Juno News - Another pro-lockdown premier has been re-elected

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's most irreverent talk show.

00:00:05.700 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:10.700 Coming up, why do Canadians keep re-electing the people that impose these horrible COVID restrictions and vaccine mandates?

00:00:17.660 Plus, perspective on residential schools.

00:00:19.940 The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.

00:00:23.380 Hello and welcome to you all.

00:00:25.580 It is Tuesday, October 4th, 2022.

00:00:28.460 Thanks for tuning in to Canada's most irreverent talk show.

00:00:33.280 This is the Andrew Lawton Show on True North.

00:00:36.320 I apologize in advance if I'm feeling a little bit hoarse.

00:00:39.420 I was over the weekend actually at Talladega.

00:00:43.060 I'm not even a huge NASCAR fan, but my father is.

00:00:46.760 And my brother had a great idea some months ago that we should all go, the three of us,

00:00:52.420 and also my brother's father-in-law, to Talladega for the Yellowwood 500 on the weekend.

00:00:59.700 And we had a fantastic time.

00:01:01.560 I mean, you don't even need to be a NASCAR fan to take in the spectacle of it all.

00:01:04.920 And I evidently got so immersed in it that I was like cheering and hooting to such a point

00:01:09.360 that I don't entirely have my voice now.

00:01:11.760 But I will try to get my way through the show here.

00:01:14.440 I hope it is not too grating for you to listen to.

00:01:16.900 If so, I think on YouTube, you can like turn on the live caption.

00:01:20.260 So maybe you'll have some luck with that.

00:01:22.420 In any case, I do want to jump right back into the swing of things though.

00:01:25.680 And I don't do a lot of Quebec politics talk on this show for a couple of reasons.

00:01:30.200 I think the general one is that it is its own animal, the politics of Quebec.

00:01:35.060 And in a way that isn't always directly analogous to the politics or isn't really ever directly

00:01:41.420 analogous to the politics outside of Quebec.

00:01:43.680 This election, I was making a little bit more of an effort to stay apprised of what was

00:01:49.280 happening because of the emergence of the Quebec Conservative Party.

00:01:53.240 But as we saw, and I mean, as we kind of feared, it didn't really make a difference.

00:01:59.540 On the popular vote, the Parti Conservatoire de Quebec had just under 13% of the vote, which

00:02:05.400 is quite significant, but that amounts to zero seats.

00:02:08.480 You take that and compare it, say, to the Parti Québécois, 14.6% of the vote, three

00:02:14.180 seats, or Quebec Solidaire, 15.4% with 11 seats.

00:02:19.400 The Liberals even, 14.37% and they got 21 seats.

00:02:24.160 So distribution is everything in first past the post.

00:02:27.680 So all of these parties that weren't the CAC basically had a similar enough vote share,

00:02:33.940 but for the Conservatives, it was too heavily centralized in a couple of key strongholds.

00:02:38.960 But nevertheless, Eric Duhem is staying on board and will continue to lead the party.

00:02:43.740 And it really is, I mean, apart from the Liberals, which are Liberal, the only party speaking up

00:02:49.060 for English language rights in Quebec.

00:02:51.580 And I think in general for a form of conservatism that isn't rooted in Quebec separatism.

00:02:57.420 But I want to take a different look at this thing and talk about Francois Legault, who has

00:03:02.820 90 seats now under this.

00:03:05.740 90 seats, 40% of the vote.

00:03:07.900 This is a super majority.

00:03:10.980 And if we go back just a year, a year and a bit, Francois Legault was the guy presiding

00:03:16.100 over the strictest COVID regime in Canada.

00:03:20.420 This was a guy who was threatening to tax the unvaccinated, to fine the unvaccinated.

00:03:25.820 A guy who banned the unvaccinated from shopping in big box stores.

00:03:30.560 Remember this photo that went around, I think it was of a Walmart, where the unvaccinated 1.00

00:03:35.080 had to wait in this little vestibule like some dirty animal under quarantine while someone

00:03:41.140 else went and got their stuff for them because they weren't allowed to buy non-essential

00:03:44.960 things.

00:03:46.240 That's what Francois Legault did.

00:03:48.140 Or people that were harassed and fined for walking outside their homes after, I think it

00:03:53.700 was 8 p.m. at one point and then 10 p.m.

00:03:56.020 But the guy who put in place a COVID curfew.

00:04:00.040 So Quebec presides over the most restrictive COVID measures in North America and in some

00:04:06.700 respects the world.

