The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian

What happens when serious issues are discussed in an unserious country?

(Note to readers: As some of you may know, I’m Canadian, and more than a decade back I was a newspaper columnist. I kicked the comment-on-the-news habit long ago, but I occasionally relapse. This is one of those occasions. As a former lawyer with a passion for history and human rights, I felt I had to write the following piece. If you’re not Canadian, you probably won’t be interested. Apologies for indulging my old habit. I won’t do it again. At least not for a good long while.)

As Canada’s federal government ponderously considers how to respond to the accusation of genocide levelled by the government of South Africa at Israel, members of Parliament have spoken up. Some urge that Canada back Israel. Others, South Africa. Liberal MP Chandra Arya is among the latter, but at least one statement he made expressed a feeling that, I am sure, is widely shared among MPs and Canadians at large: “Canada’s reputation and its right to claim the moral high ground on justice and humanitarian issues are at stake here.”

Implicit in that statement is the belief that Canada’s reputation on justice and humanitarian issues is strong. It’s that reputation that gives Canada the “right to claim the moral high ground.” It’s why the world listens when Canada speaks. And why the world needs more Canada.

Or so we are pleased to tell ourselves.

It’s forgotten now but the phrase “the world needs more Canada” was coined in the 1990s as the smug tagline in an ad campaign aimed at American tourists. It’s a shallow slogan, nothing more. As is the rest of what Mr. Arya said.

Nothing illustrates that better than this country’s unserious and irresponsible treatment of genocide accusations.

“Genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a legal scholar and Polish Jew who, in the interwar period, examined Ottoman Turkey’s massacres of Armenians during the First World War. Turkey’s goal had been nothing less than the destruction of the Armenian people, Lemkin concluded, yet international law had nothing to say on the matter. A government could do whatever it pleased to those living within its borders.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin escaped to the United States – scores of his family were murdered in the subsequent Holocaust -- where he developed the legal concept of genocide as the intentional destruction of a people. Note the word “intentional.” Genocide is acting with the intent of destroying a group. Intent is central to the crime.

Lemkin also pressed for this new crime to be adopted into international law, which the United Nations did with a 1948 convention that came into force in 1951. Most of the nations of the world signed it, Canada included.

Today, under international law, genocide is among the gravest of crimes and nations are legally bound to stop it and punish those responsible. Most major governments treat it accordingly. Officials tend to be extremely cautious about even using the word “genocide.” They don’t want to trigger obligations to act they aren’t prepared to fulfill. And they don’t want to diminish the gravity of the word.

This stands in sharp contrast with political activists – of all stripes – who have, in recent years, deployed the word with increasing promiscuity because they know it grabs headlines like no other. And using it costs them nothing. It imposes no legal obligations on them, after all. Nor is the risk of diminishing the word’s power by overuse their concern, if it occurs to them at all.

But Canada is a different story. In recent years, members of Parliament, Cabinet ministers, and even the prime minister, have acted more like headline-seeking activists than officials of a serious nation.

In 2019, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls delivered a report with the bombshell conclusion that the government of Canada had committed genocide against indigenous peoples not only far back in history, but much more recently, and that it continues to commit genocide even today – via policies such as the over-apprehension of indigenous children in the child welfare system, a lack of police protection for indigenous women, and the continued existence of the Indian Act.

At that point, in a serious country, only two responses were reasonable (at least in regard to those claims of genocide recent enough that their perpetrators may still be alive.)

You can say that the inquiry is wrong, that it wildly overreached and expanded the legal interpretation of genocide beyond all reasonable bounds.

Or you can say that the inquiry is right. But if you say that, you must treat it as a five-alarm fire. Other issues must be pushed aside. Genocidal policies must be identified and stopped immediately. And those responsible must be identified, prosecuted, and punished. As international law demands.

So how did the government and Parliament of Canada, and the political class more broadly, respond? They followed the lead of the prime minister.

At first, Justin Trudeau seemed to accept much of the substance of the inquiry’s report on policy matters but he balked at the word “genocide.” Then he did an about-face. He repeated the accusation, called it genocide, and stated emphatically that the inquiry was right.

