[Thanos]

Brutality is the hallmark of psychopaths. Cruelty is not a decent national value. Except maybe to the demented alt-right & fascist minds who admire the sort of people who run countries like Russia or Chechnya.

[CDN_PATRIOT]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

You don't re-write history, you change who the heroes of the story are.

That's called being a revisionist. Still falls under the cancel culture umbrella, no matter how quaint you word it.

-J.

[Scape]

Smallpox, the original cancel culture.

Too soon?

[raydan]

If it wasn't for cancel culture, we'd still be living in caves and slinging shit at our neighbours... not that there's anything wrong with that.

[Scape]

[Thanos]

I'm actually hoping that bitch Lynn Beyak and the other social conservatives say something incredibly stupid and cruel right now, just to give O'Toole the opportunity to kick all of them out of the Conservative party altogether.

[Scape]

PM says cabinet discussing 'further' actions in response to mass grave uncovered at residential school

$1:

OTTAWA -- Amid calls to go beyond lowering flags at federal buildings and to fund the research and excavation of residential school burial sites Canada-wide, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t have any tangible next steps to announce Monday but said discussions are underway following a horrific discovery in British Columbia.

Trudeau said he will be speaking with his cabinet about the “next and further” actions the federal government should take in response to the discovery of remains of 215 children at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

Trudeau said that Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett and Northern Affairs Minister Dan Vandal will be discussing what role the federal government should be playing, noting “an awful lot” remains to be done when it comes to reconciliation.

According to the Truth and Reconciliation report there could be thousands more to be found.

http://www.trc.ca/

[bootlegga]

Thanos Thanos:

bootlegga bootlegga:

I don't live in St Albert, but I too learned this weekend about Grandin's role in developing the residential school system and completely agree his name should be stripped from as much as possible, and the only thing that should remain is a placard/statue denoting his terrible legacy.

I was opposed to it before but there is no choice remaining any more. ALL the statues of any politician or clergyman have to be removed. ALL the buildings, streets, and schools have to be renamed. At this stage the only statue still standing in this country should be the one of Wayne Gretzky and of the soldiers who died in the wars because every other statue seems to be of someone who has the darkest shadows on their legacy and blood on their hands.

A single crime does not render any person irredeemably evil but neither does an endless list of following good deeds wipe out the original sin, especially not when that sin resulted in the mass deaths and torment of children. And this is our original sin, done in the name of every generation of Canadians that followed the founders. It can't be washed away or covered up but wretched worship of ancestors. It has to be worn forever by everyone, not just as a reminder of what was done but as a lesson to never let anything like it happen again. The crime has to remain on the record and the responsibility, the obligation, going forward is simple to be good enough that no one else ever has to experience that kind of indifference and contempt.

God should not so quickly forgive this nation of it's sins and hypocrisies. Not when Canada half-asses it's way through most of the things it continually says it's going to do. This land's complacency and self-serving contentment and resting on the laurels of glories far in the past has to come to an end. And it's simply disgusting that it took the finding of a mass grave full of children's bones to wake this country up from it's undeserved smugness.

[bootlegga]

CDN_PATRIOT CDN_PATRIOT:

xerxes xerxes:

I know there’s been calls to remove statues of Sir John A McDonald because of his role in the repression of First Nations people and I’ll admit I’m torn on that one.

Sir John A. MacDonald was a drunk and a bit of a handful, but he had the courage to found Canada and should never have anything with his name taken down. It's bad enough PM Potato removed him from the 10-dollar bill.

-J.

Saying McDonald was just "a drunk and a bit of a handful" is the understatement of the century.

In that light, would you say Mao was just another Chinese leader who made some mistakes when he was leader? Or maybe that Stalin was the Russian leader who industrialized his country and made it a superpower, but made some mistakes along the way.

Those are similar understatements, even though McDonald's sins are certainly less than either of those two monsters.

I might consider leaving McDonald's statues up as long as they also mentioned his role in the residential schools and attempted genocide of First Nations peoples, as well as his corruption in getting the CPR built and all the rest of his scandals...and even then, it's only I might consider it.

[llama66]

I don't like the idea of tearing down statues, provide context instead. Sir John A. McDonald was a founding father of this great nation, but his views towards the indigenous people while in line with convention 160 years ago. Its barbaric now. The man would never hold office today.

I think it important to keep the statues, as they provide markers for how far we've come, and how far we still have to go.

I'd like to see statues of great indigenous people and to the victims of the residential schools.

It's not going to magically heal the nation, but it's a start.

[Scape]

I do see John A as a scoundrel but one that transformed British North America into a modern nation on the path to a middle world power. He was a basturd but he was our basturd.