00:04:08.540 And he gets a super majority.

00:04:11.660 You go back to the last Ontario election, less than a couple of months ago.

00:04:16.560 Very similar thing.

00:04:17.500 Doug Ford, very strict COVID protocols in this country.

00:04:20.940 Ontario had the vaccine passports.

00:04:22.960 Ontario had the lockdowns.

00:04:24.720 Ontario had the stay-at-home order.

00:04:26.800 Ontario had, for a time, the granting to police the right to question people who were out of

00:04:31.760 their homes.

00:04:32.400 And Doug Ford gets handily re-elected with another majority.

00:04:38.100 Doug Ford, elected after putting in COVID restrictions.

00:04:43.080 Elected after taking people's freedoms.

00:04:45.460 Francois Legault, elected after taking people's freedoms.

00:04:48.520 Justin Trudeau, and he's a bit of a different case, as we've talked about on the show, in

00:04:53.900 the last federal election, just over one year ago, he was trying to push more restrictions.

00:04:59.540 He was arguing for more restrictions.

00:05:01.840 I want to ban the unvaccinated from the public service. 1.00

00:05:04.380 I want to keep the unvaccinated off planes. 1.00

00:05:06.860 I want to separate these dirty, racist, misogynist, unvaccinated types. 1.00

00:05:11.280 And he wins. 1.00

00:05:12.180 Not a majority, but he wins.

00:05:14.160 So there's a question in all of this that must be asked.

00:05:19.840 Do people like lockdowns?

00:05:22.380 Do people like politicians who lock them down and take away their liberties?

00:05:27.420 I don't think the answer is yes, but I also don't think the answer is no.

00:05:31.940 I think that the sad reality is that this issue is not a deal breaker.

00:05:37.060 And I'll give you two fundamental reasons why I think that is.

00:05:41.020 The first is that when people feel they have no legitimate alternative, their vote choice

00:05:49.040 becomes this thing that they just do.

00:05:51.960 So the federal election in 2021 is a great example of this.

00:05:56.100 All five party leaders came together after the one debate.

00:06:00.120 I think it was actually before the French debate.

00:06:01.960 And they recorded this PSA.

00:06:03.760 We're all in this together.

00:06:06.160 We've come so far in the fight against COVID.

00:06:08.420 It's time to finish this pandemic for good.

00:06:10.480 So get vaccinated.

00:06:12.080 If you know someone who hasn't, talk to them.

00:06:14.640 For our kids, for our communities, for our economy.

00:06:18.160 It's how we get forward together.

00:06:20.200 Vaccines are safe and effective for use.

00:06:23.380 Vaccines are the best way for you to protect yourself, your family and your community. 0.77

00:06:28.240 So get vaccinated.

00:06:29.540 Let's fight COVID-19 together.

00:06:31.180 Pour vous protéger vous-même, pour protéger les plus fragiles d'entre nous, pour protéger

00:06:35.920 l'ensemble de la population, le meilleur moyen connu demeure le vaccin.

00:06:40.360 S'il vous plaît, soyez responsable.

00:06:42.840 Soyez solidaires.

00:06:44.160 Faites-vous vacciner.

00:06:45.400 Merci.

00:06:45.660 We all agree getting vaccinated is the way forward.

00:06:50.420 We're all in agreement this is not a partisan issue.

00:06:52.980 So please get vaccinated.

00:06:54.700 We're united.

00:06:56.060 And it's time to get the shot.

00:06:57.840 Vaccines save lives.

00:06:59.560 They're how we're going to beat COVID.

00:07:01.280 And it's time for everyone to do it.

00:07:03.400 Get the shot. 0.99

00:07:04.740 Get the shot. 0.97

00:07:05.780 Now, you may think, what's the big deal?

00:07:07.860 Five-party leaders, a couple of them have now been deposed, but nevertheless, five-party

00:07:12.780 leaders come up and say everyone should get vaccinated.

00:07:15.040 Well, it means that it didn't really look, it didn't really look like there was anyone

00:07:20.560 else speaking up for people that said, well, you know, maybe I'm okay with the vaccine,

00:07:25.760 but I'm not okay with this coercion.

00:07:27.600 I'm not okay with the mandates.

00:07:28.780 I'm not okay with firing people.

00:07:30.220 Now, that Team Canada approach just completely made it look like there was no daylight between

00:07:36.700 the Liberals and the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois and the Greens and the NDP,

00:07:41.600 at least on the COVID file.