And then? Did the prime minister immediately order a sweeping effort to put a stop to the genocide as fast as humanly possible? Did he call for determined investigations to uncover the responsible officials and have them charged, prosecuted, and punished? Did he acknowledge that if the inquiry was right that the genocide was not only in the past, but was ongoing, that he, as prime minister, must be on the list of suspects?

Of course not. He said and did none of that. He didn’t even make it clear if his agreement that the inquiry was right extended to its claim that there was an ongoing genocide – a genocide he, presumably, may be culpable for.

Nor was he pressed to explain in more detail, and take proportionate action, by MPs and Senators. Or the press. The story simply petered out.

Politicians and reporters went on to more important matters than genocide, like the new lyrics of “O Canada.” And in the subsequent national election, neither the alleged national genocide – the one the prime minister himself declared to be very real -- nor the criminals responsible for it were ever mentioned. I’d say the media and the public shrugged but that would suggest at least a tiny degree of awareness and engagement, and I don’t think there was even that.

It was one of the most shamefully irresponsible moments in Canadian history.

And Parliamentarians soon topped it.

In October, 2022, the House of Commons expressed unanimous support for a private member’s motion. Unanimity on serious matters is as rare as a solar eclipse in the House of Commons. What was so clearly true that every single member got behind it? It was a declaration that Canada’s residential school system for indigenous children had amounted to “genocide.”

This was in line with a finding of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 report. The residential schools had been created in the 1870s with the intent not only to educate indigenous children but to erase their culture and identity. The 1948 convention includes “forcibly transferring the children of the group to another group” with the intent to “destroy” the group. It’s debatable but not unreasonable to find that the mandatory attendance of indigenous children at residential schools met that definition.

But here’s the rub: The residential school system wasn’t an exclusively 19^th-century phenomenon. Its last gasp came in 1997. Lots of officials responsible for overseeing and operating the system are still alive today. By declaring that policy to be “genocide,” MPs triggered Canada’s obligation under international law to investigate, prosecute, and punish what they were stating was a monstrous crime. Or rather, they would have, if they were serious people who respected the gravity of the law on genocide and understood the implications of their words.

So naturally, MPs immediately followed up by calling for investigations and prosecutions, right? They’ve talked about little else since then, yes?

Of course not. They preened and postured for one day in the House – and immediately went on to other matters. It was as if the statement had never been made.

By the way, throughout the long history of residential schools, the government minister directly responsible was always the Minister of Indian Affairs. There are still former Indian Affairs ministers who oversaw the residential schools alive today. One of them is Jean Chretien, who was Indian Affairs minister starting in 1968.

Chretien, of course, went on to become prime minister in 1993 and is today, at the age of 90, a revered and influential figure in the Liberal Party and beyond. In fact, just yesterday, the Globe and Mail published an op-ed filled with glowing praise in honour of Chretien’s birthday.

But according to the plain wording of the motion passed with unanimity in the House of Commons, this same man is a horrific criminal – a man responsible for nothing less than genocide.

How is it possible to simultaneously revere this man and accuse him of genocide? By not taking your own words seriously enough to think about what you’re saying.

Or doing: In 2023, at the Liberal Party’s national convention, with all those Liberal MPs who righteously denounced the residential schools genocide in attendance, the audience gave Jean Chretien a standing ovation.

It has become fashionable in certain quarters to say that Canada isn’t a serious country. Not about the roots of prosperity. Or foreign affairs. Or national security. Certainly not about national defence. Aside from the small and shrinking number of Canadians born prior to the Second World War, we have all lived our whole lives in a privileged little bubble above a superpower. We enjoyed peace and abundance no matter what we said or did: Our decisions simply had no consequences. And so, in time, gradually, our political discourse, and the policies it informs, detached from reality. We became unserious.

I agree with this analysis, and I think there’s no better illustration than our heedless, irresponsible, downright juvenile discourse around genocide.

It is, in a word, silly. It is the playground prattle of children who scarcely think about what they’re saying or what the implications would be if they took their words seriously.

After all, they’re children in a playground. What they say makes no difference to the lives of anyone, least of all theirs.

The sun will always shine. And tomorrow will always be another day for play.

Until it isn’t, warns the grownup.