1 week Ago By Father Raymond J. de Souza
The admonition not to speak ill of the dead is generally wise, though public figures are in a different category. Murray Sinclair, chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), is in a category of his own. He taught Canada to speak ill of generations of the dead, including its founders, and even to speak ill of Canada itself.
Sinclair, who died on Monday, is likely the most influential Canadian public figure of this century, now a quarter complete. He managed to convince much of Canada’s leadership class — in politics, academia, the churches, the arts, journalism — that the country itself was a criminal enterprise animated by genocidal brutality against Indigenous peoples. So far-reaching has his influence been that the very name and visage of our first prime minister, Sir John A.
Macdonald, has been removed in several places — including Kingston, his hometown. Sinclair lived a life of varied achievements. Growing up in Manitoba, he was raised by his paternal grandparents after his mother died in his infancy.
His grandmother had attended a residential school; her experience was such that she fervently wanted her grandson to become a priest. Sinclair had to fight her to obtain permission to not enter the seminary and go to university instead. His decorated career would include stints in both law and politics.
He worked in NDP politics in Manitoba and became a leading lawyer in Winnipeg. Appointed Manitoba’s first Indigenous judge, he soon served as a commissioner of inquiry into police violence against Indigenous peoples. He would go on to serve on other commissions, those distinctively Canadian instruments of public policy.
In 2009, he took over the TRC, which had had a rocky start. Sinclair’s TRC would radically change how Canadians think about their country. The TRC, modelled on the South African experience, was intended to bring to light the experiences in the residential schools, to permit voices to be heard about shadows in the country’s history.
Sinclair led the TRC in a different direction. His ambition was to retell the entire history of Canada thought the lens of the residential schools. The schools were not a dark chapter in Canadian history; the schools were the essential story of Canada.
The schools were not the shadows, as there were no lights. Canada was darkness from the beginning. That shifted discussion of Indigenous affairs.
Whereas in the 1990s, Indigenous leaders argued for self-government to restore a partnership gone awry, the TRC’s “calls to action” were almost entirely about what others — governments, the churches, academia — ought to do. Sinclair’s radical retelling of the Canadian story would not have been as influential absent the co-operation of leaders precisely in government, the churches and academia. The churches had acted much earlier to foster truth and reconciliation; the first significant apology — a four-page detailed confession and act of repentance — was issued by the Catholic Oblate order in 1991 at Lac Ste.
Anne in Alberta, 31 years before Pope Francis would visit the same site. But during and after the TRC process, the churches made little effort to correct historical errors, even slanders, against their own. The TRC report was issued in 2015, just as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to office.
Far from resisting the revised retelling of Canada’s history by the TRC, Trudeau embraced it with enthusiasm. The prime minister who believed that Canada was a “post-national” state with no core identity did not feel he had anything to defend. Sinclair found in Trudeau exactly the partner he needed to speak ill of the generations of Canadian dead, beginning with Trudeau’s own predecessors in office.
Notably, Trudeau showed a partisan preference for castigating Sir John A. and not Wilfrid Laurier or his own father. “He showed us there is no reconciliation without truth,” Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said upon Sinclair’s death.
Exactly right, but not in the way Kinew intended. Sinclair did not seek the truth in order to tell a more complete history, but rather determined that the truth must serve his revisionist history. That’s why the voluminous TRC reports contain much evidence that didn’t find its way into the main summary, or into the calls to action.
Where the truth is lacking, reconciliation will not follow. Nearly 600 houses of worship have burned in the past 12 years. That’s not reconciliation.
Last week brought the report of the special interlocutor regarding graves at residential school sites, Kimberly Murray. Taking Sinclair’s TRC methodology to extremes, she had little to say about any actual graves discovered, but rather produced a thousand-plus pages on how Canada is itself an illegitimate entity. Murray’s vision of reconciliation is to abolish Canada .
Sinclair was too good a lawyer to produce the kind of irresponsible work that Murray did, but he guided the TRC in such a way that made Murray’s work possible. When she demands that it be illegal to seek the truth about residential school graves — “denialism” in her Holocaust-evoking language — it is clear that she has lost interest in both truth and reconciliation. Murray Sinclair lived a great Canadian life, finishing off as a senator and a chancellor of Queen’s University.
There was much to admire in it. Not speaking ill of the dead requires one to attribute sincere and noble motives to Sinclair’s leadership. But the TRC did not live up to its name, no matter how influential it has been.
National Post.