00:07:44.120 Now, obviously, you fast forward now and the Conservative position is much different and

00:07:49.700 much better than it was back then.

00:07:51.720 But at the time, only Maxime Bernier and the People's Party of Canada, who, as we know,

00:07:56.060 weren't in the debate and didn't have seats in Parliament and still don't have seats

00:07:59.040 in Parliament, but only they were talking about this issue from what I would just broadly

00:08:03.940 characterize as the libertarian perspective.

00:08:07.900 So I think this is important.

00:08:09.640 If you're a voter in Ontario, say, and you're saying, well, you know, I normally lean Conservative,

00:08:15.700 but I really don't like those lockdowns that Doug Ford did.

00:08:19.680 Yeah, I can vote for the Ontario Party, but they're not going to win a seat.

00:08:22.680 I can vote for New Blue.

00:08:23.660 They're not going to win a seat.

00:08:24.600 And then I'm stuck with the Liberal or the NDP who would have locked me down just as

00:08:29.200 much.

00:08:30.420 And I talked to a lot of people like that.

00:08:32.220 Now, many of them ended up staying home, but a lot of them just said, yeah, OK, fine.

00:08:36.720 I guess I'll vote Conservative because it doesn't really matter.

00:08:39.700 There's just this resignation that this is the way politics is and there isn't really

00:08:44.120 another option.

00:08:46.060 And in Quebec, very similar.

00:08:47.640 Now, obviously, you throw the language divide in and other ideological fault lines in Quebec,

00:08:51.780 but a lot of people that felt, yeah, well, that's it.

00:08:54.360 We were going to get locked down no matter what.

00:08:56.360 There really isn't a non-lockdown candidate.

00:09:00.360 So we just accept and unnecessarily settle because we don't believe, and in many cases,

00:09:08.140 rightfully so, that there are other options, that there are better options.

00:09:12.700 Now, I think better is always possible.

00:09:14.780 It's not always easy and it's not always apparent imminently, but better is always possible.

00:09:20.340 I mean, in the last federal election, yeah, Aaron O'Toole, he was not really all that against

00:09:25.060 mandates, but eventually the Conservatives rise up and the leadership race that followed,

00:09:30.320 even the most left-leaning in that race, Jean Charest, was not coming out and saying,

00:09:34.740 yes, I support mandates.

00:09:37.200 So I think there's something to be learned about this.

00:09:39.940 And you can read up on this idea called the Overton window, this window that you look through

00:09:45.020 that shows you essentially what the neutral resting position of a society is.

00:09:50.960 And Conservatives have allowed the Overton window to just move in such a way that it becomes

00:09:57.460 not even at all connected to what they're selling and what they're offering.

00:10:02.320 And when Conservatives do this, they self-select out of the debate.

00:10:05.640 They self-select out of the argument.

00:10:08.600 And it means that when one of the most critical infringements of civil liberty, in fact, not one

00:10:13.500 of the, but the whole host of infringements on civil liberty come up, the kind of stuff that we

00:10:18.740 wouldn't have even anticipated was possible five years ago, you end up in a situation where you have

00:10:25.200 no one that's in the fight, no one that wants to take up the fight and represent you.

00:10:29.580 And I think this is the problem.

00:10:32.440 I don't think that everyone is all that thrilled with Francois Legault.

00:10:37.560 I don't think everyone was all that thrilled with Doug Ford in Ontario.

00:10:41.200 The criticism about both is larger and more pointed than I've ever seen it before.

00:10:46.800 Yet the two get reelected with majorities.

00:10:48.920 Justin Trudeau, same thing.

00:10:50.140 How does he win reelection?

00:10:51.420 A lot of voters stay home and elections are not won and lost by persuasion.

00:10:57.040 They're won and lost by turnout and getting out the vote.

00:10:59.680 So when you stay home, you are having a tangible effect on the result, whether you like it or

00:11:05.140 not, whether you want to or not.

00:11:07.900 But the other part of this, and I think this is so absolutely fundamental, if you want to

00:11:12.820 understand how electoral outcomes shake out the way they are, it's not about vote fraud.

00:11:18.680 It's not even about being outmaneuvered.

00:11:20.840 It's that a lot of people just so drastically misunderstand the calculations for a lot of

00:11:29.000 voters.

00:11:29.800 I'm a civil liberties voter.

00:11:31.260 My freedom means a lot to me.

00:11:32.680 Free speech in particular, personal freedom.

00:11:35.200 This is the hill to die on for me.

