential school denialism” to belittle and possibly even criminalize anyone who doesn’t unequivocally decry Canada’s past actions. And yet now many of these same academics, Carleton amongst them, are equivocating over the story of Robert Carney. They are calling for nuance and insisting that things are complicated and that we need to approach the topic with empathy.
Yes, they say, Carney’s father was “complicit” in the residential schools system, but the details aren’t quite clear. But what is so striking about their account is the way — in the midst of this election — they are willing to focus on what we don’t know, and to insist on particular details that might be incorrect or at least not yet verified in the account of those with whom they disagree. He was a principal, they emphasize, at a day school and not a residential school.
And we don’t’ yet know enough about events at this particular school to say anything definitive. It’s an astounding turnaround for the kinds of academics who, in other contexts, have believed in nuance about as much as a vegan at a pig roast. It’s cognitive dissonance in real time.
These are the same academics who have criticized commentators for asking why no graves have yet been excavated at the Kamloops site. Instead of treating this as an important factual question — about getting to the truth — they have spun these questions as if they are examples of a hateful ideology. And yet now, with Robert Carney, we need to be careful and nuanced.
The problem seems clear: if they call out Robert Carney this might just dampen those Liberal poll numbers. The funny thing is that there actually isn’t much of a story that CBC reported on Thursday, not on the simple facts of the case. Or at least there shouldn’t be in a world where we don’t assume that past values are present values or that there can be only one view on complicated and divisive social issues.
Mark Carney’s father, from what we know, seems to have been a well-intentioned educator. He taught at Joseph Bull Tyrrell school in the North West Territories and went on to do a PhD in education and to be a professor at the University of Alberta where he was a specialist on native education. Robert Carney held views which these same radical academics have in most other cases labelled as “problematic” and “denialist.
” He thought that the schooling he offered to Indigenous kids was useful. And though he called out some of the terrible behaviour in residential schools he also didn’t think this was the only aspect of the schools’ history. When the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples gave its report on the schools Carney published a review calling out the commission for being too one-sided.
In contemporary academia, this just isn’t done. This is a world where everyone who writes on this situation first lets everyone know their racial background, and so do the CBC journalists who write stories about it too. If you’re not indigenous you have to identify as a settler.
Only a few years ago these same academics and activists who are now trying to suggest the story requires “untangling” were the same people who supported the Canadian Historical Association’s “Canada Day Statement.” This was the published claim that the history of the Canadian governments policies towards Indigenous peoples was a settled issue and there was only one perspective allowed. There wasn’t much room for nuance or academic discussion there.
not even in the world of the university. But with Carney they are talking about how the situation is complicated. In fairness, they aren’t quite giving in.
They called for Mark Carney to appear on atone for — and distance himself from — his father’s beliefs. And, on Saturday, Carney was happy to oblige, effectively throwing his father under the bus. For the activists, it was not a moment too soon.
The Cognitive dissonance was hard to endure. National Post.