To that end I take issue with the statues raised in his honor taken down/warehoused. Warts and all we need to see the founder to see where we have been so we can then direct our future. He was as we all are a man of his time. His hand in the genocide of the native way of life should not be dismissed but learned from so we can begin to bridge the gap between our severed communities. A statue to him is not the same as that of Stalin or so other despots but rather a salute to his accomplishments that is his tarnished legacy but at the time they were inspired we did not pay homage to.

Like Grandin Station don't tear it down to spite the past but give context to build a future.

[JaredMilne]

bootlegga bootlegga:

Saying McDonald was just "a drunk and a bit of a handful" is the understatement of the century.

In that light, would you say Mao was just another Chinese leader who made some mistakes when he was leader? Or maybe that Stalin was the Russian leader who industrialized his country and made it a superpower, but made some mistakes along the way.

Those are similar understatements, even though McDonald's sins are certainly less than either of those two monsters.

I might consider leaving McDonald's statues up as long as they also mentioned his role in the residential schools and attempted genocide of First Nations peoples, as well as his corruption in getting the CPR built and all the rest of his scandals...and even then, it's only I might consider it.

I've been talking about this for years, and that solution is my ideal one. Each community has to decide, though.

Here's the thing, though-Macdonald and other people like him were in large part responsible for our being able to live here. Are everything we've done and all the heritage we've built since then morally tainted because of how they were made possible? Not to mention residential schools in one form or another have existed almost since Europeans first came here. These attitudes existed long before him, and they existed long after his death.

And do we remember that Macdonald established voting rights for many First Nations without requiring them to lose their status, saying that "they carry out the obligations of civilized men...in every way they have every right to be considered as equal with the whites," which were repealed by a Liberal government that said it was "an insult to free white people in this country to place them on a level with pagan and barbarian Indians." And it wasn't a so-con historian that showed me that-it was Metis historian Olive Dickason, even today one of the most pre-eminent Native historians in Canada.

I sometimes wonder how different history had been if Native people had been able to wield that kind of electoral power much sooner. Native people have been experts at turning tools of assimilation into tools of resistance (e.g. settler Canadian law, European languages) so who knows what they might have done with both the vote and retaining status?

And we can't overlook the bigger issue at hand. Historian Christopher Moore wrote this in Canada's History a couple of years ago:

$1:

What would be shameful would be to remove Macdonald statues around the country — without addressing Canada’s responsibility for the poverty, dispossession, and alienation of Indigenous peoples that he helped to create and that we maintain.

...

When he helped to make starvation into a tool of coercion on the prairies, he was pursuing policies that were accepted by the Canadian electorate of the times — by us, in effect.

The way to redress that situation is to address the underlying wrong. It would be the height of hypocrisy to hide the Macdonald statues while we still accept the Indigenous poverty and dispossession he allowed to develop.

This year's Reflections On Canada Day is going to focus on the whole hardcore Orange Protestant imperial attitudes that were at the heart of everything from the repression of the French language outside Quebec to the hanging of Louis Riel to the oppression of the Irish to the residential schools phenomenon. That "One Flag, One Religion, One Empire" bullshit is probably the single most toxic thing in Canadian history, and it's responsible for a lot of the problems we've had to deal with for the last century.

[CDN_PATRIOT]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

I've been talking about this for years, and that solution is my ideal one. Each community has to decide, though.

Using the term 'settler Canadians' instantly discredits you. I'm no settler, I was born in this country. Using that term does nothing but divide people, and is really uncalled for. I have as much right to this land as anyone else, and I refuse to feel any shame whatsoever for being Canadian, or in the way I appreciate the founding fathers (like MacDonald) for having the guts to put together this country.

-J.

[DrCaleb]

CDN_PATRIOT CDN_PATRIOT:

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

You don't re-write history, you change who the heroes of the story are.

That's called being a revisionist. Still falls under the cancel culture umbrella, no matter how quaint you word it.

-J.

You wield the term 'cancel culture' as though someone is being forced to not speak publicly.

Protip - if they died 100 years ago, they can't be cancelled. And taking children away from their parents, raising them in a crowded loveless environment, raping and beating them - sometimes to death - has always been unacceptable. It's not new. It's not revisionism to recognize what happened in the past, and stop seeing the people responsible as important historical figures when we find out these things happened.

That's the revelation here. Children didn't 'run away' from these schools. They died, and their bodies dumped in the yard. No ceremony, no headstone, and their parents told a lie to cover the crime. If you want to keep the people that did these things in their proud historical context, feel free. But I suggest that point of view will be unpopular, so you might want to keep it to yourself.

[DrCaleb]

$1:

Justice Murray Sinclair, who heads the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, says the federal government stopped recording the deaths around 1920 after the chief medical officer at Indian Affairs suggested children were dying at an alarming rate.

"He was fired," Sinclair says. "The government stopped recording deaths of children in residential schools, we think, probably because the rates were so high."

Sinclair has guessed up to 6,000 children may have died at the schools but it's impossible to say with certainty.

"We think this is a situation that needs further study," he said.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba ... -1.3094632