00:11:36.760 For a lot of people, it's not.

00:11:38.920 For a lot of people, these aren't the ballot issues.

00:11:41.420 The ballot issues are, they don't have the luxury of engaging in what, and again, I'm not

00:11:46.440 saying it's an academic discussion because if you're someone who was denied the right

00:11:50.120 to do certain things because of your vaccination status, that is very real.

00:11:54.260 But the problem is that was at the time when the government had, you know what, 90% of the

00:11:59.280 country with two doses.

00:12:00.280 The percentage of people marginalized by its proclamations was a small minority and not

00:12:06.960 a particularly capital L liberal minority.

00:12:09.820 So they didn't need that.

00:12:12.660 They could win votes off the backs of these people because they didn't care about them.

00:12:17.220 They weren't even human to the liberals.

00:12:19.580 Just as they weren't to the governments across this country at the provincial level.

00:12:24.900 Even the holdouts, Saskatchewan, Alberta eventually went down that road.

00:12:28.780 So that's the whole thing.

00:12:29.720 The elections in the last few years have had these coalitions in which certain groups are

00:12:37.760 just pitted against other groups.

00:12:40.700 And you look at the last few federal elections with Andrew Scheer, for example, then Aaron

00:12:45.840 O'Toole.

00:12:46.520 And oh, social conservatives, gun owners, all of these people are told, yeah, you don't

00:12:50.080 deserve to have a say.

00:12:50.920 You don't deserve to have a voice.

00:12:52.080 But no one has pronounced as the unvaccinated.

00:12:56.820 No one has ended up in the crosshairs of the political debate as much as the unvaccinated 1.00

00:13:01.240 have.

00:13:02.500 And it's despicable, not only that you have politicians like Trudeau who ran campaigns

00:13:07.760 against them, but that it worked and that they won.

00:13:11.940 And that in Ontario and Quebec, the campaigns weren't against the unvaccinated.

00:13:15.960 The campaigns weren't fought about COVID, but that people just moved on so quickly that

00:13:21.600 they either forgot or didn't care.

00:13:24.840 Because the only other alternative is that they liked it.

00:13:27.100 The only other alternative is that, you know, I actually like the cut of that jib of that

00:13:31.520 Doug Ford or of that Francois Lago.

00:13:33.260 I like the restrictions.

00:13:34.440 I didn't mind them.

00:13:35.100 They were fine.

00:13:36.000 You know, have at it.

00:13:37.040 That's the only other alternative.

00:13:38.520 And to be honest, I don't necessarily think that's as crazy as it is.

00:13:41.920 And it's a project I'd like to dig into at some point, understanding why it is people

00:13:45.780 are so afraid of liberty, why people want to take away their own rights and the rights

00:13:50.060 of others around them.

00:13:51.840 Which is what these restrictions necessarily do, rather than just leaving it to choice.

00:13:56.540 One bizarre but amusing example of this comes in a human rights complaint filed.

00:14:01.680 This is hilarious.

00:14:02.780 By an Alberta doctor.

00:14:03.760 So the federal government on September 30th dropped, or I guess it was on October 1st,

00:14:08.820 dropped the mask mandate for air travel.

00:14:12.200 So there's nothing stopping anyone from wearing a mask on a Canadian airplane.

00:14:16.540 You no longer have to.

00:14:18.380 He has filed a human rights complaint about this.

00:14:22.120 He says that it violates his human rights to not require masks.

00:14:27.260 Nothing is stopping Dr. David Keegan from wearing a mask.

00:14:32.240 Nothing is stopping him from wearing a mask.

00:14:33.900 But he filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission because he says that he has a cardiopulmonary

00:14:38.280 condition and it harms him.

00:14:40.600 It puts him in harm's way and therefore discriminates against him on the grounds of a disability to

00:14:45.860 not force everyone else around him to wear a mask.

00:14:48.540 The masks are so effective, yours doesn't work, but other people's do.

00:14:52.240 But this is the whole point.

00:14:54.700 So when the mask mandate dropped and all these just unhinged lunatics came out of the woodwork 0.96

00:14:59.000 to say that, you know, we were all going to die.

00:15:01.100 Emmett McFarlane, who's a political science professor in Waterloo, had said that it's homicidal,

00:15:07.640 homicidal to drop mandates.

00:15:09.280 So you've got people that are genuinely peddling this fiction that if you lift a mask mandate,

00:15:14.820 you are just lining them all up and going boom, boom, boom.

00:15:17.220 You're just like killing your citizens. 0.99

00:15:18.780 You're executing them on mass.

00:15:21.460 But you can't go up against that because there are going to be some people that believe that.

00:15:28.020 You should go up against it.

00:15:30.260 But if you are a politician that's trying to win over a cross-section,

00:15:34.440 I feel there are more people like that than there are people like me that are like,

00:15:38.460 I'm so done with this.

00:15:41.180 And that's the real, and I don't even know how you measure that.

00:15:44.680 Like, how do you go door to door and canvas the people that are too afraid of their own

00:15:48.140 shadow to live because they're not even going to answer the door.

00:15:50.480 They're just going to like pepper spray you through the screen and like run away.

00:15:53.440 And then you've got people like me that, you know, and a lot of other people that at varying

00:15:58.040 points came around to this.

00:15:59.500 There were people that were never on board with the lockdown.

00:16:01.860 There are people that were never on board with it.

00:16:04.200 And there are people that were completely for it until the third lockdown or until the vaccine

00:16:09.280 passports or until the boosters and all of that stuff.

00:16:12.640 So I think it's quite fascinating to me.

00:16:15.340 We should welcome everyone who came along.

00:16:17.500 It's the line I've said on the show is like, don't be mad when people come to the party

00:16:20.640 late, just be happy they showed up at all.

00:16:23.760 But if you look at the reelection of Legault, it is easy to be a little bit disenchanted with

00:16:29.000 the state of affairs in this country.

00:16:30.520 How did people reelect a guy that threatened to find the unvaccinated, the curfews in? 1.00

00:16:35.620 And the questions, the critical questions, do people like that or do people not care?

00:16:41.080 And I think it's probably somewhere in the middle.

00:16:44.100 We got to take a quick break here.

00:16:45.740 When we come back, I'm going to be talking about residential schools here on the Andrew 0.79

00:16:50.560 Lawton Show.

00:16:51.160 Stay tuned.

00:16:54.620 You're tuned in to the Andrew Lawton Show.

00:16:57.280 Welcome back to the Andrew Lawton Show.

00:17:02.380 It's been a little over a year since the announcement of the discovery, so it was framed anyway, of

00:17:10.300 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School site, a thankfully decommissioned residential

00:17:16.980 school in Kamloops.

00:17:18.020 And this followed a wave of other similar announcements.

00:17:21.040 Some of them talked about ground penetrating radar.

00:17:23.140 And it became apparent, though, that a lot of what was being brought up, in fact, most

00:17:27.240 of it was not new information.

00:17:28.580 This was reviving a narrative and presenting things that mattered to communities, but were

00:17:34.200 not how the media ran with them.

00:17:36.200 And I want to make very clear here, my issue has been the media, which irresponsibly and

00:17:41.340 reprehensibly reported on these things as though they were mass graves, children being

00:17:46.500 murdered.

00:17:47.160 When what actually happened was at a time in which public health was not what it was today,

00:17:51.620 you had people that died at schools, Indigenous students, non-Indigenous students.

00:17:56.600 Many of these cemeteries were shared.

00:17:59.320 My colleague Candice Malcolm, I think, was one of the foremost journalists.

00:18:03.180 In fact, she was the foremost journalist in Canada at pushing back against this narrative.

00:18:07.780 But everyone was so afraid.

00:18:10.120 Everyone was so afraid to deal with this, afraid to take this story head on, which is why the

00:18:15.260 Canadian flag was at half mast for over five months.

00:18:18.960 Because we all just accepted as a country that we should be in a perpetual state of mourning

00:18:23.920 until Justin Trudeau just flipped the switch at one point and said, no, no, no, we can put

00:18:27.700 the flag up at full mast again.

00:18:30.180 The residential schools issue is a complicated one.

00:18:33.640 And if you're expecting to find an apologist for them in me, you are not going to find that.

00:18:38.160 I find that the fundamental ideal of the program, however it might have been believed and perceived

00:18:44.100 at the time, is one that through the benefit of history and hindsight being 2020, I believe

00:18:50.060 to be profoundly wrong.

00:18:51.460 And I believe that terrible things happen there.

00:18:53.440 But I also believe truth is paramount when we are talking about history and perspective

00:18:59.260 and context are important.

00:19:01.160 About understanding that the residential schools of 1900 were not the residential schools of 1960.

00:19:06.820 about understanding the distinctions in various schools, within schools, and certainly from

00:19:11.940 province to province.

00:19:13.360 There was a piece in the C2C Journal written by Rodney Clifton, who actually lived at two

00:19:19.320 residential schools earlier in his life as an educator.

00:19:22.920 And he wrote about this in a piece called My Life in Two Indian Residential Schools.

00:19:27.320 He's a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier

00:19:32.720 Center for Public Policy.

00:19:34.000 I caught up with him about this last week.

00:19:36.480 Professor, good to talk to you.

00:19:37.680 Thanks for joining me today.

00:19:39.200 Thank you for having me.

00:19:40.480 I'm really excited about this.

00:19:42.460 So as I was just mentioning in my preamble there, I find oftentimes this discussion, whether

00:19:47.880 we're talking about the supposed discovery of bodies at the sites of former residential

00:19:53.720 schools or even discussions of the residential schools themselves, they tend to be, I think,

00:19:58.780 very needlessly polarized.

00:20:00.220 You've got this one side that believes no one can criticize or express any skepticism to

00:20:05.580 some of these stories or findings or proclamations by media.

00:20:09.440 And then on the other hand, you have people that veer and are maligned and called deniers

00:20:14.240 of everything.

00:20:15.100 And I just want to first off ask you, do you find that there's always been this absence

00:20:20.240 of nuance in this discussion in the time that you've been engaging in it?

00:20:24.640 Absolutely not.

00:20:25.760 This is a relatively new phenomenon.

00:20:28.600 I've been engaged in this debate, part of this debate.

00:20:31.600 I published my first paper in 1972, long before some of the people that are involved

00:20:35.840 in this debate were even born.

00:20:37.820 And look at the integration of children, Métis, Eskimo, and Indian children, as we called them

00:20:46.740 at those times, into Stringer Hall, where I had worked for a year with supervising these

00:20:53.460 children.

00:20:53.760 At that time, people were more interested in what the facts of the case were.

00:20:59.400 And there were a series of ethnographic studies done by PhD students in anthropology, school

00:21:08.640 at Mopas, which was about residential school in the Yukon Territory, and Kuala School and

00:21:16.300 Village that haven't been reported.

00:21:18.920 And they were pretty factual, very factual in terms of what was going on in the schools.

00:21:22.920 And there's a lot of literature that people haven't been referring to, and they don't

00:21:28.080 know.

00:21:28.500 They don't even know that it exists.

00:21:31.180 So let's contextualize this for people.

00:21:33.800 We go back to 1960s.

00:21:35.720 What's your role in the residential schools?

00:21:38.660 The first job that I had was as an intern on the Blackfoot Reserve, Siksika First Nation

00:21:46.720 now, and I was a student in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta in a

00:21:53.160 program, a new program that was called Cross-Cultural Education.

00:21:56.980 It was to train young people to be teachers on Indian Reserves at that time and Métis colonies,

00:22:04.540 which there are separated colonies in Alberta from Métis colonies.

00:22:09.200 And one of their requirements for the program was to do an internship, and I was assigned to

00:22:13.520 the Blackfoot Reserve.

00:22:14.260 I lived in the residential school from the beginning of May until the third week in August.

00:22:22.880 And at that period of time, there were classes in that school, as well as kids being bussed

00:22:28.560 out to other schools.

00:22:29.960 So I kept notes about what was going on.

00:22:34.180 I had a very good relationship with Blackfoot. 0.66

00:22:36.520 In fact, I met my wife there, and we'd been married for 54 years.

00:22:41.780 And had a very good understanding of what was going on at that period of time.

00:22:48.400 As well, my wife was 10 years in old son's school.

00:22:51.760 And she used to call, when people asked her when we were young, whether she went to residential

00:22:58.460 school, she said no, that she went to a private Anglican school.

00:23:02.580 Today, she doesn't even want to talk about it to anybody, not positive or negative.

00:23:07.260 She doesn't want to talk about it because of the change in the ethos towards saying anything

00:23:12.240 positive about the school.

00:23:13.980 She had teachers that saw her as her, as their child.

00:23:19.700 They kept in contact until they were 100 years old and died.

00:23:24.060 Christmas times, when we went to Calgary, she would phone these people.

00:23:28.000 We'd go and have tea with them.

00:23:29.660 And it was a very warm relationship.

00:23:33.180 You can't hear that anymore in the dialogue that's going on.

00:23:38.740 So you're right, it's polarized.

00:23:40.340 And it's a disaster.

00:23:42.800 I want to read a line from a piece you wrote in the C2C Journal.

00:23:46.900 No mainstream account, of which I'm aware, has yet challenged the underlying premise of

00:23:52.100 residential schools as consistently awful, rife with disease, neglect, and abuse, a sinister

00:23:58.020 system established to expunge Indigenous language and culture, and by forcibly separating Indian

00:24:03.100 children from their unwilling parents, bring about their total assimilation into so-called 1.00

00:24:08.500 white culture, unquote.

00:24:10.140 Now, there's a lot packed into that, but I want to try to drill into a fair bit of it

00:24:15.240 here, Professor.

00:24:16.160 Are you saying that none of those things are true?

00:24:18.540 Are you saying that it's a more complicated picture?

00:24:21.020 It's a more complicated situation.

00:24:22.960 Obviously, there were children that were abused.

00:24:25.020 That is absolutely evident.

00:24:27.820 And I think we will not deny that.

00:24:32.760 But what is missing is the positive things that are going on.

00:24:38.320 It's like the complaints that we hear about the medical system.

00:24:40.760 It's all about the negative things that are happening in the medical system, rather than

00:24:45.260 a balance between the positive and the negative and giving equal time to both of those.

00:24:50.700 And the legacy media is not interested in one side of that debate.

00:24:57.280 I think they're letting Canadians down.

00:24:59.560 I think Canadians are strong enough and mature enough to understand the subtleties of a situation.

00:25:05.800 One concern that I've always had about the residential schools discussion is that there did seem to be a marked shift in how residential schools, and I'd say how schools in general were in the late 19th century, and how they weren't in the 1960s.

00:25:21.860 And, you know, when people talk about how recent some of the residential schools were, I have not heard of any of the things that we heard happening in the, you know, the 1900s, 1910s, and 1920s happening in the 60s and 70s.

00:25:33.600 So I'm wondering if you could talk from a historical perspective about the evolution, if there was a conscious evolution within these schools.

00:25:41.020 I think you're right, I think they were, they evolved in a similar sort of way that the public schools evolved, and that is from pretty top-down teacher said things, and the children learned those things, to a more egalitarian and empathetic notion towards the culture of the children that you're teaching in.

00:26:04.800 And you had to be somewhat empathetic to that culture, that was part of the arguments for the program on cross-cultural education that I was in at the University of Alberta, and it was just started in 1965, so it wasn't, it didn't go back a long ways.

00:26:22.140 People started to get the idea that in order to be a good teacher, you had to be able to empathize with the students, and to stand in their place and see the world through their eyes before you could help them achieve the objectives that you and they would share.

00:26:41.040 Now it's become quite polarized.

00:26:42.900 You have to only have that perspective, and if you don't have that perspective, you can't teach them.

00:26:47.780 Well, I've seen unbelievably good teachers for Aboriginal kids in Inuvik and other places that had nothing in common with the culture. 0.98

00:26:57.780 They were very good individuals, human beings, that taught very well.

00:27:04.860 Do you deny that assimilation was the goal of that, or do you find that that in and of itself is not something that you would accept?

00:27:13.160 I have no problem with assimilation.

00:27:15.880 Absolutely, it was assimilation. 0.78

00:27:17.320 I think assimilation is a better word than integration.

00:27:21.100 In the time that I was in Inuvik and in the Blackfoot Reserve, living in Old Sun,

00:27:30.660 there were all the kids outside of classrooms would speak their native languages, and nobody did anything about it.

00:27:40.060 Many of the white people in Inuvik that were working both in the Roman Catholic residents as well as the Anglican residents had facial expressions and used Inuktitutuk words to communicate with both the kids and with other people, including the white people.

00:28:03.220 So it became part of the culture of that school is to use expressions like lifting your eyebrows if you want to say yes and scrunching up your nose if you wanted to say no.

00:28:15.060 So people would use those kinds of things because the white people were a minority in a large group of kids that spoke as their native language in Inuktitutuk.

00:28:28.060 But the stories, and I mean, all Canadians have been hearing these now going up to and certainly since the Truth and Reconciliation Report that they couldn't retain their own language, their hairstyles were changed, their names were changed.

00:28:40.300 So where does that all come from if what you're saying is that, well, you know what, everyone could just use their own language outside the classroom and there was no issue there?

00:28:49.940 Where does it come from? It probably was enforced in certain schools.

00:28:54.840 It probably was enforced by certain people to a greater degree than other people.

00:28:59.160 So people are reading the situation from a specific perspective and then generalizing.

00:29:08.260 Now, I am doing the same sort of thing, but what I'm trying to say is that the subtleties between the schools and between the individuals that were running the schools may be quite large.

00:29:21.360 And we don't know because we haven't got that evidence.

00:29:23.800 The report doesn't report that evidence.

00:29:26.120 If you look at the report itself, rather than just looking at the summary volume or the legacy volume, which are particularly biased, you will see a much more nuanced set of facts than if you just read the summary volume and the legacy volume.

00:29:41.680 So in and of itself, the report is not a fair representation, the summary and the legacy volumes are not a fair representation of what the report actually says.

00:29:51.440 And obviously, the commissioners since that time have gone off on a tangent in which Murray Sinclair said in the report, they report that 4,201 children died in the schools.

00:30:04.260 And it's true, some children died in the schools, but some children died because of severe infectious diseases like tuberculosis and smallpox and all kinds of things that affected other people, Aboriginal kids to a greater degree probably, but they affected other kids.

00:30:23.260 And Murray Sinclair said there's 15,000 to 25,000 missing kids or murdered kids buried someplace.

00:30:32.880 Like, where does he get that?

00:30:34.640 If you go through the report, you don't find any evidence of that and you don't see anything in the recommendations, the calls for action to get the RCMP to search schoolyards for missing children.

00:30:48.820 One of the prevailing sentiments here, I mean, children being murdered, we hear that term used.

00:30:56.040 Also, children being like just involuntarily pried from their families and placed in these schools, never to be seen by their parents again.

00:31:04.260 And you talk about in your experience, not knowing and your wife, who, as you mentioned, is someone you met at this place, not knowing anyone who had that happen to them, correct?

00:31:14.780 There probably are some cases in which children were taken from their families, but certainly in my experience in the mid-60s, the parents signed forms to have their children come to certain schools or to stay in residence and to go to other schools if they were bused, like the Blackfoot children, bused to other schools.

00:31:40.920 They knew what they wanted, and at that time, they all wanted their kids to be educated in the traditional educational system.

00:31:49.900 They knew that in order to succeed, they knew that even to communicate with other Aboriginal people, and there's a number of people on the reserve that are mixed Aboriginal heritages, they have to communicate in English because they don't have a common Aboriginal language to communicate with.

00:32:06.680 So, whether they liked it or not, they needed to be educated in English and understand English and French as languages as a communication for our country, for other people.

00:32:22.460 Now, if you look at the way people are using their Aboriginal names, and you look at the accents on those names, it's impossible for people that are outside of that language to pronounce them properly. 1.00

00:32:34.820 Why are they doing this?

00:32:39.040 What would you say?

00:32:39.980 I mean, because I know you lived in the teacher's wing when you were staying there, and you would have talked to and known a number of the educators there.

00:32:47.420 And I don't know if it's possible to generalize, but I'm curious what the prevailing attitude was towards Indigenous people.

00:32:54.920 Was it paternalistic? Was it fraternalistic? Was it just, I'm the teacher, they're the students, and race didn't factor in?

00:33:01.220 What were your senses there?

00:33:02.700 People knew there was differences in race, and there was differences in culture.

00:33:09.760 The people that had been teaching on the Blackfoot Reserve for a long period of time, for example, were unbelievably empathetic towards the Blackfoot people.

00:33:19.680 They liked these kids. They thought their job was to prepare them for the world that was coming, and to get them prepared both to be members of the Blackfoot community as well as the non-Indigenous community outside, so that they could fit into the Southern Alberta culture outside.

00:33:41.740 And now, 50% of the people from the Blackfoot Reserve live off the reserve.

00:33:47.260 If they didn't have that preparation, they would have a hard time integrating with other people and taking jobs in Calgary or working in some of the small towns or working on farms that are in the area.

00:34:01.380 Well, that's certainly, I think, fascinating account that you've shared, and I would encourage people to, first and foremost, read your piece in, I think, the C2C Journal, which really elaborates on this.

00:34:14.840 My life in two Indian residential schools. Professor Rodney Clifton. Good to talk to you, sir. Thanks for coming on today.

00:34:20.440 Thank you very much. Have a good day.

00:34:23.580 That was my interview with Professor Rodney Clifton, and that does it for us for today here on The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:34:29.660 We'll be back in a couple days' time with more of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. Stay tuned. We'll talk to you then. Thank you. God bless, and good day to you all.

00:34:50.440 Thank you.

Juno News - October 05, 2022

Another pro-lockdown premier has been re-elected

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